Baa-hind the scenes on the Shaun the Sheep movie: 'In a good week we can shoot two minutes'

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/22/shaun-the-sheep-movie-aardman-studio-tour

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Few multimillion-pound TV and film franchises can have accrued from a throwaway gag, but 11 minutes into A Close Shave, Nick Park’s third Wallace and Gromit short, when Wallace addresses a newly defleeced sheep as “Shaun”, a star – unknowingly, perhaps – was born. Twenty years, one Oscar and 130 episodes of Shaun’s own spin-off TV series later, a full-length feature film is about to emerge, with Shaun front and centre, which in all likelihood will reinforce the cultural supremacy of its makers, the Bristol-based animation studio Aardman.

Shaun the Sheep the Movie is Aardman’s sixth feature, and the first not to be produced in partnership with a major Hollywood studio. (French-based giant Studiocanal is the main backer this time.) With the Shaun TV show enjoying a vast global reach – Aardman say it has been sold to more than 170 territories worldwide – it would appear to be prime cinema material with transnational appeal: no dialogue, slapstick humour, inoffensive, family-oriented storylines. Aardman, it is clear, knows what it is doing, commercially as well as artistically: none of its films have grossed less than $100m globally, and another solid hit would appear to be on the cards.

It is fair to say, however, that Aardman – despite all its success – occupies a semi-detached position in the wider British film industry; its pre-eminence in animation doesn’t necessarily translate into similar levels of credibility and visibility of what you might call its live-action peers – Working Title, 007 producers Eon, Ridley Scott’s outfit Scott Free, Harry Potter makers Heyday. It is perhaps a result of the modesty and self-effacement of Aardman’s totemic figures: founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park, who joined in 1985, and early hire Richard Goleszowski – “employee No 1”, in Aardman lore – who developed the Shaun TV series and is credited as joint director on the feature. All of them are now in their late 50s and early 60s, but given animation’s lengthy creative cycles, seem be only just getting started.

A visit to Aardman’s Aztec West production studio, where Shaun is being shot, is an invaluable reminder of what an ultra-successful British film company looks like. A low-rise warehouse in a nondescript industrial estate on the northern edge of Bristol – “There’s a Spandex factory next door,” says Shaun producer Paul Kewley proudly – is home to what Kewley describes as “an extraordinary group of people”. Shaun joint director Mark Burton – in his first directing job after writing credits on Chicken Run, Madagascar and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit – likens it to “sitting in the seat of a Rolls-Royce”. Goleszowski – who is now rather confusingly called Richard Starzak, after changing his surname back to an old Polish family name, but is universally known as “Golly” to his Aardman confreres – is a little more blunt about the company’s progress. “In the past, when I’ve worked on commercials, the film crews sometimes treated you like you’re from out in the sticks and didn’t know what you were doing. But these days, Aardman’s reputation is enormous.”

In truth, the building hums with a quiet self-confidence that comes from the recognition that Aardman is one of the tiny handful of British film companies that has turned its cottage-industry beginnings into an established, successful and profitable enterprise – and arguably beyond that to national institution status. As well as the films, Aardman runs a commercials house, a CGI studio and takes on commissions; the company is particularly proud of the recent promo it completed for the Imperial War Museum. But Shaun is the main current business, and has taken over the place with a multitude of miniature sets, and teams of animators, model-makers and production coordinators beavering away. Apparently there are 16 shoots going on simultaneously – down from 40 at one point – with each animator working on their own set and producing around two seconds of footage a day. “In a good week,” says friendly Aardman handler Kelly Lappin, “we can get two minutes.” Elsewhere, chief model-maker Nigel Leach explains the mysteries of armatures, moulds and “blacktack”. Art director Matt Perry breezes by to talk up the in-house glass-blowers, who create the tiny pieces of crockery. Starzak and Burton move from shoot to shoot, briefing the animators, approving shots, tweaking edits; their job is more hands-off than you might imagine.

This, it seems, is an accommodation with the scale of activity that a feature film demands, and the brief company history delivered by Sproxton demonstrates the long haul of Aardman’s growth after the company was established in 1972. It took five years for Morph to get on the air, in the BBC art show Take Hart; another decade before making a big impact with the promo for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer. The company’s first Oscar came in 1990 with the Nick Park-directed Creature Comforts, defeating Park’s first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, which was also nominated. It took another decade for Aardman’s first feature, Chicken Run, to make it to cinemas after the company signed a five-film deal with Dreamworks.

Even though their relationship with Dreamworks finished earlier than expected – though impressive, the takings for the next two features, Were-Rabbit and Flushed Away, were not what Dreamworks were after – Sproxton is outspoken in his gratitude for the leg-up. “To have Dreamworks behind us on our first go-round was pretty fantastic. We learned a massive amount about what it takes to mount a feature film; it was a much, much bigger thing to grapple with than the half-hour shorts we’d done before.” Aardman then went with Sony, making two more features, Arthur Christmas and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!. The former, at least, was evidence that new blood was joining the old guard – it was directed by Sarah Smith, originally hired as Aardman’s head of development in 2006, with a script provided by Borat co-writer Peter Baynham.

With its low-key determination to make things work and subtle comic intelligence, Aardman is likely to remain a dominant force in the British family-film market for the foreseeable future; you can’t see it going down the laser-eyed, killer-robot route that baffled audiences of the Postman Pat movie. Shaun the Sheep the Movie, I can report, is a consummate upscaling of the TV show, retaining all its much-admired characteristics while bulking out the narrative to sustain the longer running time. In its quiet way, Shaun actually possesses the seeds of radicalism, being to all intents and purposes a silent film. “Funnily enough,” says Sproxton, “when the The Artist came out, it reinforced the idea that we were on the right path.”

Whatever change Aardman undergoes – which, inevitably, will happen very slowly – it is likely the company’s special brand of gentle but sharp-witted humour and precisely calibrated action will endure. Sproxton tries to define the Aardman style. “We use the word authenticity,” he says. “It’s about being honest and uncynical. We strive to make the characters true; they believe the world they are living in, however ridiculous it is. We know how to make the films, but getting the story to land absolutely spot on – that’s the hardest bit.”

• Shaun the Sheep the Movie is released on 6 February.