11.11.2019 AXEL ONLINE #15

BRISTOL REVISITED/GENSYN MED BRISTOLSteen Dalin pays a visit to evaluate the digital revolution in model animation

Frontpage: Think of it: Hans Christian Andersen and Isambard Kingdom Brunel were contemporaries, born only one year apart. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge (1864) spanning the Avon Gorge still stands as a distinctive landmark of Bristol.

To the right:A generation of musicians and artists; this is DOP Dave Alex Riddett.

Having booked the flight and making an appointment with old acquaintances at Aardman Animations, the opening lyrics from the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper album kept playing in my ears:

It was twenty years ago todaySergeant Pepper taught the band to play.They’ve been going in and out of style.But they’re guaranteed to raise the smile. And surely Wallace & Gromit have also guaranteed a smile. One reason of course is their stop motion films being so typical British in humour and style, just like The Beatles and Monty Python. But David Sproxton and Peter Lord brought that spirit into the 21st Century. The two founders of Aardman Animations belonged to the Woodstock generation together with a lot of their co-workers. In addition it’s exactly twenty years ago I myself for the first time set sails towards Bristol. During the 90’s I’d made two model animation shorts in Copenhagen based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales with Romanian animator and director Mihail Badica.

Our first adventure The Tinderbox brought us to the Annecy Festival d’animation in France. That year 1993 was special. Dave Borthwick presented his weird mixture of models and real humans in his epic pixilation feature The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb. It quickly became evident that the Brits participating were top of the pops. Much to the annoyance of the French hosts who later at the gala did everything to ridicule the hereditary enemy in the worst clownish way. Of course Aardman were present too, but anticipating not being able to finish their new Wallace & Gromit film in time, it was

not signed up for the competition. But for the first time in the history of the festival a giant screen had been set up outside the Pâquier lawn overlooking the Lac d’Annecy. By sunset I had my first revelation of an animated marvel together with the local general public for whom the screen had been erected: The Wrong Trousers had just been flown over to the Continent still wet from the laboratory. Never before had the world experienced such a tour de force of animated plasticine turned into cinematic splendour. It was amazing. No wonder it gained Aardman it’s second Oscar half a year later. The first Oscar also bore the name of director Nick Park in 1990 for his Creature Comforts upon which Peter Lord and David Sproxton made him junior partner of their company.

Then six years later when recording our second Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale Clumsy Hans or Jack the Dullard or Simple-Simon (a rose is a rose is a rose, red) I allowed myself some time off to go see what went on in Bristol. Our 35 minutes animation were well over half done after six months of production. So I reckoned I could hand over the DOP work to a temporary replacement for the proximately one minute of animated cinema that would equal a trip of ten to twelve days. So accompanied by Tone Tarding from the animation department of the Danish Film School we arrived in Bristol. I brought my DV-camera not to forget anything said, because previous visitors had lost their memory when returning to Denmark. In 1998 Bristol was swarming with smaller animation companies. A typical example

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The Wrong Trousers pulled the rug out from under the feet of everybody present at the 1993 Annecy Festival d’animation in France.

would be cinematographer Andy MacCormack. In addition to work for Aardman and the Bolex Brothers he had set up his own tiny studio, equipped (of course) with a Mitchell. The studio was very narrow and somewhat elongated and thus he’d named it ‘Big Fat Studio’. Already at that time Aardman had proved to be the most successful and commercial competent of all the Bristol based studios. In addition to traditional model animation they had set up an experimental CGI department, whereas everybody else demonstrated a profound fear of things to come. Andy Mac was no exception with his deep voice exclaiming: “If it ain’t got sprocket wheels – it’s the Devil’s work!” Or as model maker Tim Farrington put it: “I think it’s just very cleverly manipulated light in a box!”

