Cavemen in clay With the armies of skeletons.
Matt Suddain gets a masterclass in creativity from Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park.
We had to make a claymation/stop-motion project at film school. Me and a girl called Charlene spent 20-something hours straight moving tiny bits of plasticine, cotton wool and toilet-roll inners a fraction at a time and recording each frame on a Nazi-era German film camera while keeping ourselves hysterically alert with litres of V energy drink and occasional shouting matches.
We imagined a slick animated short – something like the Aardman classic The Wrong Trousers, or at least at the level of Morph.
What we discovered when we finally viewed our footage was a two-minute clip that looked like a cinematic cry for help from a chimpanzee.
So animation was never going to be my medium of choice. But for Nick Park, there was no other way forward. His brain has gifted us Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Chicken Run and the Academy Award-winning Creature Comforts.
His latest feature, Early Man, tells the story of a tribe of cave-people who have to defend their homelands from bronze-enhanced invaders in a winner-takes-all association football match.
Early Man features the voices of Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams and Timothy Spall. I went to Aardman Studios in Bristol to chat to Nick Park in person.
Clay seems a strangely appropriate material for a story about cavemen.
It’s always been the choice for me really to do stop-frame, it’s just what I’ve always done. And this subject seemed very in keeping, the whole subject of cavemen and cavewomen, the earthy quality. There’s something very primitive and visceral about it. It reminds me of the old Ray Harryhausen films. Yeah, and the early work of Willis O’Brian on King Kong. When the animator handles the puppets you get this boil. [‘‘Boil’’ is the term for subtle changes to a claymation character when it’s handled, or exposed to hot studio lights. On playback the surface seem to ripple.] I kind of like it because it looks different, especially these days with everything else around. It looks different to all the CG stuff.
I learned from my studio tour that there’s actually a fair amount of CGI in this movie.
There is, yes. It helps us in places. We use what you’d generally call digital effects. We extend the landscapes if we haven’t got studio space to build a vast desert or whatever. Or smoke, or fire: things that you can’t do very well in camera. I used to use tinfoil as a kid for fire. But now we use digital effects. In this film, we have a giant football stadium with thousands of people, so that needed CG help. But we make sure it’s first done with puppets, then the CG guys would come and copy it and make sure the worlds fit together.
What’s been the biggest challenge on this project?
Probably the football stadium, making a stadium full of people. It’s a cast of thousands done on a small scale. I imagined it as like a little Gladiator, but in a football sense. You’ve got this crowd baying for blood. It’s epic. But in terms of challenges, the biggest one is getting the story working. No matter what the technique or the look, if the story isn’t good, isn’t compelling with good characters, then it’s all a bit of a waste of time.
Do you get to tweak the story much during production?
We do, and in a way it’s one of the advantages of shooting animation. Because it takes so long, you have time to keep reviewing the bits of the story
that you haven’t yet shot. At the moment Act Three is a bit … GYAAHHH! [he mock-screams], like, ‘‘how are we gonna do it? Is it funny enough? Are all the different threads satisfying? Does it deliver emotionally?’’ Because we don’t have that freedom like you do in live-action to shoot a lot more and then edit it down, we have to try and use everything that we shoot.
How does what’s happening in this massive studio today match the dreams you had when you were making your first animations as a boy?
Wow. Yeah, I pinch myself every morning. And often when I’m driving home at night, too I think where did this begin? From playing with plasticine and clay models as a kid. A lot of us started like that, making films on a kitchen table. And to think now, we’re coming in to make a movie that’s gonna go out to a world audience is incredible. It’s just amazing. But the pressure’s even more, you know … GYAAHHH! It’s got to be GOOD!’
It’s hard when you watch one of your films to even imagine any stress behind the scenes. Is there a point you can imagine where this would all get too big and too stressful?
There are times of stress, yes, very much so. But you’ve caught me on one of the good days.
I’m glad.
