Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1530710
WB: 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 every- one'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 to- gether. We watched all the rushes from the week before, and it's real- ly inspiring. You can see the level of quality of animation, and if some- one 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 animator, 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-motion, 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 approved 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 an- imating characters, but creating these dramatic, sweeping camera moves too. WB: The way Aardman animates on two frames, unlike perhaps Laika and other companies that work in stop-frame, we're not an- imating the characters 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? WB: Exactly. [That's] just the style of Aardman. Many of Aardman's projects are effectively 12 different frames per second. They're 12 in- dividual movements 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 cor- recting the motion so that it doesn't drop behind the camera every frame, because when you do that, you get the sort of stuttering ef- fect. It's something that we don't love doing because technically it's quite difficult and it involves measuring, 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? WB: It's absolutely years of work. Oen 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 ro- Aardman animators produced 4.2 seconds of animation each week. 18 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 4