Aardman Senior Model-Maker Jay Smart Reveals Aardman's Puppet Materials and Plasticine Techniques for "Early Man" to Adam Savage of Tested

Adam Savage (right) holding "The Farmer" puppet from Shaun the Sheep and Jay Smart (right). Copyright Tested.

Along with the usual humdrum of press ranging from critic reviews and interviews with voice actors regarding British animation powerhouse Aardman Animation’s latest feature film – Early Man, a “prehistoric underdog sports story,” in the words of the film’s director Nick Park – has come by the way of the YouTube channel Tested something really exceptional and especially meant for stop motion enthusiasts – a deep-dive into the materials and plasticine techniques Aardman uses for their puppets presented by television personality and special effects aficionado Adam Savage and Jay Smart, a senior modeler at Aardman.

During Savage’s tour of the plasticine department, Smart gives Savage a demonstration of a system Aardman began developing for Chicken Run, their first plasticine-driven feature film, to methodize a system for mixing large batches of plasticine to produce a particular, standardized color of plasticine. The technique developed, it turns out, was to amalgamate several different colors of modeling clay in a repurposed gumball machine, which, Smart elaborates, can mix about one 10 kg box of Newplast modeling clay at a time. Although after Chicken Run the amount of clay needed in large quantities increased and the modeling department upgraded from a gumball machine to a large industrial machine which looks like it was once used to mince meat – a machine the modeling department at Aardman dubbed “the extruder.” It should be noted, however that the gumball machine is still put to good use whenever smaller batches of clay of particular color are needed to sculpt the tongues and eyelids for the plasticine puppets.

Director Nick Park (right) displaying the characters for Early Man. Copyright Aardman Animations.

“How much platicine might you process for an entire feature film?” Savage asks Smart.

“Some of the lead characters generally have about 12 boxes. I think I worked out on this [the gumball machine mixer] 550 kilograms which is half a ton, I think, in total…I think in total about a ton of modelling clay, and we use about half a ton for the characters,” Smart responds.

In the video, Smart also gives fascinating rundown of the techniques Aardman’s modeling department employs to make their modeling clay firmer or softer depending on the animators’ preferences and he also goes into detail about the other, non-plasticine materials that Aardman utilizes to make their characters. He also goes into depth about how he and the rest of the modeling department tackle the important task of creating a new batch of clay with the same consistency of color across Early Man’s 18 month production schedule.

You can watch Tested’s video – “The Clay in Stop-Motion Animation at Aardman Studios” – by going here.

You can stay tuned for the upcoming interviews and articles by subscribing to Stop Motion Geek via the “subscribe” button at the top right corner of our homepage, or by following us on Facebook @StopMotionGeek, or by visiting https://www.facebook.com/StopMotionGeek/. You can also stay up-to-date with the blog by following us on Instagram or @stop.motion.geek.blog.

Early Man has already been released in theaters in the UK and will hit the theaters in the US on February 16th.

Early Man poster. Copyright Aardman Animations.

Comments

Aardman Co-Founder David Sproxton's Tips for Success in the Animation Industry, Part 1 (of 3): 3 Pre-Production Tips

Aardman founders David Sproxton (left) and Peter Lord (right) standing in front of Wallace & Gromit set for Variety (Photo by Charlie Gray) “It all started at a kitchen table,” says co-founder of Aardman Animations, David Sproxton, about the beginning of his career in animation, “Pete [Peter Lord] and I met as schoolkids….Pete and I got to be great mates and we started playing and thinking up stories. I was always interested in photography and kind of, I guess, the process thing about films….One day we got out the Bolex, stuck it up on a stand and actually just cut images out of color supplements. We’d obviously watched programs like Vision On , which obviously used a plethora of styles. Cut out is the easiest thing to do. We didn’t really understand cel animation or actually how you drew stuff. We just moved stuff around and did stuff with chalk drawings.” Earlier this year, Aardman, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of their studio, released a ...

Read full article »

Vincent & Puppet Scales

Tim Burton's Vincent is a masterpiece; the short was animated by the brilliant Stephen Chiodo . I do love that the short was shot in black and white film, ask any true film-lover and

Read full article »

Interview with Samuel Lewis - Animator, Character Designer, and Sculptor on Stop Motion Short Film, "Lost & Found"

Knotjira, a clumsy dinosaur made of wool, as seen in Lost & Found . Photo courtesy of Andrew Goldsmith. “If I had to pick a starting point for my career as a stop motion animator I would have to say it was my obsession as a six year old with a book called ‘Playing with Plasticine’ by Barbara Reid,” Samuel Lewis – a London-based stop motion and 2D animator and director, whose most recent labor of love can be seen in his contribution to the Australian stop motion short film, Lost & Found – tells Stop Motion Geek. Upon reflection, Lewis explains that his love for the medium of stop motion began very early in life, and has merely managed to burn ever brighter in his fervor to master the craft. “I would spend countless hours fixated on sculpting tiny snails, fruit bowls and dinosaurs to the point where I would stay inside on family holidays sculpting a surfer in a beach scene rather than going to the actual beach that was only a short walk away,” Lewis recalls wistfully. “...