I personally experienced the approaching digital avalanche during the next three years as a summer substitute for the DOP at the only commercial stop motion studio in Copenhagen. We set out with 35mm stop motion cameras, next summer replaced by freakish frame grab video systems until the studio finally was equipped with Canon EOS cameras. The whole game had changed very rapidly. 2D animation was now mainly executed on computers and CGI had taken over from a lot of the former model animation. Mainly by features and adverts but also by art house one-off shorts. In time CGI became so sophisticated that you could hardly tell the difference. Consequently a lot of cottage industry studios in Bristol had been wiped out. Only Aardman and a few smaller ones like the Bolex Brothers remained.3

Dave Borthwick’s The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb blended models with real humans in this pixilation feature.

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By pure luck I had focused almost entirely on those two studios in a documentary we put together from the many interviews Tone and I had done in 1998. When Why Bristol? had its second premiere at the cinematheque in 2005 we managed to convince the two CEOs David Sproxton of Aardman and Dave Borthwick from the Bolex Brothers to make a renewed trip and participate in Copenhagen. I had my doubts about Sproxton as he was busy promoting Wallace & Gromit’s first feature, but he took me by surprised by simply saying: “Yes, that’ll be quite feasible.” The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was shot entirely on film whereas another model animation feature that same year, Tim

Burton’s Corpse Bride had gone all digital with Canon EOS cameras. Sproxton said that if he could have started all over again he would have preferred digital too, but the build up of a fleet of customized Mitchells over time at Aardman had secured a reliable pipe line. Changing to digital in the midst of production would have caused too much disturbance.

Now almost 15 years later I’ve returned to see what happened. The old studio at Gas Ferry Road looks awfully abandoned and nobody answers the door. But at the former parking lot a

Dave Borthwick and David Sproxton visiting Copenhagen 2005

whole new modern building has risen out of the tarmac. Well inside we are welcomed by David Sproxton and Dave Alex Riddett. It seems there’s a frightful lot of ‘Daves’ around so in continuation I prefer to call people by their family name. Both of them are cinematographers but regrettable none of them members of ‘the club’ when I ask. Riddett replies by quoting Groucho Marx on wishing or not to be member of a club which include yourself – a well known joke which I won’t repeat. But I guess they are not going to sign up for the BSC and IMAGO tomorrow so the club will have to do without them. They both appear in the closing credits of The Wrong Trousers as DOPs. Riddett started out working with (David) Borthwick with whom he founded the Bolex Brothers.

Wallace & Gromit’s first feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit still shot on 35mm

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Somewhat disturbed as nobody answers the door.Your correspondent in front of the original studios at Gas Ferry Road

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The eponymous animal of the company can be seen at Bristol Museum.

David Sproxton and Peter Lord. Both Commanders of the Order of the British Empire.

However nowadays Riddett is the primarily responsible DOP at Aardman. Sproxton set up with childhood friend and animator Peter Lord when they were only mere schoolboys. The Aardman name derives from a 2D half-baked Superman figure they created for a BBC children’s programme. His name combined with the animal aardvark and the name stuck. In 1972 they registered the name with the advantage of always being number one in the telephone directory. Today Sproxton is the CEO of one of the main companies in a billion dollar industry. In addition he and Peter Lord were awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) half a year after our last rendezvous in 2005.

“Since we last saw you, of course we’ve gone 100% digital.” Sproxton starts out. “The first big film we did that way was A Matter of Loaf and Death (Wallace & Gromit). That transition to

digital was very interesting. Dave (Alex Riddett) made the might jump and has never looked back. But we’ve been shooting digitally for commercials for some time to kind of prove the case.“

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A Matter of Loaf and Death marked Aardman’s transition to digital cinematography.

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David Sproxton and Dave Alex Riddett with plasticine characters that won Oscars.

“Up to that point.” Riddett adds, “we were waiting. Specially with the investment we’ve made in film. During the years we’ve build up this amazing collection of converted Mitchells.”

Sproxton: “It’s kind of interesting because the guys we work with now, they wouldn’t recognize a sprocket hole if it hit them in the face. Trying to explain what a 35mm mag-back is? What the hell – you know!”

Riddett: “The fact that you can’t see the image until the next day: “Terrible! How were you supposed to do it?”

