On 29 January, the 15 Limkokwing students in the Global Campus programme in London attended a one-day workshop on building animation characters. The workshop was run by Aardman Animations, led by the company’s model making expert, Jim Parkyn.
Aardman Animations is the Oscar winning British animation studio specialising in ‘claymation’— an animation technique which uses different coloured plasticines to create characters, then animating them with stop-motion filming.
Based in Bristol, Aardman Animations was founded in 1972 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. The company’s name is derived from one of the studio’s earliest characters, a cell-animated superhero created for the children’s programme Vision On in 1972. The name ‘Aard man’, is Dutch for nature man, or Earthman, but it can also mean goblin.
Aardman is very active in supporting new and upcoming animators. The Aardman Award is presented each year at the UK’s Animex Festival, and the recipient receives world-class story consultations with the studio for their next project.
Some of Aardman’s memorable films include the Wallace & Gromit series, Shaun the Sheep, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, Flushed Away, Arthur Christmas, and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists.
Jim Parkyn began the workshop by examining the new Shaun the Sheep movie (released on 6 February 2015) which he had worked extensively on. He also talked about the specific animation processes involved in making Aardman films, as well as more general information about the animation industry.
During the morning session, students were asked to create a plasticine model of Gromit the dog, under Parkyn’s attentive supervision. In the afternoon they were required to make a model of Morph (the title character of an early work of the company called The Adventures of Morph, a cheeky little character who lived in a box).
Using these models that they created, the students were taught how to create their first animation on Aardman’s Animate-It! Software.
Parkyn was impressed that the students could turn unmoulded strips of plasticine into three-dimensional characters and to direct a short film featuring these claymation figures, all in one day. He praised the students’ creativity and ability to grasp concepts in a short span of time and complimented their accuracy in creating the models.
At the end of this one-day course, the students were awarded the highly prestigious ‘Aardman Animation Trainee Model Maker Certificate of Achievement’, in recognition of their impressive efforts in creating and animating their own plasticine characters.
For more information on the Global Campus programme, visit here.