Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1530710
botic gnome and whether Wallace would build something. 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 production process is generally a couple of years if you include all the building of the puppets and the sets, and the building the animatic with the story team. That's a good two years from then till we finish…We start with a really small crew. We start just with two animators and then expand, so by the end we've got 30, 35 all shooting simultaneously. But you can't start like that. That would be crazy. We build it slowly. How many stages will you have at the height of production? WB: We have about 40 live, and then about another five that are being dressed or set up, so about 45. They're all different locations. Obviously, they change throughout the film. We actually started this film shooting all the interiors because it was a smaller space, and we were still working on Chicken Run at that point. So we had a small space in the studio, and a lot of the stuff in the opening scenes are actually inside the interiors of Wallace's house or the police station. We start there and then by sort of halfway through the film, we fin- ished all of those interiors. Does Aardman have a single location where this all takes place, or is it spread out? WB: No, we're still using the same site, actually. The original Chicken Run site was acquired to make Chicken Run One. And it's where we've been filming everything ever since…Actually, they did have a break- out space, but it becomes really hard to manage if you've got two. Even within the space we're in, the directors end up walking about seven miles a day, just covering their rounds, so you don't want to go any bigger. Can you talk about your camera setup? Is it a traditional mo- tion-picture camera or an animation-specific camera? WB: We're just using digital stills cameras, so high-end photographic cameras. We're not using actual film cameras at all. This changed, I think, around sort of the mid- to late-noughties is when we switched from 35mm film cameras—which Aardman had acquired from the film industry—to digital stills. But we're still using those lens- es—the original lenses adapted from the film cameras. Really, really high-quality prime lenses. Anyone can shoot animation like this es- sentially on a phone or tablet because all we're doing is taking high quality still images one aer another and then they're combined in the edit process. How are those still images coming together on a timeline? WB: It's all automated. We actually use a program called Dragon- frame, which is designed by animators for the industry, and that just manages all the captures. So as we're animating, we can watch it back in real time. Obviously, the raw images, they go through a sep- Up to 30 animators worked on the film during peak production. 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 c g w 1 9