Riddett: “We went to the States about the time they were developing the RED camera. We thought that this might be the solution to get a digital camera there. We asked them if it would shoot single frame and they said: “No, we haven’t thought about that.” It hadn’t really come into their reasoning at all, that anybody wanted to shoot single frame on them.”

Sproxton: “There will always be pioneers that get lost in space. It’s the people coming behind them who learnt from the pioneers and I remember thinking that Arri with all it’s muscle will eventually sort all the issues. They’ve been in the camera business for a hundred years so they know what the issues are from the cameraman’s point of view.”

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On set Early Man, Nick Park and Dave Alex Riddett at work with Canon EOS cameras.

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Riddett: “I did some test shots with the Nikons of Wallace’s front room and immediately it didn’t look at all right. Nikon always had that red bias. The wallpaper looked fake, all the reds coming out. A lot of sort of radiant effect. Someone suggested to try the Canon and it just suited the colour range. And this is where the beef would have been for us to make films, so it’s quite important. There was a certain look to the widescreen which sort of came across on film and it looked right. Gentle on the colours, it had a slightly nostalgic warmth to it. It just seemed appropriate. With the choice of the camera, well that’s the first thing really, we don’t want to get out of that look. We don’t want to leave that world and have to try and recreate it.”

Sproxton: “The other thing I remember we did was a physical thing where both cameras were switched off if they were getting too hot. I remember the Nikons quite early on, because they were on all of the time and they got quite warm. The Canon switched off later but it had a heat sink in there to help that. And Canon were more responsive to what we were just talking about as well.” Riddett: “I’ve known people shooting Nikons with feature film and they have lots of trouble with them. Remember the one Tristan did – Mister Fox? (Fantastic Mr. Fox is an American stop motion film by Wes Anderson from a novel by Roald Dahl, red). They were shooting on Nikons and they had to put fans on them to cool them down. We always use the Canons. Basically we

use the top of the range, the 1D Mark III. And I’ve had a little bit of an argument with other people about that, cause they are quite expensive, about 6 grand or something I think. And there are a lot of people in the States that all use 5Ds and say: “Why are you using such an expensive camera?” But in fact we’ve proved it was worth the investment. Because we actually got them at a good price because we bought so many of them. We got quite a discount. They are really solid and they have not let us down. We have replaced some sensors in them, but they have been a really good worker. Whereas the 5D sort of burn out after a years use. But we actually managed to shoot Loaf and Death and then we shot a feature film with the same cameras. It’s only recently we out dated them to 1DXs.”

Riddett: “But it was a hell of a difference, being able to get them into a set. Before you really had to think about where you’re placing the camera or you’d have to build the set around it. But the fact that you can just hold it on an extended arm and a bit of scaffolding because it’s a smaller camera. It’s amazing.”

Sproxton: “I think that’s what came up really early on, that just the rigging of the camera was so much quicker and easier. And you can flip it up-side-down and get it in really close and then just flip the image.”

Riddett: “You can get it into so many spaces. And of course the immediacy of having an image there cause we constantly got so many sets. Trying to match light from one set to another. Which on film was difficult because you’d have to shoot something and you’d have to wait until the next day to see it. Whereas now we just network with towers together (the animators work-stand using Dragonframe stop motion software, red) so we can immediately match the light. Because quite often we are shooting the same scene on different sets – reversals and things. Forty-five sets on Pirates and about thirty active cameras at any time shooting something. That’s why we go in mob-handed as DOPs as well, cause you can’t actually cover that many sets. Just physically getting around from one place to another. So we have to have a bloody big team. But the fact that we can link them up and check one against the other is a God send. Well, I tell you what: Physically it’s taken it out of us over the years, the amount of millage you cover on a concrete floor. About a year ago my feet were killing me and I was in a really bad way. I was hobbling around. We covered a lot of ground. We worked it out to be about 8 or 9 miles a day you could be walking – every day!”

