Stop-motion training in a digital world
3D World speaks with Mark Simon Hewis, head of department at Aardman Academy, as he develops its training for people passionate about stop-motion
“WE’RE SEEING FAR MORE STUDENTS IN THEIR 30S THAN IN THEIR EARLY 20S” Mark Simon Hewis, head of department, Aardman Academy
There’s a real sense of satisfied surprise in Mark Simon Hewis’s voice when he recalls how, during the past two decades, the terrain and perception of stop-motion animation has radically evolved. “When Aardman was starting with Chicken Run they just couldn’t find enough animators,” he reveals. “They just couldn’t find people who did stop-motion. Stop-motion was incredibly unpopular if you weren’t Disney doing 2D, and it certainly wasn’t something that a lot of people dreamt about doing. And so Aardman realised that they almost had to train people up. So that’s what they did. They got people in who’d done a little bit or showed a lot of interest and they started doing a three-month course which trained people, and a lot of them walked straight onto Chicken Run; onto the highestgrossing stop-motion film in history. And, actually, some of the people who now teach on the Academy, who are directors and senior animators, they did that course.”
With that lineage outlined, it’s clear that it echoes something essential about Aardman’s creative culture. In turn, about seven years ago the studio recognised the opportunity, as Hewis describes it, “to try and open the door a bit and to kind of help and support an industry that it really loves”.
Of the profile that’s currently enjoyed by the Academy, Hewis says: “It has officially existed for about six or seven years, but it’s not had the same sort of public-facing front that I came in to help it have over the last year.” With this in mind, Hewis notes that some of those who enrol on an Academy course are doing so as a way towards developing their skills and sensibilities beyond the animation education that they may have had as undergraduate students at universities. Our conversation will later return to the relationship between prior knowledge and experience and what it might take to become an Academy student. Indeed, Hewis makes a useful and telling observation about the demographic of enrolling students, explaining: “We’re seeing far more people in their 30s than in their early 20s.” As such, for a significant proportion of Aardman students their impulse is to embark on a reskilling journey by enrolling on an Academy course.
At the time of writing, we’re all emerging from the various waves of lockdown and the experience and value of teaching and training has, by necessity, been shown to work in various ways. One of those ways is the opportunity afforded by online delivery. To keep class sizes manageable and communal, each Academy course sets a cap of 40 students.
Addressing Aardman’s creative and industry-orientated philosophy, and how that underpins the work of the Aardman Academy, Hewis explains: “I think that regardless of who you are and what department you’re in and what your skillset is, Aardman is full of really good people and I think that [with the studio] becoming employee-owned it’s just made that more clear to all of us. The Academy has become a chance for us to really try and support an industry that we love and make it have an incredibly healthy future. And then, all along the route of the Academy what we’ve been trying to do is to work out how to be more than something that costs a lot of money for people to come and do; and that you can only do it if you are in a position where you’ve got lots of time and a fair bit of money on your hands. And so, actually, over the last three or four years we’ve been trying to work out how we deal with that. The purpose of the Academy now is to just genuinely support and grow people and help people and not be a closed door. And the whole price point was trying to make
it at least half the price of university for the equivalent number of weeks. We know that we can’t offer loans, but what we do is we spread the cost so you can pay in instalments.”
Doing anything well requires focus and persistence, of course, and in turn that can be buttressed by passion. “To be honest, you come to the Academy when you love animation,” says Hewis. “That’s what we find and with animation, no matter what role you want – whether it’s producer, editor, director, animator, model-maker, scriptwriter or storyboard artist – the truth is nobody chooses that unless they love it, because it’s hard work. Our job is to help people with their skills. They’ve already got the work ethic. It’s about getting people the skills and the support and a genuine industry network of experts to hold people’s hands through a process of getting better.”
Part of the Academy’s teaching and learning resources combines digital and hands-on tools, as Hewis explains: “Everyone gets sent their own studio, so everybody gets the same. When they join the course we send them Dragonframe software, we send them out Dragonframe controller, we send them out an armature. In Week 1 we all build our armatures together. You get sent plasticine. You get sent a rig and tools. And so everybody has that joy of: ‘We’re on the same course; we’ve all got the same kit.’”
Hewis goes on to define how he sees the Academy developing: “Now, at the moment, the Academy is at about the point where we’re trying to build a pyramid of skills. At the bottom it’s people who want to learn more about animation from experts, from people who make animated feature films, who win awards. Then the next one up are two-week courses, that are really intensive, in story (character development and storyboarding) and then another two weeks purely in model-making: what modelmaking is. And then, above that, you’ve got three-month courses and that’s where you do things that take much longer.”
Hewis’s recollection about the origins of the Academy prompts him to note that: “We started the plan four years ago and when the pandemic hit it looked like we were incredibly quick to respond to the pandemic. But we weren’t. We were almost there already (with online).” In turn, the Academy’s online delivery has opened up the opportunity for people to apply because they can undertake the entire course from their home with no need to travel and incur the varying
costs involved with that, whether nationally or internationally.
With its range of different courses, Hewis sketches out the underlying teaching and learning provision and what tools are available for students to work with. “We try and make it as much contact time as possible, allowing things to be recorded in a way that adds to the delivery,” he says. “There are multi-cam shoots, with close ups of what animators are actually doing with their hands. There are screen-recordings of what’s actually happening in the software, with shots of them talking directly to camera. People can also shuttle through films frame-by-frame. We also have live Q and As, live lectures every week and, also, every single participant gets their own Aardman mentor. What we’ve done is created this really brilliant community that’s behind a paywall. It’s a bit like a Facebook group and it’s just for them. All the mentors are on there as well and we’ve all got taggable names. The community is vital: students post their work there, ask questions, engage in general chat and identify industry opportunities. By the end of the course there are thousands of posts by 40 people. Then, at the end of each week, our students upload their work and you tag your mentor. So, while your mentor’s on-set shooting something, they’ll get a message saying that their student has just sent them a piece of work.”
Hewis goes on to speak to a particularly pragmatic point: “I think that it’s not in our interest, as an industry, let alone as a department within Aardman, to flood an industry with too many people for the number of roles that are actually out there. And we really talk about that a lot in the department: getting that balance right between what’s needed and what people want. But what we hope is that what we’re doing is giving people a really good foundation as part of the Academy. The second you come here and do something, you become part of the alumni for life. And loads of opportunities go on there; there’s loads of support. It’s so idiosyncratic of Aardman that if you’re going to do something it needs to be excellent.”
As our conversation concludes, Hewis returns to the spirit of the Academy. He stresses that the Aardman Academy gives those who enrol the chance to “fall in love” with stop-motion. In turn, he cites a particular anecdote that might just speak to one of the ways that the medium of stop-motion dovetails so usefully with the medium of CGI. “We’ve had quite a few people come onto the course who are CGI animators,” he says. “One of our CG animators said that they came on a course because they were scared of gravity. They’re brilliant animators but you get something that can’t just be picked up with a mouse. The digital animators suddenly go: ‘Oh wow, I can move around it with my own eyes!’”
“THE ACADEMY’S COMMUNITY IS VITAL: STUDENTS POST THEIR WORK THERE, ASK QUESTIONS AND IDENTIFY INDUSTRY OPPORTUNITIES” Mark Simon Hewis, head of department, Aardman Academy