There’s something of that glorious, plucky, against-all-odds
tradition about Peter Lord. And there was certainly something of the
heroic British amateur about his very first brush with the world of
animation.
Not for him was the route into this competitive world made via the long,
tortuous and scholarly study of, say, airbrushed acetate at Walt Disney
or anthropomorphic articulation at Hanna Barbera. For Lord, the
beginning was rather more straightforward.
He and his mate, Dave Sproxton, were 12-year-old, like-minded grammar
school pals in Woking. Their only unusual advantage was that Dave’s dad
was a professional photographer who also owned a cine camera. But in the
event it was Dave’s dad’s kitchen table that was just as important,
because that served as the none-too-elaborate mise-en-scene for the
pair’s very first animated feature.
It was the product of a bored, rainy, day - a chalk man getting up to
all sorts of mischief - and each frame was painstakingly drawn and shot,
then rubbed out and the whole process repeated. As cutting-edge
animation technology goes, this was pretty much prehistoric. But it was
a start.
A start that led the pair to found Aardman Animations, which is now the
most successful set-up of its kind in Europe, a company that has been
six times nominated for Hollywood Oscars and which has also been
responsible for some of the finest ads to appear on British
television.
For all the creative garlands that have attended Aardman over the years
for its own film and TV work - from Morph, the TV character that graced
Tony Hart’s TV series, to the national treasure that is Wallace and
Gromit - advertising has been critical to the company’s development. And
not just for the traditional reason that its fat fees have enabled Lord
to subsidise his short films and poorer paying ventures.
’One of the great things about our involvement with advertising over the
years has been the creative challenge,’ Aardman’s joint founder, Peter
Lord, says. ’Ad agencies have tended to ask us to solve problems that I
would not have dreamed of tackling if simply left to my own devices.
I remember, for instance, about ten years ago, popping in to see an ad
agency in Soho and them saying simply ’we need marmalade’.
So we had to try to animate marmalade, which sounds pretty hard and is
even more difficult than it sounds. The ad itself never worked out for
one reason or another, but it was still a great challenge.
’And it was the same with the Lurpak butter man. GGT had the idea and
the script and everything, and they were convinced that the character
should melt. Our toughest job was to find out how that happened. So I
ended up watching portion after portion of butter melting - it’s a
really complicated process and all this stuff is going on with the
consistency of the butter, which seems to melt at different times. Then
we had to try to recreate that, which was fun and a terrific creative
challenge.’
In ads, as elsewhere, animation has moved on. With the widespread use of
digital technologies that allow the almost limitless manipulation of
images, people are less impressed by straightforward craft techniques,
while the traditional storytelling virtues of characterisation, plot and
humour have become more and more important.
Lord is a keen supporter of this change. ’I think it’s fair to say that
animators have moved on from being the conjurer doing a trick that was
designed simply to fool the audience. It has become a much more mature
industry. But, for all the splendour of computer animation, what it has
really done is focus attention back on performance in a way that the
best animation has always done.’
’If I see an ad - to pick one I like that is nothing to do with us -
like Peperami, I don’t think there is anything particularly innovative
about the animation itself, they haven’t broken any new ground, but I
think it’s a great ad because there is a fantastic performance, and it’s
really well directed. But then I think that’s what was so special about
the ’creature comforts’ ads that Nick Park did here. The best animation
has never been just a technical challenge, it’s been about getting the
voices right, the timing, the intonation - in short, it’s about creating
effective characters. And that’s the case much more so now than
ever.’
The technical challenge still interests Lord, though. Together with the
author, Brian Sibley, he has just published Cracking Animation, which
tells the story of the Aardman studio and provides a guide to making
your own 3D animated film.
Lord’s favourite ad was for Disco crisps: ’The creative team at Lowe
Howard-Spink came up with the whole idea - they wanted a pair of legs
tangoing around a ballroom - and produced a very well- thought-out
graphic style, mocked up with complicated storyboards. But they needed
me to make it work in 3D. So I went off and learned how to tango and
eventually worked out the models and how they could move. It wasn’t even
my idea, but it was a fantastic creative challenge and I was really
pleased with the results.
And that’s largely why animation has been such a great experience.’