Sproxton: “And you were on your feet most of the time, weren’t you? Saving the gym fees then! What I think is interesting: When we went digital we gained about two stops, because the Canon cameras are really good at low light. On film we got reciprocity failure cause the shutter speed is quite slow. You would probably, if there is a 100

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Dave Alex Riddett and Gromit with oneof the classic rack-over 35mm cameras.

ASA film, you would register it at 64 or so. So you’re almost losing a stop. But digital cameras have come a long way, so the way we used to apply the big tungsten lamps of 5K or 10K, we hardly ever get them out now. The trouble is we now have to heat the studios.”

Riddett: “We will light generally at an exposure of one – or maybe two seconds if we want to introduce some blur with a bit of go motion. Occasionally I’ve gone to as much as a ten second exposure for some very low level lighting. With digital you can actually see what is happening during the way. Again you would have to do a lot of testing with film. We have lit scenes with just practicals. I’ve lit the inside of a caravan with a 12 volt torch bulb. It was the only thing that fitted in there and I thought why not just try it. I don’t like to do it too often, because when your operating with hardly any light – if the animator comes in changing his T-shirt from one day to the next, that alters the lighting as well. When you’re operating on that lower level you have to make sure you’re standing in the same place: “Don’t smile, your teeth will change the exposure!”

Riddett: “One thing I do miss, and in particular appropriate to animation, is the film grain. One thing I always found with shooting on film is just the fact, that every frame is slightly different because the grains are moving around a bit. It sort of puts a bit of life into it. I mean, it did frighten me when we first went digital how clinical it looked. And you just try to get a bit of

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New digital technology on Chicken Run in 1998 revolutionized post production at Aardman, if not the whole industry.

that organic feel back into it. Same thing applies to how we used to do all our camera moves. We used to do it by hand and all the jerks and the faults brought it to life. Nowadays we have to try and program much of the idiosyncratic mistakes, just to keep them a bit more realistic.”

Last year I accidentally wrote in this magazine (Axel #11) about the thirty-three Mitchells in the possession of Aardman. But during the conversation I realize that the number might

be well over fifty. So when I ask about this magnificent fleet of Fries 35mm Mitchell cameras equipped with Aardman’s own customized stop motion controller, Sproxton leans towards Riddett: “What have we done with our Mitchells?” And immediately after he turns to me making me a bid with a big smile: “Do you want one? Buy one and you can have one for free!”

Actually in 1999 I was talking to Tom Barnes from Aardman’s camera department about the possibility to buy one of their Mitchells. Quite luckily for me it came to nothing. But now Riddett gives me an even better deal: “In fact, if you would look after it you could probably have one for free! I think we all got one in trust. They don’t give it to us but if you could look after it somewhere – it would be helpful. Coming from the old days of film, we like to keep things for sentimental purposes. Poor old Tom, he’s getting told off by the production manager to get rid of a lot: “You can’t have this or that! Those dollies have to go!” And these cameras we are never gonna use again.”

By the turn of the millennium Aardman had joined forces with DreamWorks to produce their first stop motion feature Chicken Run. Featuring Mel Gibson i.a. it became the highest grossing stop motion animated film in history. Still shot on film, albeit introducing radical changes in production. Sproxton explains: “When we’re shooting on film on a daily basis we’d send out a pile of cans. Within each can there would be 2-3 seconds worth of film. So the film leader you lace into the camera and later let out of the camera was probably 3 times as long as the actual shot. And there’s a whole lot of paper work that went with it. So you can imagine – unloading – fill out the forms and that, 30 times a day. Just to get a latent image processed which got scanned. It’s kind of – it’s nuts! If you look at it logically: The kind of process was in a way bonkers! But it was all that we could do.”

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Finally the three gentlemen each at an age of sixty-four could meet.

