Aardman Retrospective
Tuesday 28th Octover 2008

Nanyang Polytechnic Theatre for the Arts

David Sproxton and Luis Cook from Aardman, the home of Wallace and Gromit, had a discussion session after the screening of some of Aardman’s works.
The question and answer question was really interesting, so I thought I’ll jot some of them down here. I cannot remember everything, word for word or every figure, but I guess the idea is somewhat like that, may not be too accurate :)

Q: Do you have life at Aardman?
A: In the past we used to work day in and out, now with advancement of technology, we adopt a 5 day work week. So we have time for ourselves during the weekends.

Q: How do you find your animators?
A: Source from institutes and we have portfolios and resumés coming in. From there, they are trained to be stop frame animators or 3D animators. It’s interesting how stop frame animators can convert to 3D animators much easier than the other way round.

Q: How many animators do you have?
A: All the times, it depends on the scale of a project. The size of the team grows and shrinks based on the projects. For feature film length projects, the number of animators can go up to 40, whereas for short films or commercials, there coould probably be 5 to 8 animators.

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Overall, I found the talk really beneficial. I love The Pearce Sisters and a commercial (I forgot the title) which interviewed different creatures “Why will you do when you fear?” there were two comical cockroaches inside hilarious! And the Mcvities one too. They have really interesting concepts and execution here and there. Awesome!