But working with such a big crew, 29 animators, shooting on 35 sets at the same time. I’ve got a magnificent team. It only gets stressful really when you reach certain points where the story isn’t working, or what you’ve shot hasn’t quite worked out, so you’ve gotta reshoot. The animators are working really hard, and we’re a talented bunch, but it’s really hard if an animator has spent five days on a shot to say, ‘‘Could you do that again?"’
How do you adapt to stress, personally? Do you have strategies for when things get too much? Do you chuck plasticine at people?
Good question, no I don’t. I am a perfectionist. I know everyone else is trying to get it right, and they’re really trying to achieve what I can see in my head, to satisfy my vision. I guess with CGI and drawn animation, you can look at it and adjust it, but with this … it’s like a performance, it’s all set up in front of the camera, we act it through on video to try to convey what I’m after, or what the joke is, what the timing is, and then the animator goes for it. So it’s very hit and miss. Sometimes it can be not quite what you wanted, but you have to go with it. It’s a spontaneous medium, really.
Controlled spontaneity.
Yeah, every puppet we make we put through a road test, we test it out, see if it can do everything it needs to do, if it can bend enough, if it looks good in certain positions. We record all the voices before we animate, as well. So whoever we’ve chosen for a particular character, the way they voice that character might make us want to change the look of the face. We might adjust the lips according to how that person speaks. It’s an evolving thing, the goalposts are always moving.
What process do you use to generate ideas? Are you a daydreamer?
I guess a lot of these ideas come from little sketches I do. Like Chicken Run: that was just a sketch of a chicken digging her way out of a chicken coop. And with this, I’ve always been obsessed with cavemen. It came from that idea of a tribe of ridiculous misfits. I guess working with clay I’ve always been attracted to quite ridiculous characters that look a bit thick and have heavy brows.
And I assume the physical material itself pushes you in certain creative directions.
Yeah. To me the clay itself has a certain quality. I think a lot of humour comes through it, and through the charm of it, and the fact that you can see it’s handmade. Plus, for me there’s something very British about it. It’s to do with small, understated expressions; deadpan, nuanced expressions.
The cave era is quite a welltravelled area for animated features, with Ice Age and The Croods. Were you conscious of that going in?
Well, you’re always aware of what else is around, but we’ve talked about doing a caveman movie for years and years, it’s always been in the back of my mind. I guess it’s just one of those subjects that’s always had a broad appeal, and I always wanted to do cavemen in clay. The idea came from the idea of cavemen swinging clubs around and thinking, ‘‘what if cavemen took up sport?’’ But it quickly got back to football, because of the whole tribalism involved, and what if cavemen had to drop their weapons and just use their feet. That’s all how it sort of developed. I see it as a kind of broadly entertaining movie with jokes the whole family can enjoy, but there are a lot of football fans working on this project, so there are lots of little gags in there for hardcore football fans, too. The queen in the film is called Queen Oofeefa, for example.
That’s funny.
It is.
You seem fascinated with duos in your work, too. Can you talk about that?
I suppose I have always drawn on that idea of the hapless human and their animal sidekick. In this movie, you’ve got Dug and his pet boar Hognob. I’ve been trying hard not to repeat the ideas of Wallace and Gromit, but there are connections there I guess. I just don’t seem to be able to avoid it! But it’s not a conscious effort to do it.
It’s interesting how that works with creative people. Is it strange for you to look back at what’s subconsciously come through in your work. I mean, your dad was an amateur inventor? Was that right?
Well, he wasn’t really an inventor as such, but he loved making stuff. He was actually a photographer by trade, so I picked up a lot of stuff from him about photography and cameras, a love of film. But at home, yes, he did love to build stuff, he built a caravan that we all went on holiday in. He spent a lot of time in his shed making things. And it was actually years later with Wallace, I realised: I think I’ve made a film about my Dad.
❚ Early Man (PG), the whimsical story of the development of the game of football (aka, soccer) in prehistoric times, hits New Zealand cinemas on March 29.