Aardman



Aardman

Born on December 6, 1958, in Lancashire, England, Nick Park made his first stop-motion film at age 13. After joining Aardman Animations Ltd. in 1985, he created the famed Wallace and Gromit Claymation shorts about a shortsighted inventor and his dog.

Over the last twenty years Nick Park and Aardman Animations have become synonymous with 3-D stop-motion animation in the UK, successfully straddling advertising, music videos, TV series, Internet animations, Academy Award winning shorts and big budget feature films.

Nicholas Wulstan Park was born in Preston, Lancashire on 6 December 1958 and started making amateur films in his teens, going on to gain a degree in Communications Arts at Sheffield City Polytechnic before being accepted at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). While studying at the School, Park asked Peter Lord and Dave Sproxton of Aardman to speak there and after graduating was invited to join the studio.

Aardman was set-up in Bristol by Sproxton and Lord in 1972, while they were both students. Its name came from the eponymous Peter Lord creation, the nerdish superhero of a 2-D cel animation that was the first of their work to be bought by the BBC for its children's programme Vision On. Over the next few years they continued to work part-time for the series, only going full-time in 1976 when they were asked to come up with a regular character for Tony Hart's follow-up series, Take Hart. The result was 'Morph', a happy-go-lucky Plasticine creation that proved to be hugely popular, effectively putting Aardman Animations on the map. In 1981 this led to the character starring in The Adventures of Morph, a series of twenty-six five minute adventures which when shown weekdays at 5.35 in the afternoon proved to be an unprecedented scheduling success for the BBC.


Having already made a couple of unsuccessful attempts at animation aimed at an older audience in the 1970s, Aardman found a new outlet with the arrival of Channel Four in 1982. This led to Conversation Pieces (1983) and Lip Sync (1989), series which featured animated characters mouthing words recorded during interviews with members of the public. The standout edition turned out to be Nick Park's Creature Comforts, with its memorable range of animals musing about their captivity in a zoo, most notably a Brazilian student's voice used for a jaguar complaining about his accommodation. The short went on to win many awards, including Aardman's first Oscar, and inspired the celebrated advertising campaign for Heat Electric (often misremembered as being for British Gas). Aardman has subsequently worked on a number of advertisements, the most distinctive of which are probably the Lurpak spots featuring a character made of butter named Douglas.

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