Netflix’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 (pictured) 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 animation 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 chicken 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 rushes 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 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 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 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?
“Exactly. (That’s) just the style of Aardman. Many of Aardman’s projects are effectively 12 different frames per second. They’re 12 individual 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 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 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?
“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 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 going at the height of production?
“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 finished all of those interiors.”
Does Aardman have a single location where this all takes place, or is it spread out?
“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 breakout 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 the camera setup you’re using? Is it a traditional motion-picture camera or an animation-specific camera?
“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 lenses — the original lenses adapted from the film cameras. Really, really high quality prime lenses. Anyone can shoot animation like this essentially on a phone or tablet because all we’re doing is taking high quality still images one after another and then they’re combined in the edit process.”
How are those still images coming together on a timeline?
“It’s all automated. We actually use a program called Dragonframe, 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 realtime. Obviously, the raw images, they go through a separate pipeline into edit, but it’s all automated. Thankfully, we don’t have to worry too much about physical lining them all up.”
Do you have a specific digital camera that you prefer?
“I don’t think it’s a secret…they are Canon, I’m pretty sure. That’s what we’ve used as far as I can remember, since the beginning of the stills process.”
As for the digital VFX, I would imagine you have to determine what is going to be added in post early on?
“It’s a blurry line to be honest. It’s never that clear cut. In essence, we go with whatever looks best for the film. It’s much more about the sort of aesthetic. The practicality of trying to create effective water on a large scale doesn’t really work, so at the beginning of the film, we did lots of tests. Wherever we can, we do in-camera. There are various points in the film where water is created by our assistant animators using hair gel, wax, Vaseline — all of those things. Also, in this film, we used this resin that you could cure, so it’s completely crystal clear, but you could sort of sculpt it. For example, when the jam gets splattered on the toast at the beginning, we sort of built see-through bits of jam with this resin, so in the beginning of the film, we’ve got some in-camera effects. But things like fog, water, fire, they’re really hard to do…If you want it to look realistic, the best way for those kinds of effects is VFX.”
Does Aardman have in-house visual effects capabilities, or does that go to an external facility?
“It varies film to film, but on this one, we had it all in-house. They can scale up to do a feature film. There (are) other departments at Aardman that make commercials and digital. It’s actually a huge business (with) lots of different sides to the company. But…Nick and Merlin, they wanted to have that very authentic feel to the VFX, so it really sat well within the worlds of Wallace & Gromit, and to be honest, going to an external supplier of VFX for the film industry probably wouldn’t have given us that. So we were really keen to keep the in-house nature, and work with people that understood the style.”
What becomes of all the assets after production wraps? Do you keep them in storage or a library?
“We try and keep what we can, and we’ve actually got two archivists who work at Aardman, and it’s a full-time job. They archive everything that we make. But the bigger sets, we can’t keep. It’s just going to cost too much. So we tend to sort of have smaller sets, and all the props will be kept. Some of those really expensive larger sets, we just have to strike them. And basically we try and recycle what we can. We’re much more conscious now as a company of the environmental impacts of filmmaking. There’s a couple of exhibitions that do tend to go around. I was in New York with Nick, and we take the puppets with us, so the actual real film puppets, they .tend to have a bit of a life after the film.”
What sc
ale are the characters?
“I reckon Wallace is just over six inches. Norbots, probably three to four inches high. They’re really specific sizes, and that’s because we don’t have different scales in this film. We’ve got one scale. That’s partly because we want to build the whole world. We don’t want to build lots of versions. But that means we’ve got to have a scale that works for those really-wide shots, but also the extreme close ups of Gromit and his brow when he’s changing expression. We’ve physically got to put a camera right there next to this tiny puppet, and the animators are going to animate that by hand.”
So it's not just the typical action-hero/1:6 scale?
“They’re all slightly different. And I don’t know exactly why that is, but, Shaun the Sheep’s world is slightly different to Wallace & Gromit, which was slightly different to The Pirates. They’ve all got their own bespoke scales…The other thing is, Wallace & Gromit’s world — all their props are slightly oversized, even for them. It’s just part of a sort of chunky world that they live in. The mugs are huge…His hands are massive as well. If you see Wallace’s hands, they’re actually really chunky, so everything’s got a very unique look about it in this world.”
What’s next for you?
“I’m actually excited! I’m working in the Aardman Academy, where we bring people in to teach them animation skills, but also teach filmmaking. I’m preparing for a filmmaking course where 12 people from around the world have applied with a film idea, and they pay to come and make it here. They basically make it under the supervision and the support of Aardman. It’s a really-exciting prospect because it sort of it feels very fresh and new.”