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www.postmagazine.com 23 POST NOV/DEC 2024 N etflix's Wallace & Gromit - Vengeance Most Fowl is a new stop-motion animated feature from Aardman that's set for release here in the States on January 3rd. The project was directed by Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham, and is the latest installment to feature the well-meaning inventor and his loyal canine companion. Gromit is concerned that Wallace has become too dependent on his own inventions. This proves true when Wallace creates a "smart" gnome — known as a Norbot — that develops a mind of its own when corrupted by a vengeful figure from the past — jewel thief Feathers McGraw. Gromit now has to battle sinister forces and save his master. Will Becher served as supervising animator on the project, which has been in production for more than a year. On average, an animator produces 4.2 seconds of animation each week. With as many as 30 animators working on the film during peak production times, a little over two minutes of ani- mation was produced each week. Actor Ben Whitehead recorded more than 20 hours of dialogue takes for Wallace's performance. This film comes 19 years since the Oscar-winning feature Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were- Rabbit. Here, Becher shares insight into Aardman's animation process, the tools they use and how the film came together in time for its Christmas release in the UK. Will, tell us about your history with Aardman and how you got involved in this project? "Everyone who works on the project at Aardman is an Aardman partner. That's what we call ourselves because the two founders of the company, they made it employee-owned several years ago. So, anyone working on the film — working at Aardman on an Aardman project — is brought in on a regular sort of contract for that whole job. I've been an Aardman employee, working on Wallace & Gromit, and I have on all the films essentially over the years. I've had different roles on each one." Between Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, the studio has been steadily busy over the past 20 years. "Yeah, I started actually on Chicken Run (2000). The first Chicken Run film was my first job in the industry…I came in, did work, made some chick- en wings, and really, I've worked on every film since then…We've actually had a really good run of features…When we're not making feature films, we still have the studios and a lot of the crew. We tend to work on series (and) commercials, but also, we have the other departments to do things like interactive and events. We've got this big events team who do things like create sort of theme-park rides and things using the Aardman characters. So it's quite a broad range of things. But the animation team particularly that I work with, we will generally work on features or series, and the series tend to fit in-between the features." Tell us about the weekly review meetings you have regarding the progress of the animation. "The weekly meetings are brilliant. The animators love it because we're all working independently all through the week. We're working on our own, in our individual units. We're all in different parts of the film, and it gets to the point where you don't even know what everyone's shooting. If you're one of the animators working on a scene, you might not see one of the other animators for a couple of weeks. So the weekly meeting was brilliant to bring the whole team together. We watched all the rush- es from the week before, and it's really inspiring. You can see the level of quality of animation, and if someone does something brilliant with a character or they find a new way of doing something, we talk about it. And equally, if something didn't quite land or the directors had a bit of feedback for that ani- mator, I'll bring that up and talk to everyone about it. The idea is, every week we're sort of honing all those different things. But ultimately with stop-mo- tion, it's so organic that you really only get one shot. So once that shot is in, it's up to the directors to make a decision. They've got to decide if it's ap- proved or not. If it's not approved, the animator has to literally go back and do that shot again. It's very hard to do any changes in the middle." Tell us about Aardman's animation style. You are not only animating characters, but creating these dramatic, sweeping camera moves too. "The way Aardman animates on two frames, unlike perhaps Laika and other companies that work in stop-frame, we're not animating the charac- ters every single frame. We're doing every other frame. That's part of the style of Aardman. So that becomes really complicated when you've got a camera move, because the camera move has to be shot on every single frame. It becomes this great, confusing thing, where the animators have to sort of do the natural style on twos, but also animate on ones to fit with the camera. It's complex, but those shots in the film really stand out because they feel so cinematic." So you are shooting 24fps but only animating on every other frame? "Exactly. (That's) just the style of Aardman. Many of Aardman's projects are effectively 12 different frames per second. They're 12 individual move- ments per second, but the camera moves are always on 24. We've got this weird thing where we have to actually animate the character. We call it one-and-a-half, rather than twos, which is what we normally do. One-and-a-half means we're sort of correcting the motion so that it doesn't drop behind the camera every frame, because when you do that, you get the sort of stuttering effect. It's something that we don't love doing because technically it's quite difficult and it involves measur- ing, and the animators have to make these minute movements but make it feel still like it's got the energy of being animated on twos." How far back does production go for a film this complex? "It's absolutely years of work. Often with Nick's films, there's a gem of an idea that probably came about a decade ago, and his sketchbooks are full of these little ideas. There was an idea for a robotic gnome and whether Wallace would build some- thing. Ever since that film, for the last almost 20 years, he's been tinkering away with this idea, and then probably in earnest for the last six years. I would say probably six years ago (Nick) sat down and said, 'This is going to be the film.' The actual shoot itself is just over a year long. But the produc- tion process is generally a couple of years if you Supervising animator Will Becher with the film's stars.