Boxoffice-April.2000

Sneak Preview
as
Unique
Aardman experts locked into a minutely detailed
Animations may be, "Rarer schedule, overseen by both Park and
than a hen's tooth" is not the
quaint adage to apply to what's been
Lord in accordance with a daily diary
call sheet mapped out almost to the second.
happening at the company's studios
The bosses are scheduled for the
these past couple of years. Everywhere
one looks there are grinning chickens,
BOXOFFICE interview from 2:30 to 3
p.m., after Lord has visited Unit 18 of
flashing their molars, beaming their his crew for a final briefing on their
three-day shoot of sequence 6500, and
pearly whites, gnashing their incisors,
chattering through teeth that are
clenched, agape, smiling, on edge.
It's teeth, many admirers feel, that are
responsible for much of the success of
Aardman's unusual brand of plasticine
animation that in the past has created
such witty short films as the Wallace
and Gromit adventures "The
Wrong Trousers" and "A Close
Shave" and the medieval fable
"Wat's Pig." Rarely have creatures
created from whole cloth, or
rather a sophisticated version of
play dough, appeared to have
such an inner life, and much of
that impression can be attributed
to the way the perfectly synchronized
words in odd regional
accents come forth from toothy
mouths. Now Nick Park and
Peter Lord, the creators of these
3-D wonders, are co-producing
and co-directing "Chicken Run,"
a full-length feature cartoon with talking
hens to be released by DreamWorks
in the United States and most international
territories, while Pathe will distribute
in
The
Europe.
Aardman workshop is an
ordinary-looking building in an
ordinary-looking industrial
park, just outside the city of Bristol in
southwest England. Exiting the motorway
and driving on to the site one day
last June, nothing prepared BOXOFFICE
for the wonderland of creativity and
amusement inside the premises. Who
knew how much a chicken with teeth
could make one giggle?
The ambitious project demands the
painstaking attention of a whole team of
THE
1
rr
"RUN
BOXOFFICE Visits the
Set of DreamWorks' and
Aardman Animations'
"Chicken Run"
Park has spent half an hour in the art
department with animator Loyd Price,
director of photography Frank
Passingham and an assistant art director,
in reference to something ominously
called "the Pie Machine." Following the
interview Lord is immediately scheduled
for "director time" and then must check
out sequence 5300 and review a reel of
completed film, while Park's schedule
attends to other details and then joins in
the review.
Aardman is definitely a world unto
itself,
filled with jobs few know actually
exist, but many might covet if they did.
There are about 150 people working in
this building, which had been taken over
in 1998 because the company's established
commercial and short film studios
and offices in Bristol were not large
enough to accommodate such a huge
crew and extensive workshops and sets.
(Among the most visible of Aardman's
commercial ventures are those chatty,
toothy cars dreamed up for Chevron
ads.)
by Bridget Byrne
During BOXOFFICE's visit, production
on "Chicken Run" is about half way
along. Panic isn't yet rampant, but lurking.
"The hours are quite severe. The sheer
volume of work to be done is quite
daunting," admits Lord, while Park says
that though they believe they are running
a "very well oiled machine," they
are practicing creativity with a time gun
at their head, and it can feel something
of "a hard slog" at times.
Lord founded Aardman with school
pal Dave Sproxton, co-producer of
"Chicken Run." They met at age 12 at
grammar school in the town of!
Woking, south of London, discovered
a mutual interest and (as
Lord describes it in "Cracking
Animation," a book written with
Brian Sibley that delineates and
illustrates the whole process of 3-
D animation) "in the great tradition
of British amateurism our
first film was made on the kitchen
table." The company was named
after a rather limp, semi-
Superman character Lord first
drew as a strip cartoon. The character
was then developed into a
cell animation short that was
bought by the BBC for 15
pounds, the check deposited in the
bank in the name of Aardman
Animations.
Park joined the company in 1985,
bringing his own sensibility and style
into the mix as the originator of the
cheese-eating inventor Wallace and his
levelheaded dog Gromit, a famous
Oscar-winning duo first developed when
he was in art school in Sheffield in
northwest England.
Lord and Park both possess what
might be called an amateur star quality,
meaning that despite having to take on
the onus of big business, they are clearly
still in touch with the schoolboy enthusiasms
that first fueled their careers. Lord;
writes in his book. "I began animating
as a hobby, when I was a teenager
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