Riddett complements: “During the making of Chicken Run technology changed so much. We were probably the first to do a digital negative. When we started the film that possibility didn’t exist. One of the problems we had shooting on film was that the animators would be cutting back all the while. He might shoot 6 frames and if he didn’t like that last frame, he would go back two frames and start over. Afterwards the negative cutters went mad. Once there was one of them wanting to hit me: “Why do you keep sending me this stuff? How am I expected to cut this?” Then half way through Chicken Run we could actually scan the stuff. We were still shooting on film but once we had shot the film we could scan it and then just put it back together with digital editing. So we would have a nice slick negative after we had scanned it back to film. The digital colour grading system was a box full of soldered bit and parts, but we could actually adjust quite a lot, play with contrast and digitally grade the film. Everything that is now commonplace. It was build by the company doing our effects work and became the Baselight grading system.”

“They built a basic film-scanner.” says Sproxton. “It was the Computer Film Company which eventually developed into Framestore. It became almost the only practical solution to scan the whole negative and forget about any cut backs and just take those out later in the digital edit. I think it was the first time in the UK (in fact in Europe, red) where the whole film did a digital intermediate. From then on it revolutionized the

way we worked and the CGI went into that as well. Some explosion stuff at the end of the film.“

“We also had the problem,” Riddett remembers. “Although it was quite a big budget, we couldn’t afford a lot of effects work. I think we envisioned like 300 shots. That would be crucial stuff like taking out rigs etc. The sets were with painted backgrounds. There was little compositing, so we started out doing everything to hide the rigs as everything was done in-camera. But as technology was changing we could do more and more in digital. And in fact a little bit of mathematics came into it. Well, first of all we were chatting to the labs. They were saying to us: “Why don’t you just digitize it from the start?” I said, but we can’t really afford it. But we spoke to their post supervisor who said: “Well you’re going to digitize this film anyway!” Because that did happen in those days for DVDs etc. Obviously there is a budget for that – like a million dollars to do that. So he said: “Can we have that earlier so we can digitize while we’re making the film?” They were saying, well it hasn’t been done before, but yes, that is possible. So it was an accountant thing really.”

Sproxton continues: “The digitization came out of the marketing budget, it wasn’t the production budget. Basically we took that budget and put it into the production budget. And that made it feasible. And the digitalization managed to eradicate a lot of these little problems.”

“Looking at the archive bit of it.” Sproxton ponders: “Obviously we got an original camera negative from Chicken Run. We also got the DI and indeed the print negative. So you’ve got the internegative for the release print. What we now have is terabytes of data, in all sorts of bits and pieces. We’ll end up with a final DCP. And the scan back for the black and white separations for archive purposes. But it’s quite weird now what we store in archives of material. It’s still the convention of the studio to scan the DCP to black and white colour separations. And those will be put in the salt mines for ever. Cause you can always retrieve the image that way. So it’s very, very stable.”

“We know that’s gonna last for at least a 100 years.” Riddett eagerly breaks in: “Because it has already been proven. The digital method – nobody knows how long it’s gonna last!”

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Aardman feature to premiere in Copenhagen very soon

“I don’t know how many versions of Farmageddon we have on Avid.” Sproxton continues. “I mean, the amount of data you store – it’s colossal! What do you keep and what don’t you keep? Ranks and ranks of terabytes of material are being accumulated. Whereas on film... I think that’s one reason why films like Star Wars are being shot on film. Because on the studio it’s more efficient, cause you’ll find the off-bottom more quickly. Cause it’s costing you real money as the film goes through the camera. And in terms of what you then have to store you only scan the okay takes. So you end up with a relatively small amount of data, cause all the out-takes – you don’t bother with them. You realize, if you’re shooting a live action film purely digitally, you’ll just shoot tons and tons of stuff.”

We now decide to move ourselves up the majestic staircase dominating the vestibule to the second floor in order to avoid the ever increasing noise from people visiting the canteen. These studios at Gas Ferry Road in central Bristol are not the hotbed of what you have seen in cinemas and television. The production of Aardman features and series needs more space and have long ago been moved some 12 miles up north to Aztec West. It’s neighbouring the Filton production site where the Concorde was born and where Airbusses are being made. Ascending the staircase the two Daves tell me about their latest feature which they have just concluded filming. Originally Shaun the Sheep was a character from the Wallace and Gromit 1995 short film A Close Shave. But it spun off to

become a one hundred and fifty independent seven-minute episode series for the BBC for more than twenty years. This winter Shaun the Sheep will premiere as a feature: Farmageddon. If the title sounds familiar – think of Bruce Willis saving the world from a menacing flying rock and combine it with the rural home of Shaun.

