"Early Man" Assistant Director Ben Barrowman Explains Incredibly Detailed Process of Scheduling an Aardman Production to Adam Savage of Tested

Adam Savage (left) and Ben Barrowman (right) standing in front of one of Aardman's schedule boards. Copyright Tested.

In Stop Motion Geek’s third week of featuring the YouTube channel Tested’s excellent behind-the-scenes look at Early Man – the most recent stop motion feature film from Aardman Animations – special effects devotee Adam Savage interviews Early Man first assistant director Ben Barrowman, the mastermind behind Aardman’s “schedule boards” and the coordinator of the entire production schedule for the film.

“Schedule boards” is the term that the folks at Aardman Animations use to refer to the rows upon rows of massive cork boards which are used to plot out the schedule across an entire feature-length production and that are positioned on mobile wall-mounts, one next to another, together spanning an entire wall of one of the studio’s buildings.

Adam Savage pointing to a schedule board. Copyright tested.

The boards are seemingly inauspicious – light gray in color and well-worn from the hundreds of thumb tacks by which they have been impaled since their introduction on Aardman’s second feature-length production, 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Yet, beyond that point, the boards become more and more complex, the key to the “schedule” element of the boards beginning with the thin twine that stretches up-and-down and left-to-right that splice each board up into dozens of uniform rectangles. Within each of these regulated areas lie a dizzying and almost indecipherable maze of multi-colored Post-It Notes – red and yellow, orange and green – with carefully penned inscriptions, taut rubber bands that stray from one rectangle to another, and tiny storyboards – no more than an inch or two wide – pinned to various rectangles in small collections which together comprise one of the over 1,400 individual shots in Early Man.

“Each board represents two weeks over our shoot schedule,” explains Barrowman, pointing to the schedule boards. (As a brief side-note, when Savage visited Aardman he did so in June of last year. At that point in the schedule, Early Man was at week 60 in their schedule and had 18 weeks yet to go, comprising a total of 78 weeks in total from the start of production to the final wrap.) “We have our units down the sides [of the schedule boards], so across our four studios we have 37 shooting units,” Barrowman proceeds. “Each one of those has a set in it. Not every one will have an animator on it. We've got 29 animators on our shoot at the moment...Every one has an animator attached, every one has lighting attached, dressers attached, riggers attached, have attached crew. It’s my job to schedule all of those and make sure the shoot runs to that schedule.”

Several Early Man schedule boards. Copyright Tested.

That's where the schedule boards come into play. Beginning with these mostly empty cork boards, Barrowman works with a variety of different materials such as rubber bands and Post-It Notes to signify particular jobs and to coordinated their schedule on on the schedule boards. Animators, for instance, are symbolized on the schedule boards by rubber bands.

“I’d say probably the next month is fairly tightly plotted and then just as we approach it because things, despite our best efforts, don’t always go according to plan,” says Barrowman. “We try to keep the next month short of tightly plotted and then after that it gets a bit looser. But we have to keep an eye on the back end of the schedule obviously to see what’s going over and what units we need to prioritize and each shot.”

Several storyboards from the third act of Early Man that, in the video from Tested, had yet to be placed into the schedule. Copyright Tested.

In an increasingly digitized world, Aardman’s cork board method is something of an anomaly, and yet in that uniqueness lies its beauty.

“It's [the schedule boards] a really good focal point for the crew so I do a morning meeting at nine o'clock and we talk through what we need to do for the day to achieve the schedule,” Barrowman explains. “There can only be one version of it and you can't have different versions knocking around. It can never break so it's just a really good way for everyone to see what is required from them.”

Barrowman has been an Aardman veteran for many years now, having also worked as an assistant director on The Shaun the Sheep Movie, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and 20th Century Fox’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Storyboards from Early Man on schedule board. Copyright Tested and Aardman Animations.

You can watch Tested’s full interview with Ben Barrowman – “Organizing a Stop-Motion Film Production at Aardman Animations” – in which he goes into an extraordinary amount of detail for anyone interested in animation or filmmaking about the process of plotting out a production schedule by going here. I also recommend, if you haven’t already, subscribing to the Tested YouTube channel.

This is the third consecutive Stop Motion Geek article featuring Adam Savage’s tour of Aardman Animations. You can read the first article by going here, and the second article by going here.

You can learn more about Early Man by visiting the Early Man website and the Early Man YouTube channel.

If you're interested in learning more about Barrowman and his career at Aardman, I also recommend reading this interview with him on Aardman’s website, where he’s featured as a star employee. He makes a point in the interview upon being asked the question of what advice he’d give to people interested in becoming a professional in the stop motion industry that I thought was quite interesting and have thus included it below, as the final ending note for this article:

“Formal qualifications don’t really count for a lot. Obviously having a degree shows a certain level of intelligence and dedication but I don’t believe not having one would be any kind of barrier. Stop motion production in particular is such a niche area, your best approach is to get some work experience as soon as you can, find out if you like it then work hard and be nice to people.”

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Early Man poster. Copyright Aardman Animations.