Stop-motion animation's director of photographer recalls the origin of the beloved British duo
Jay Smart, junior model maker, measuring Gromit. The average size of Wallace and Gromit is 8 inches If you walked into the Aardman Animation studios around the turn of the 90s, there would have been one very clear command: no clomping. Walking too heavily on the wooden floorboards of the former banana warehouse on Bristol’s quayside where Aardman Animations lived could wobble the miniature sets around and ruin days of work. So a sign was put up: no clomping.sent them to the moon in 1989.
But working alone, Park found it was taking forever. “I got very disillusioned at times,” he later said. “I had no money at all. I was living in a grotty little bedsit in Cricklewood. But I had to fulfil this vision, this film I had in my head.” “We put down sort of an old camera dolly tracks and we built a camera mount, like a little crane that leant over the set,” Riddett says. The camera and the dolly were attached to the puppets, so everything moved together. To get the background to blur convincingly, animators had to get agricultural with their kit.
Giving life to plasticine is laborious. Before video assistance made it easier to check the progress of a character’s movement and smooth out any mistakes, animators had to take a leap of faith that what they’d spent the last few months on would turn out OK. “Blind” animation, as Park’s colleague Steve Box, “is more ropey, it jumps about, if you kick the camera or knock the model over, you’ve got to start again or put up with it”.
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