The quest of Lord and Sproxton have always been adult animation and the trademark of Aardman was to combine it with children television. That’s why you ever so often finds traces of unforgettable classical cinema within the plot. Take for instance the so far latest Wallace & Gromit film A Matter of Loaf and Death. For a start the title may also ring a bell? Well into it you might feel in the midst of a thriller by Hitchcock and later you can imagine Sigourney Weaver fighting an Alien-mother. When Gromit, towards the end refrains from disposing a smoking bomb into a pond full of ducks, Adam West did the same thing in the 1966 version of Batman. In the first Aardman feature to be shot at Aztec West you would expect prudent Alec Guinness and brave William Holden to fool the Japanese army by escaping the POW camp – only they are all chickens!

At last we find the CEO office of David Sproxton and inside decorating the wall is a movie poster of the old Chicken Run dressed in autumn colours. Happily Sproxton waltzes towards it exclaiming: “And now we start working on: Da-da-da-da! Chicken Run 2! - Well uh..? The poster is sort of fading away, isn’t it?” Riddett

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Dave Alex Riddett and Nick Park at set with Wallace’s rusty Austin A35 van.

elaborates: “Yeah, after twenty years. A little more than chickens normally live.”

This time it will be in cooperation with the French company Pathé and Studio Chanel. I remember Aardman already intended to finance their very first and very expensive feature by European capital amongst others by Pathé. However, to balance the budget it was necessary to guarantee American distribution and that was when DreamWorks entered the scene and financed the Aardman features. “We were with Jeffrey Katzenberg for ten years.“Sproxton recalls. “We were financed by DreamWorks three times: Starting out with Chicken Run, then Flushed Away and Curse of the Were-Rabbit. They were obviously pushing a bit more for the American market. Actually there was a line on here where Mrs. Tweedy says: “Go and get the torch!” And a ‘torch’ in America is a flaming firebrand thing. And they said: “No, no, no – it’s a flashlight!” We said: “No, she wouldn’t say ‘flashlight’ up there. We’ll bring it out! We’ll see it so you CAN say ‘torch’ and you’ll see the thing. And on Were-Rabbit we had a couple of weird... couchette and marrow stuff.”

“Oh yes!” Riddett adds: “We had to change to melon and we had already done the animation. Then you definitely want to say something in two syllables. ‘My prize melon’ instead of ‘my prize marrow’. In America that would be a squash, isn’t it? The people wouldn’t understand what a marrow is. But they have all these issues – I

mean drink... there is a strange thing with the drinking thing. There’s a shot where they think they’ve shot the rabbit. One of the guys in the foreground pulls out a hip flask. I heard Jeffrey (Katzenberg) saw that and said: “Well, we can’t have that, that’s alcohol in a children’s film.” There’s another scene a bit later on where this guy is pointing a gun at the children. “That’s OK.” He said, but not alcohol. It’s a strange cultural

thing, what you can say and what not. But in general Jeffrey was great because he was so much hands on when he was over here every few months, making comments and he did trust Nick (Park) a lot. He would say funny things though, wouldn’t he? Like looking at Wallace’s wallpaper: “I don’t understand? This is the sort of thing your grandmother would have?” And we were going: “Yeah, all right?”

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Wallace and Gromit at the Prom 20 in the Royal Albert Hall.

Sproxton smiles: “You know, he was looking at Wallace’s little van and kind of said: “Why is his truck so rusty?” He was expecting him to have a brand new sparkling Chevrolet. It’s very hard to explain. This is sort of down at Yield, in a poor, you know, struggling through... But he let us do it and he was a huge supporter of the talent and the story.”

