Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Nick Park molds Wallace and Gromit for the big screen

By John Hayes / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

Twenty-four. Remember that number. It's how many frames of film pass through a movie projector per second.

For a stop-action animator, 24 is the number of barely noticeable changes that need to be made to a lump of clay to make it seem to move during one second of film.

Here's another number to keep in mind: 122,400. That's about how many minuscule alterations were made to various lumps of clay to bring to life the 85-minute animated action adventure "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit."

And while we're doing the numbers, here are some more to wrap your head around: It took a team of 30 animators just under two years to make the movie. Clay was squeezed and sculpted into about three seconds of usable film per day.

Sounds tedious.

"Yes, it certainly can be," says 46-year-old British producer-director-co-writer Nick Park. "Stop-motion animators are a different lot. You can easily get so involved in creating your little world, you're almost living in a different time frame. What I like about it is the immediacy. You're working in front of a camera and there's not a long thought process (as you're) moving the character from one emotional beat to the next. It's kind of a spontaneous medium. At the end of the day you can go home haggard and totally exhausted."

Wallace and Gromit, however, are anything but tedious. The quirky inventor and his helpful mutt first made the rounds in animation festivals in the mid-1980s, along with Park's other five-minute animated short "Creature Comforts."

Remember the cool machinations of Peter Gabriel's music video, "Sledgehammer"? That was all Park. In 1989, he directed Wallace and Gromit in their first half-hour film short, and two more followed in 1993 and 1995. In 2000, Park made a big splash in the States with his first long-form animated feature, "Chicken Run," and three years later the animals of "Creature Comforts" returned for 13 episodes of a British TV series.

Wallace and Gromit accidentally caught the attention of mainstream America in 1995 when Park left his clay figures in a New York cab during a promotional tour. The original motorbike and sidecar containing the 9-inch Wallace and 4-inch Gromit figures were valued at $20,000. Park appealed to the New York media to help him find his models, and the ballad of Wallace and Gromit became international news. A cabbie saw the stories and checked his trunk, finding the intrepid inventor and his sidekick intact. He returned them to Park and even waived the $500 finder's fee.

In their first full-length movie, the G-rated "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," they run a pest-control business in a town obsessed with vegetables. Bushy gardens fill every back yard, and produce size is more than a point of personal pride -- it dictates social status. When a mysterious nighttime pest of gargantuan dimensions begins eating up the gardens a week before the annual garden fair, the big-toothed Wallace and his silent, sleuthing hound are commissioned to humanely dispose of the critter before a pompous local hunter shoots it.

Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter provide the voices for two key characters. British actor Peter Sallis has been the voice of Wallace since 1989.

"What amazes me," says Park, "is the way the characters evolve over time. ... One example is how Gromit found his personality. When we did the first (short) film, the first shot started with Wallace building a rocket and sawing through a door using Gromit as a trestle to support him. I wanted Gromit to be a more happy, bouncy dog and I had even recorded a voice for him. But the way the shot was (set up), I could only access his eyebrow and face. So I had him just tuck his head and roll his eyes. He was born in that moment, and he hasn't spoken since."