Help building the largest human-edited directory of the web Suggest URL - Open Directory Project - Become an editor

directopedia.org uses links and structure from dmoz Open Directory Project.
The contents has been generating using technology developed by scientec.

Aardman Animations is a British stop motion animation studio founded by Peter Lord and David Sproxton in 1972. Nick Park joined Aardman in 1986, bringing his creations Wallace and Gromit with him. The company is based in Bristol and is the centre of a sizeable animation and film special effects industry in the City. Because of the company's base characters with faint west country accents are also a feature.

Aardman's early work was in creating inserts for Vision On, a television series aimed at deaf children. Lord and Sproxton went on to create the character of Morph for the children's art programme Take Hart, who went on to have a series of his own.

In 1983, Aardman produced a series of short films for Channel 4 that featured audio recordings from real world situations such as a local radio DJ that were then matched to an absurd animated scenario. This same technique was the basis for Creature Comforts.

Aardman also made the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", in which Gabriel himself was used as a stop-motion model (a process called pixilation, which was also used in the Aardman series Angry Kid, featuring an actor wearing a mask).

Three Aardman films, all directed by Nick Park, have won Oscars.

Aardman produced their first feature-length film, Chicken Run, directed by Park and Lord, in 2000.

Most or all of the props and scenery used in Aardman productions since 1972 were destroyed in a warehouse fire on 10 October 2005. The models and sets used for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit were undamaged, as they were on display at a different location. The same case applies to the master copies of finished prints of the company's work. The original models of Wallace and Gromit were spared however, as they were with Nick Park on his publicity tour at the time. The rocket from a Grand Day Out was also spared as it was on display at the company's studio at the time.

Contents 1 Aardman productions 1.1 Music videos 1.2 Commercials 1.3 TV series 1.4 Short films 1.5 Feature films 1.6 Miscellaneous 2 See also 3 External links

Aardman productions

Music videos

• Barefootin' for Robert Parker
• My Baby Just Cares for Me for Nina Simone
• Sledgehammer for Peter Gabriel
• Viva Forever for The Spice Girls

NB: Contrary to popular belief, the promo videos for Happy Hour by The Housemartins and Reet Petite by Jackie Wilson are not by Aardman. Though they share a similar visual style, these are by another animation house, Giblets.

Commercials

• Serta mattress commercials featuring the out-of-work counting sheep.
• Wine Gums based around a recording of the song "Hoots Mon!".
• PG Tips featuring talking birds in a sitcom situation.
• Commercials for the Electricity Association based on "Creature Comforts". In 2000, these were collectively named the 4th best television commercial of all time in a poll conducted by The Sunday Times and Channel 4.
• Dairylea cows.
• Lurpak Butter commercials, featuring a little butter man named Douglas and the voice of Penelope Keith (who is continually annoyed by his attempts to play The Flight of the Bumble Bee on his trombone).
• A long running series of ads for Cadbury's Crunchie bars, in which the chocolate covering of the confection sprang to life as various characters, often performing to The Pointer Sisters' hit "I'm So Excited".
• The Chevron Cars commercials for Chevron gasoline in the U.S.; likely based on Nick Park's classic Creature Comforts series.
• Jacobs crackers, featuring Wallace and Gromit.
• An educational and awareness ad for the UK's Countryside Code based on "Creature Comforts".

TV series

• Creature Comforts (2003)
• The Adventures of Morph
• Rex the Runt
• Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions
• Angry Kid
• Shaun the Sheep (forthcoming 2007)

Short films

• Creature Comforts - 1990 Oscar, animated short
• Ident
• Late Edition
• Adam - 1992 Oscar nomination
• Wat's Pig - 1996 Oscar nomination
• Not Without My Handbag
• The Presentators
• A Grand Day Out - Wallace and Gromit
• The Wrong Trousers - Wallace and Gromit
• A Close Shave - Wallace and Gromit
• Angry Kid

Feature films

• Chicken Run
• Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Miscellaneous

• Special Christmas-themed channel idents for BBC2 in 1995 and BBC1 in 2001 (unusually for Aardman, this latter set was computer-animated rather than using stop-motion animation).
• Channel idents for BBC Three featuring little blob people, voiced in the style of Creature Comforts.

See also

• Trumpton 3 BBC stop motion series for kids- credited by Nick Park as being inspirational.

External links

• Official site
• Aardman Animations at the Internet Movie Database
• Aardman Animations at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• CNN.com - Fire destroys 'Wallace and Gromit' warehouse
• BBC News - Animation archive up in smoke
• The Guardian - How big a deal is the Aardman blaze?
• Download page for the Countryside Code video

This article is based on the article "Aardman Animations" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.