“I think,” Sproxton continues. “That if he hadn’t had to go public we would have stayed with them. Originally their funding was from him, Stephen Spielberg and David Geffen. But DreamWorks were refinanced three times, cause they were burning a lot of money. It took them 6 or 7 years until they got to Shrek. They did a couple of films that didn’t make any money.

But they spent a fortune on them and then they turned into a public company. And an American public company is very public. So their expectations for each of their films was that they had to do something like 300 million dollars each at the box office to fulfil their business plans. And our films are never gonna do that. They are much more art house and more niche. I’ve often said that our films play in America like a Polish film plays in Britain. There is a constituency which loves them, but they’re not gonna play in the Midwest in a way that say a superhero film plays.”

The hallmark of Aardman is of course Wallace & Gromit. Over the years they have become a national treasures to the British people. At the Prom 20 on 29 of July 2012 they performed ‘live’ at the Royal Albert Hall on big screens communicating with the conductor Nicholas Collon, their title track by Julian Nott being played in an orchestral rendition of the theme. Of course Wallace almost ruins the event but Gromit ends up saving the night by composing his own musical piece, A Double Concerto for Violin and Dog. He plays it on a violin over the monitor in a heartbreaking duet with English violinist Tasmin Little, who is performing live on the concert hall stage. How in the world they managed to synchronize plasticine animation with live action in a BBC direct transmission is beyond my grasp. Then last year 2018 Wallace & Gromit appeared in a tribute to Prince Charles at his 70th birthday. After which the Duchess of Cornwall exclaimed that the duo was “Prince Charles’s favourite people in the world.”

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Gromit performs his A Double Concerto for Violin and Dog in a duet with violinist Tasmin Little.

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Gromit is mute. His expressions only derive from his ears and eyebrows.

Peter Sallis made the voice of Wallace unforgettable.

But in fact the birth of the duo set out utterly modest. Having attended the National Film and Television School Nick Park left London for Aardman in Bristol with a half finished W&G film: A Grand Day Out. The dog is mute, has no mouth, his only visual expressions are that of his ears and eyebrows. In contrast Wallace does all the talking, but not in a very intelligent way. He is Laurel and Hardy merged into one single character. The voice of Wallace is very peculiar. It belongs to Peter Sallis who was the longest surviving actor in a BBC series that went on for 37 years and the only actor to appear in all 295 episodes.

Sproxton recounts: “That piece has a funny story to it. Peter Sallis got a phone call from this young student who said: “I’ve seen you in the series Summer Wine and I’d love you to read a

few lines. Is that something you would like to do?” Peter said “Yes” and he did the session and sent Nick a cassette tape. Then it all went silent. Seven years later Peter’s phone rang again, it was Nick saying: “I’ve finished the film Peter. Would you like to come and see it?” - Yeah, seven years later!”

The Northern accent Peter Sallis brought into the character went so well that it became an integrated part of the Wallace and Gromit universe up to the last film in 2008. But Sallis died 2017 at an age of 96 years.

“The last thing he did with us was A Matter of Loaf and Death.” Riddet recalls. “And even then his eyesight was going and his memory was certainly gone. For him to do the recordings he said: “Write it out in real big lettering.” And then we just held up the cards basically. Also his assistant, an actress took on the task to look after him. On the sessions I went to, she would actually read the lines for him and he would repeat it. Immediately afterwards he would have forgotten: “Have I said this line?” We had to speed up his voice a little bit as well because it was showing his age at that point. But somehow he managed to get quite a coherent script out of it. Peter, bless him, still injected character and humour to each and every line. But that was his last proper job.”

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Sproxton elaborates: “He got macular degeneration in the retina. It’s where the retina falls apart from the back of the eyes. So that means you can only see small areas. But they had a great partnership Nick and him. They got on like a house on fire. He was a very charming and amusing fellow and he had a lovely cheeky delivery.”

