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Nick Park Goes Neanderthal in Aardman’s ‘Early Man’

Four-time Oscar-winner’s first solo-directed feature pits caveman against caveman in a stone-age football comedy adventure.

Aardman Animations’ ‘Early Man’ directed by Nick Park. All images © 2017 StudioCanal S.A. and The British Film Institute.

Aardman Animations’ newest animated feature, Early Man, which hits U.S. theatres February 16th, marks the British studio’s largest production to date. The 89-minute prehistoric comedy adventure, about a single courageous caveman who bravely unites his tribe against a mighty enemy, is helmed by four-time Oscar-winning animation director Nick Park, making his solo feature film directorial debut. Written by Park, Mark Burton and James Higginson, Early Man has been in development at Aardman for many years, starting with the director’s 2010 doodles and initial story ideas. Serious writing and storyboarding took around four years, with animation production -- started in May 2016 -- completed during the last few weeks of 2017.

“I’ve always loved the idea of cavemen really. That’s where it started,” says Park, describing the genesis of the project. “From age 11, I’ve been a big fan of the Ray Harryhausen film One Million Years B.C. [directed by Don Chaffey and starring Raquel Welch as Loana]. In fact, that’s probably one of the movies that made me want to pick up a camera and make films. I loved dinosaurs, collected them and knew all their names. I probably didn’t notice Raquel Welsh, but I so loved the film and the idea of making a movie about dinosaurs. So, it’s probably always been in my DNA really.”

Director Nick Park (second from left) briefing crew on set.

Peter Lord, Aardman’s co-founder and one of the film’s producers, notes, “Nick quite likes rather foolish characters. Wallace [the absent-minded hero of Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit films] is a foolish bloke indeed. He’s got some great skills, he’s a very good inventor, but emotionally and intellectually, he’s pretty dim. Nick was charmed by the idea of a whole world of these kind of Neanderthal nitwits. So, he started from the idea of these rather combative Stone Age nitwits, as well as a great enthusiasm for One Million Years B.C., where cavemen fight it out in the most implausible and totally anachronistic fashion with dinosaurs and stuff.”

That was soon paired with the idea of the invention of football, known in the U.S. as soccer, and the epic nature of the competitive sport -- played in grand stadiums -- being used to settle disputes. It was eventually pitched by Park as Gladiator meets Dodgeball. Notes Aardman co-founder and Early Man producer Dave Sproxton, “That was the initial germ of an idea, that this ‘game from heaven,’ as they call it, had literally come from the skies.”

Early Man is Park’s first effort as sole director on a feature film, though he’s directed a number of classic animated shorts, including three Oscar wins -- A Close Shave (1995), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and Creature Comforts (1989) -- as well as co-directed the animated features Chicken Run (2000), and Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). Normally, Park would oversee all the animators working on the various sets and scenes. But for Early Man, production at Aardman’s Aztec West studios was significantly reorganized, which gave Park the freedom to focus on other areas of the production, such as directing the voice actors as well as continually refining the story, along with Burton and Higginson.

“I really felt it was time to hold the reins myself to see what it’s like being in control of the whole thing,” Park explains. “But you have to have a structure if you direct it that way because you’re at the top of this pyramid. And everyone wants answers to every question. On one hand, you’ve got to answer the questions about the mega narrative…[I’m] working with the writers in some cases and the next minute, and someone wants to know about what colour socks this guy’s wearing, or what fabric you want on this…how green do you want the grass? We’ve done ten different tests on different greens of grass!”

Stop-motion, often referred to as stop-frame, is an exacting animation technique -- despite the increasingly common integration with CG extensions, backgrounds, supporting characters and visual effects, stop-motion essentially remains hands-on, hand-made filmmaking. Park relied upon two animation directors, Will Beecher and Merlin Crossingham, to supervise a team of 33 animators, working with 273 puppets, 3,000 interchangeable mouths, and 40 simultaneous camera units, all housed within a 51,000-square foot studio. Around 150 people in total were involved in the production.

For Park, determining the balance between stop-motion and CG was always an issue. He describes, “[In filmmaking] you can always do things faster and cheaper and that don’t look as good. That’s always the easy way you could choose. But I know me and many on the team are perfectionists. You want to make the characters be as good as possible. You want everything to be just as good as possible. I don’t know if it would have been any easier to make it all in CG. But we did use a mixture.”

As to that visual mix, Park notes, “It was essentially a stop-frame movie. All the principal animation and characters were stop-frame. The big challenge was this whole new expansive prehistoric world. You can’t really do lava and volcanoes with stop-frame and clay. There’s also backgrounds to add, as well as composite shots where the skies are put in afterwards.”

He continues, “We had 35 or 40 sets -- some of those are massive landscapes, some very small table-top caves. Because of the scale of the puppets, which are about ten inches high, that means a football pitch [field] has got to be 30 feet long. You can’t even reach the puppets at the back! So, we worked with digital people too. Some of the players in the background, out of focus, were digital, as was the crowd, those tens of thousands of people. Closeups of the crowd we did stop-frame. But, we would take those stop-frame puppets, scan them into the computer and replicate them around the stadium in digital form. So, we used a mixture all the time.”

“We used CG extensions for a lot of the arena and a lot of the skies were put in,” adds Sproxton. “Those things are a big logistical exercise. But, we’ve done it before. We know how to manage the thing. The big issue is, can we get the creative in place by the time that we need to shoot it all? That’s always the scramble on these things. And finessing the story, finessing the drama, knowing exactly what we’re going to do.”

Talk to enough animation directors and they always get around to describing how nailing the story is the single biggest challenge on a film. Park is no different. “I’ve spent…what was it, three years, developing the story with Mark. And, I was sketching all the time. What does the bronze town look like? What do the forts look like? With every character I’d sketch up and work on the basic shape. The thing that in a way dogs the whole process is you think you know who the characters are at the beginning, but then you decide by act three that doesn’t work, and you’ve already started recording the actors in act one.”

Park goes on to say, “In the scriptwriting, we try to come up with an overall story plan. We’ve got it, but we haven’t got a lot of the detail in. That’s all yet to come. The story process is a massive thing that goes on for years -- pitching, trying and pitching again. Getting a clearer picture in mind. Who the main characters are and what their arc is. Working those things out. It just seems to take forever. Maybe we’re more precise about it because we can’t shoot tons of stuff and decide what to use afterwards. Or try it different ways. And the actors of course, they need to know who they are and what their arc is. I don’t know how they do it in live action. They must do it quicker and know what they’re doing. Sorry I shouldn’t say that. We did know what we were doing.”

Dan Sarto's picture

Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.