No matter how funny the voices are, they are no good unless they are transformed into visual characters. If not then they just gather dust. This is where sketching a visual interpretation of an animal comes into play. Without sketches the people who model the characters wouldn’t have anything to work from. Sylvia Bennion is one of their in house artists that put together ideas and starts bringing the creatures to life.
The team of 7 meddlers is 7 strong with Kate Anderson at its head. When she first joined aardman she found it hard not to make the characters too perfect. After all they are meant to be realistic and being too precise could mean that this is lost. Over time her and her team have got used to what creature comforts should look like.
Like with every team effort everyone has to work out how their own style fits in with the joint one. Each creature takes between one and three weeks to make and they all start off the same – as a nondescript lump with protruding wires for the arms and legs. Then plasticine comes into play with each model custom made for the animator.
The models aren’t complete when they leave the model makers hands. There is one crucial stage the models must go through before they can be animated – there mouths have to be made, all of them. The modellers just make a neutral mouth based on an ‘A’ shape and then a mould is made so that lots of different mouths can be made from that mould.
posted by Martin Crosbie @ 10:53 AM
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