So what do you do when the voice of your main character passes away? And I suppose Wallace and Gromit are not going to fade away any time? Well, at the studio there was a young impersonator, Ben Whitehead, who already did quite a lot of dialogue in different voices. Mainly bits and pieces for commercial work but he also did some of the supporting characters in their films. Consequently Nick Park asked him if he could do Wallace. Riddet: “Oh yes, and we’ve been using him ever since and quite a lot. When we did the Proms, Musical Marvels, and recently for the Prince Charles’s birthday. He does a fantastic voice. But you have to remember that Peter was not a Northerner, he was a Londoner. It was an actor’s voice, he just put on a very good Lancashire accent.”

Sproxton: “If you sort of put them side by side: What Peter brought to it was a real life interpretation of a line and a nuance. And Ben does a pretty good job, but he hasn’t got that little bit of flare that Peter brought and the slight

tongue in cheek. He brought wit and cheekiness to the delivery. Which Ben does a pretty good job at.”

But the last Wallace and Gromit film goes back ten years. So I’m eager to know if the duo will ever hit the silver screen once more?

Sproxton: “Yeah, Nick still works. He’s got some ideas, as we speak actually. He’s got fired up, which is great. He has a short idea on a longer story. Good fun actually – nice idea. So we hope to get those up and running. Cause there is always a demand, people actually love it. In terms of Nick’s head I think the features are almost too big. The half hour form – there’s a natural format. And with the whole Netflix thing and the way tv is going it might be 45 minutes. But I think he sits better in those shorts, definitely. The Wrong Trousers is such a wonderful film. That length works very beautifully.”

Riddett: “We have never been able to quite capture it again though, have we? That magic script really condenses everything. And it’s something quite hard to analyse why it works so well.”

Sproxton: “You never feel rushed with it. There are sequences in the museum with thepenguin and it’s beautifully paced.”

Finally, as a kind of an epitaph, we take our time to memorize our mutual old friend (Dave) Borthwick who died all too young at an age of 65. Obviously I didn’t get to know him before 1998, but the three ‘Daves’ go way back. His studio, the Bolex Brothers, did some pretty creepy stuff with insects all over, even on the company’s letterhead. And so we’re back to the Grass Roots of that generation, which coincidentally also was the title of the last film he threw his energy into. He went collaborating with American underground artist Gilbert Shelton to make a feature of his 1968 comic The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Shelton had for a long time been searching for a producer that would not water down his classic hippie tale. The match with the Bolex Brothers and all their dirty insects seemed perfect. They hit it off immediately and the last time I saw Borthwick he was on cloud nine about the feature-long script. “It was the most beautiful storyboard ever,” Riddett concludes. “The test (trailer, red) was a beautiful fucking shot and the models... But no, it came to nothing in the end really. There’s a lot of Furry Freak Brothers fans, I think, but not the ones that have the money. The rights went back to Gilbert. There was some interest in doing it as a musical, which is a quite interesting idea. Like a stage show! But no, sadly. The storyboard still exists but it’s not gonna happen as a film.”

bolexbrothers

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Gilbert Shelton & Dave Borthwick with their Fabulous Furry models.

The poster for the 1998 A Danish Documentary about British model Animation. Some punk animator from Bristol put it on YouTube and I’m absolutely happy

about it because a lot of people watched it.

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Peter Sallis and Nick Park during voice recording of A Matter of Loaf and Death. Dave Alex Riddett with the farmer from Shaun the Sheep.

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Here are some links to the Wallace and Gromit films:

A Grand Day Out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFRzZegVIhY

The Wrong Trousers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV7AIG6U1TU

A Close Shave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NKLjm2qoU0

A Matter of Loaf and Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plY3s4NSSAI

Cracking Contraptions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbBO-hiF8wE

Wallace and Gromit’s musical marvels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68Uor5gtVYo

Additional links:

The Bolex Brothers test pilot for Grass Roots: https://vimeo.com/7560090

Why Bristol?- A Danish Documentary about British model Animation:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D33YUnk3ZU

Editor: Steen Dalin

Layout: Maria Mac Dalland

Illustrations by courtesy of Aardman Animations Ltd.

Additional photos by Mette Ørbæk and Steen Dalin

A lot of thanks to Anton Orbaek White and Jan Vittrup

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