Plasticine Quality
He says he didn’t see any point just recreating a plasticine quality for the characters. “Flushed Away is a hybrid. It has a textured feel to mimic stop-frame but we used motion blur, for example, much more than normal.”

Of the eight animators who transferred from Aardman to DreamWorks to retrain in Maya, only one had any prior CG experience. “Never having made a CG film before, it took a lot of learning. The very best stop-frame animator may not be the best CG animator and vice versa, but they’re still very, very good. In my opinion it’s all about performance, having a sense of timing and humor.”

The U.S. studio he says was, “hugely respectful and very good about us casting the film in the Aardman image.”

However, Lord ensured he had key personnel at the heart of production. Among them were co-directors Fell and Dave Bowers, an Englishman “engrained in the Aardman culture” who, while never directly employed by Aardman had worked on Chicken Run, the aborted feature Tortoise and the Hare and as a senior storyboard artist on Were-Rabbit. Supervising animator Jeff Newitt was a key figure for Lord — tasked with “carrying the Aardman gene into DreamWorks.” Lord also assigned DP Frank Passingham to the project “because I was amazed to discover that CG films don’t commonly have a dedicated cinematographer,” he says.

Lord says he didn’t see any point just recreating a plasticine quality for the characters. “Flushed Away is a hybrid. It has a textured feel to mimic stop-frame but we used motion blur, for example, much more than normal.”

A series of video links kept Aardman HQ up to speed on dailies. “Pitching the storyboard is very much part of what we do here but we tend to make it an intimate affair between director and storyboard artist. The U.S. artist would come on the video conference and — either recorded or live — would literally act out and perform the storyboard with sound effects, movements and funny voices. Extraordinary.”

There’s a sense that there were battles between the two production teams to retain the original script. “There were some differences, yes,” he chuckles. “As it went on it became clear to me just how wide a gap there is between English and American sensibilities. There are huge similarities of course, but our take on life is different.”

Was Lord worried about losing control of the project? “I was worried about it being done away from here,” he admits. “And in all honestly you can’t possibly have the same control as one would when a project is under your nose. But that’s okay because we had people like Sam, who I have total confidence in. Both CG and stop-frame are slow. If anything Aardman is more efficient as a company simply because we’re smaller.”

Lord worried about losing control of the project but he is satisfied with the final version. He finds the movie fantastically entertaining, with big comedic ideas and an eccentric, British tone.

He declares himself satisfied with the final version. “It’s fantastically entertaining, the design is subtle and there are some big comedic ideas which are what I look for as much as anything else in a project. It’s certainly got an eccentric and British vein to it. It’s not as quirky as Wallace & Gromit, but then it’s not made by Nick Park, but by directors with a different vision. Sam’s influences are filmic: he’s taken London’s East End and gangster influence from films like Snatch, Layer Cake and Sexy Beast and, not directly referenced them, but informed his direction with them.”

Lord says he’s braced for reactions to the film that will claim his company has sold out to Hollywood. Previous articles, he says, have spun the “Aardman goes CG” story to claim that it is giving up on the medium that has made it a U.K. household name.

“The biggest worry I have is that in six months time I’ll still be defending the decision to go CG and to continually repeat that we’re not abandoning stop frame.” A third Wallace & Gromit feature is scheduled he says (there’s no script yet) and he expects CG and stop-frame features to alternate from Aardman in the future — although whether this is in tandem with DreamWorks he’s not saying.

“I am personally more than happy to switch to and fro between the two mediums. Since 2001, our CG capability has expanded continually here and if that same decision to produce a CG feature happened today I’d probably shoot in Bristol.”

Adrian Pennington is a U.K.-based freelance writer and editor of animation magazine Imagine.