Wallace and Gromit animators training students
The film studio behind Shaun the Sheep and Wallace and Gromit has begun training students at the University of Canterbury.
The university and the training arm of Aardman Animations yesterday announced a deal that will see up to 300 students trained by Aardman Academy tutors as part of the university’s Bachelor of Digital Screen (Honours) degree.
Bristol, UK-based Aardman created a training academy because it couldn’t find enough animators to produce Chicken Run, which became the highest grossing stop-motion film in history.
Since then, the academy has trained hundreds in the patient art of stop-motion animation, where plasticine figures are manipulated in increments and photographed. Running the photos later in sequence gives the appearance of motion.
Using the technique, Aardman won the Academy Award for best animated feature and Bafta Award for best British film for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
The Bachelor of Digital Screen (BDigiScreen) degree is a four-year professional degree focusing on storytelling using words, still or moving images, animation and sound.
About 40 second-year students have chosen animation as their major and already had remote sessions with academy tutors, said executive dean of arts, Professor Kevin Watson.
Another 80 second year students majoring in screen writing, cinematic arts and the like will get time with academy experts in those areas later this year, he said.
The courses are taught at the Digital Screen Campus at Dovedale, which is now known as Kōawa.
“It was built on the idea of the convergence between education and industry, creating an ecosystem where students learn from both academic experts and industry partners,” said Watson.
Aardman also runs courses in Bristol, where it stresses, “Nothing’s academic, everything’s practical”.