Read full article »

Interview with Kangmin Kim, Director of Stop Motion Short Film, "Deer Flower"

Kangmin Kim animating the dream sequence from Deer Flower . Photo courtesy of Kangmin Kim. The experience of childhood is something like existing within a waking dream. In childhood, as in particularly vibrant dreams, the distinct and unique experience presents itself to simply exist in each moment without explanation or reflection – to become fully and wholly enveloped in each and every moment, the option of operating outside of which is somehow nonexistent. In that special time in one’s life, moments simply are . And yet, childhood, like dreams, is a fragile and temporary reality. It’s not until one “wakes” from childhood, by entering adulthood, that one can reflect upon and appreciate the past and, in retrospect, realize just how odd and unusual certain experiences might have actually been. Korean filmmaker and animator Kangmin Kim captures this feeling beautifully in his outstanding short film Deer Flower . Deer Flower tells the semi-autobiographical of auteur Kangmin...

Read full article »

Interview with Nadine Buss, Cinematographer on Oscar® Nominated Stop Motion Short Film "Negative Space"

One of the surreal flashback scenes from Negative Space . Source: Vimeo. “These are my guidelines for lighting,” Nadine Buss, the cinematographer of the Oscar®-nominated short film Negative Space , tells Stop Motion Geek, “feel, re-explore sensations,” she says, only to then lightheartedly add, “and remember the lights you saw.” Feel . If Buss’s creative fingerprint on Negative Space could be described in just one word, it would be just that. A beautiful and heart wrenching story, Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter’s Negative Space – a stop motion short film based on a poem of the same title by Ron Koertge – is, in many ways, one story presented as two: One half of the narrative is of a young man – Sam – as he packs a suitcase for travel before then driving to the funeral home where his late father’s viewing is being held. It’s a narrative colored by Buss in the hard, icy light of winter, which contrasts sharply with the sunny, warm light in which the second story is pa...

Read full article »

Behind the Scenes of "Robocop 2" at Tippett Studios and how "Jurassic Park" Changed Special Effects Forever

A depressingly large percentage of Hollywood movies boast a gratuitous amount of potential and possibility and yet, for one reason or another, often fall far, far too short to live up to the films they seem to have the potential of being. Although it’s a shame that many of these films have a stupendous level of production value and talent but are often often overlooked, as production value and talent are seen as secondary and supplementary to a quality story – the special effects work done on such second-rate films sadly go unrecognized the most often. An immutable fact stands strong – mediocre films, no matter the level of talent and amount of time poured into producing their special effects, are seen and remembered as nothing but wasted potential…or worse. Yet few box office bombs have had special practical effects work as groundbreaking, especially in the stop motion realm, and yet unfortunately remains unrecognized in every respect than the 1990 film Robocop 2 , both an irrefutabl...

Read full article »

Interview with Heather Colbert, Filmmaker Behind The Music Video for Tom Rosenthal’s “How Have You Been?”

Hypnos looking on at the moon. Photo courtesy of Heather Colbert. “After talking with Tom, I just let the track play, while I drew or noted down ideas that came into my head,” Heather Colbert—a Bristol-based animator and filmmaker—tells Stop Motion Geek about the origins of her newest project: creating, almost single-handedly, the music video for English singer-songwriter Tom Rosenthal’s “How Have You Been?”—a haunting and beautiful acapella piece off his latest album, Z-Sides . “He told me the album was about sleep and so the images that came to me were of nocturnal and natural things. I also saw a connection in the beautiful lyrics to a character living with mental health issues, especially in the line ‘I woke up, but it didn’t go away’. So I began to see a creature trying their best to get on with their task, but being hindered by the fear of the world that they inhabit.” Hypnos (left) and Shadow (right) in the film. Photo courtesy of Heather Colbert. The third musi...

Read full article »

Phil Tippett's "Mad God: Part 3" Fully Funded on Kickstarter!

The stop motion legend, Phil Tippet, has launched – and has now successfully funded – the third chapter in his beautiful and weird dystopian series of stop motion short films entitled Mad God , via crowdfunding the project through Kickstarter. WE DID IT! --- MAD GOD 3 kickstarter sucessfully funded ---- GREAT THANKS TO ALL ! --- — Phil Tippett (@PhilTippett) June 17, 2017 The project’s initial goal of raising $40,000 has been met and surpassed by financial backers with a final tally of $45,845 from the Kickstarter campaign , which ended yesterday. As Mr. Tippett explains in his Kickstarter video, the money will go towards feeding the crew working on the project out of Tippett studio in Berkeley, as well as to buy materials and to help “keep the adventure going,” as he explains in his Kickstarter video. Phil is a master of the craft of stop motion, which he's helped pioneer since the earliest work of his career. Starting in 1975 with his employment at Industrial Light ...

Read full article »

Boinx's iStopMotion for iPad Review

Before I jump into the review i'm going to say that Boinx is not paying me to do this review and the following is my personal opinion only . With that being said let's get to it shall we? Before we get into it I would like to show you some clay test animation that I made with iStopMotion... Untitled from SMG on Vimeo . The first thing that shows up when you open iStopMotion is a quick Stop Motion video which runs you through the key features of the app for instance: the capture button, playback, and adjusting your camera settings. Let me say that this video is of the poorest quality of animation, it's just terrible. But, if you stop to think about it, there is a good explanation for this; my guess is that Boink doesn't want beginners to look at animation that is the equivalent of Coraline and comparing their own work to it. This app itself is very straightforward. Directly below the welcome video is a plus button which if you tap creates a new proje...

Read full article »

King Kong [1933]

Yes, it's back to the olden days, back when the idea of Stop Motion was the brainchild of Willis O' Brien. King Kong , is the most influential movie in history as far as I'm concerned. Willis O' Brien, was born on March 2, 1886 in Oakland, California. He did run away at the age of 13 but, as most do after running away, returned at the age of 17. Now into the Stop Motion aspect of it all. Finding himself with some time to kill one afternoon,

Read full article »

Stop Motion Geek

Search This Blog