The Making Of (Part III)

MODEL PERFORMANCES

In any animated film, the characters' performances belong as much--or more--to the animators as to the actors providing the voices. That is especially true in the world of stop-motion animation, where the animators spend countless hours bringing inanimate puppets to life, bit by infinitesimal bit.

The process begins with the design of the puppets themselves. In their short films, Wallace & Gromit rarely encountered other human characters, but that was not to be the case in their first feature film. Model production designer Jan Sanger and her team were charged with the design and creation of an entire neighbourhood of both people and animals of assorted ages, shapes and sizes. In addition, because the characters' hair and clothing are molded and hand painted on each individual puppet, the modelmakers also had to serve as a de facto costume designers and hairstylists--albeit for clients with decidedly eccentric tastes.

Park offers, "The central characters of Wallace & Gromit were already established, but there were many more townspeople involved in the story. We had a great team building the models for about 40 additional characters in the film, including Victor and Lady Tottington. It was a lot of work designing those two characters, especially Lady Tottington, who needed an entire wardrobe of dresses. There were some pretty heated debates about which dress she would wear in what scene," he admits laughing.

Sanger says, "It was very interesting having Lady Tottington and Victor come on the scene, because they are flamboyant and it allowed us to introduce another dimension to Wallace & Gromit's world. They were fantastic characters to work with. Victor is quite pompous and has his own agenda for what to do with the rabbits. We generally had him in his safari hunting outfit, which leaves no doubts about his intentions. And Lady Tottington: with her grace and elegance, we spent a lot of time looking through fashion magazines to create a wonderful costume range for her."

Sanger reveals that Wallace's flirtation with the posh Lady Tottington even had an influence on his all-too-familiar wardrobe. "Wallace sets out to charm Lady Tottington, so we managed to get him out of his green vest and into a new zigzag patterned vest. Obviously, we had to work closely with the directors to get just the right zigzag vest, so we went through several stages of designs on that one."

Each of the puppets has essentially the same construction, beginning with a metal armature, which acts as the character's skeleton. Obviously, there are variables based on size and whether the character stands on two legs or four legs or, as in the case of Gromit, whichever suits him in the moment.

The model department then molds each puppet using a special blend of Plasticine, nicknamed "Aard-mix," which is slightly more durable than ordinary Plasticine. Audiences who remember Aardman's first feature film, "Chicken Run," will notice a distinct difference in the puppets used in "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." Where the chickens had a smooth exterior, the models in this film were intentionally designed to retain the irregular appearance of clay, in keeping with the tradition of the Wallace & Gromit shorts--to "see the thumbprints," as Nick Park was often heard to say.

Peter Lord expounds, "You can see the fingerprints. It tells you that they are real; they are tangible. Luckily for us, our audience has always appreciated that personal touch."

"It's that slight imperfection that gives it that handcrafted look," David Sproxton adds. "I think when something is handcrafted, you register that it was made by somebody with love and care."

Every character had to be duplicated in different poses and in various costumes--some more than others, depending on how many scenes he or she was in. For example, there were 35 versions of Wallace, and well over a dozen versions of Lady Tottington and Victor. In addition, there had to be an assortment of interchangeable and replaceable parts for each puppet, ranging from eyes and ears to heads and hands. Dozens of mouth shapes were also molded for each character so the animators could synch the characters' mouths to the words coming out of them.

Once all the models were completed, they were turned over to the animators who would spend the next couple of years making the puppets "perform." Guided by the vision of the two directors, supervising animator Loyd Price led a team of 30 key and assistant animators on "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

It is almost impossible to fathom the countless hours of meticulous work and the level of concentration required to make a film in the Aardman style of animation. If you think of it in numeric terms alone: there are 24 frames per second of film time, so depending on the action in a sequence, it is possible to have 24 separate poses to shoot per character for every second in a scene, each pose involving the tiniest increment of movement for body, head, arms, legs, hands, fingers, eyes, ears, mouth, and so on. In addition, the Plasticine used is malleable, so there is constant resculpting involved.

Multiply all of that by every character in every scene, factoring in the movements of any props that are on camera, and you begin to understand the task that is literally "at hand." Perhaps the greatest testament to the patience and tenacity of the animation team is that on days when as many as 30 sets were in simultaneous operation, the optimum goal was to accomplish a mere 10 seconds of completed film.

"It is very, very slow motion," Sproxton attests. "The animators have to know every step of the action before they start. They may even act it out themselves first...whatever it takes to get it into their brains."

Lord adds, "It may be slow motion, but in a bizarre way, it is a live performance. An animator may have all day to do a single line that may be only three seconds long, but he only gets one go at it. With a long shot, it might take a week, and by the end of that week, you are desperate not to mess it up because you will lose a week's work. So it may be slow, but there's real adrenaline churning around in their bodies. There is some real fear attached to this kind of work," he laughs.

Consistency was another element that added to the pressure for the animators. Being the title characters, Wallace and/or Gromit are in virtually every scene, so it was impossible for one animator to generate all of their actions. Nevertheless, anyone who lent a hand to either of them had to follow in the same style. Key animator and second unit director Merlin Crossingham, who was the lead animator on both Wallace and Gromit, acknowledges, "Pretty much everyone had a go at animating Wallace and Gromit at some point during the filming, purely because they are the heroes of the story and are in almost every sequence. From that point of view, I couldn't possibly animate them all the way through alone, so we had to make sure that everybody was on the same page in terms of the movements and expressions."

Animating Gromit posed some of the greatest challenges for the animation team, as everything he is thinking and feeling has to be expressed without a single word. Having no mouth, he can't even smile or frown; it's all in his brow, eyes and body language. His performance is entirely--and literally--in the hands of the animators, and the results even impressed Gromit's award-winning co-star Helena Bonham Carter. "Gromit is a bit like a silent movie actor. He doesn't need to speak; you know exactly what he's thinking. In a way, he's the best screen actor ever," she smiles.

Although seen comparatively briefly, the Were-Rabbit presented key animator Ian Whitlock with a different set of challenges, beginning with the fact that he is covered in fur instead of Plasticine. If Whitlock had used his fingers to move the Were-Rabbit, he would have left impressions in the fur in various places, which, in stop-motion animation, could have looked like something was, in his words, "creeping around in there. We had to find way of handling it without actually touching it, which was very tricky."

To solve the problem, the modelmakers fixed small levers into the back of the Were-Rabbit puppets, which gave Whitlock access points from which to manipulate them, using small tools instead of his hands. The puppets were also much larger than those of the other characters, so the inner frameworks were much heavier and more intricate. The increased weight was another obstacle to overcome. Whitlock explains, "The thing with a bigger puppet is that it's a constant fight with the armature, because you have to keep it under heavy tension just to lift its leg or keep the arm where it is. There's also a lot of stress on it with the stretch of the outer fabric pulling on it, so you can't have the armature as light as you would have liked it. You have to put quite a lot of force onto it, which is awkward when you're trying to do something quite refined."