Film Journal March 2018

Nick Park poses with Eddie
Redmayne (voice of Dug)
and Maisie Williams (voice
of Goona) on the set
of Early Man.
Below, Park and crew
work before a green screen.
Photos Chris Johnson © 2017 Studiocanal S.A.S and The British Film Institute
Little did a stop-frame animation student at the
National Film and Television School in England
know that his graduation project called
A Grand Day Out would launch him into international
stardom, and make a hapless, cheese-loving
inventor and his genius dog cultural icons. “I do
have to pinch myself when I see Wallace and Gromit
on TV every holiday in the U.K.,” admits Nick
Park, who has won four Academy Awards, become
a creative cornerstone at Aardman Animations, and
received a CBE (Commander of the British Empire).
“I remember 20 or 30 years ago with the rise
of CGI, and fantastic films from Pixar and Dream-
Works, we wondered, ‘How long do we have to be
using this old technique?’ Now, it helps us to stand
out against the other films.”
Stop-frame techniques have not changed over
the years for the principal animation.
“With Chicken Run and Curse of the Were-
Rabbit, we shot them on good old stop-frame film
cameras, but now we shoot digitally. It offers a big
safety net. If something goes wrong in the middle
of a three-day shot it doesn’t all get trashed.” Stopframe
and CGI work well together. “We have for a
long time been using digital effects, like any movie
does, whether it’s things that you can’t do with clay,
such as lava, smoke and fire.”
CGI was useful in expanding the prehistoric
landscapes featured in Park’s new Early Man,
where a community of cave dwellers challenge
Bronze Age villagers to a soccer match in an effort
to win back their homeland. “We shot as much as
we could in the studio but didn’t have the space, so
we would often shoot against green screen and put
in the backgrounds afterwards.”
Early Man involved 40 camera crews each
utilizing a Canon EOS-1D X simultaneously to
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