After wrapping Lloyd of the Flies I was lucky enough to get to stay on at Aardman and animate for Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, the sequel to the highest grossing stop frame feature film of all time. This was amazing! Watching the rushes of the stop-frame shots was consistently awe inspiring. How on earth do they do it? Getting briefed by directors Sam Fell, Suzy Parr and Jeff Newitt then receiving detailed, thoughtful feedback from Loyd Price was such an education. I worked mostly remotely but went and lived the dream in Bristol a couple of times; sneaking around peeking at the gorgeous sets and furtively prodding the plasticine faces. Although the CG animation we did was mostly limited to crowds of background chickens, we were sometimes also allowed to get our hands (or at least our cursors) on the hero characters. Here are some of the shots I animated with Ginger, Rocky and the rest. I’ve tried to make any stop-frame chickens black and white in the shots so you can easily tell what exactly it was that I animated.
Aardman and Lloyd of the Flies!
I waited a long time before I got to work for Aardman. I probably first saw their work on Hartbeat when Morph climbed out of his pencil box in the 80s. I loved it but I was 5 so I didn’t know (or care) who made it. I first became aware of the studio Aardman in the early 90s when my childhood friend, the director and photographer Sam Strickland, would (more than once) hire a VHS of animated shorts from the video shop featuring the Lip Synch series and a few of the music videos. We watched the whole thing over and over again. At the age of 11 I was amazed by the magic of it all. Fast forward 13 more years and I’m finishing my Masters in 3D Computer Animation. Aardman always sent very polite rejection letters but a company called Frontier Developments were hiring animators for a video game of (the then in-production) Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I was so happy to land a job working even in a distant way for these heroes. I found myself studying the animation frame by frame, sometimes copying it precisely and being paid for it. One of the animators whose work I was copying turned out to be a splendid fellow by the name of Seamus Malone. If you’d told me then that he would later be my Animation Supervisor on a series at Aardman I’d have been thrilled! If you’d told me this wouldn’t happen for another 17 years, I’d probably have given up entirely! Anyway the series is called Lloyd of the Flies and it was a delight to work on and there were so many limbs to animate and the people who worked on it were all brilliant and there were so many limbs to animate. So many limbs. Here is a small selection of the shots I animated for it:
Awards for Paddington and Here We Are!
It was very exciting to see The Adventures of Paddington and Here We Are win 2 Daytime Emmy awards each last week! Congratulations to everyone involved!
Here is Here We Are director Philip Hunt’s Instagram post with his acceptance speech:
In addition to the Emmys, The Adventures of Paddington has also won a British Animation Award and an Annie Award and the best acceptance speech was Adam Shaw and Chris Drew’s speech for the Annies so here is that:
I only worked on Series 2 of Paddington so can claim absolutely no credit for the awards won by Series 1 but I’ll enjoy basking in the reflected glory anyway. It was great fun to work on, not least because of the soothing tones of Ben Wishaw in my ears almost every day giving vocal performances that are just as subtle and endearing as those in the feature films. More on this when Series 2 has finished airing and I can share some of my work on it!
The Trailer Farm & Monstrum2
Last year worked on various projects for video game cinematic specialists The Trailerfarm. They’re a lovely bunch to work for and they get a lot of really fun projects for animators to get their teeth into. At a games studio the cinematics and trailers are often the first things to be outsourced if the developer doesn’t have the time or capacity to do all the animation in-house. It’s a block of work that usually requires little or no input from the coders so is easy to get done elsewhere. Also a games developer may not have artists specifically focused on camerawork, lighting and so on to do the job. Animators at the games studio will look on enviously as these fun sequences get done at another studio while back at the developer everyone is authoring hundreds of turn-on-the-spot animations or creating variants of every character’s animations to use when they’re holding a variety of weapons. The Trailer Farm is a studio specifically set up for all those fun outsourced sequences and they have a whole team of in-house cinematics experts working mainly in Unity and Unreal to bring a bit of drama to proceedings.
Of all of the things I worked on with them I think I enjoyed working on the Monstrum 2 trailer the most. It was a quick turnaround (All the animation was done from scratch in 15 days) but I think it turned out pretty well. It’s also a huge contrast to most of the other things I’ve done over the last few years – there’s not much horror in children’s TV. I also worked with TTF on cinematics for Borderlands 3 and the launch trailer for The Cycle Season 3.
Here We Are/Dadding Animator
From September 2018 to August 2019 I stopped all paid work to look after my daughter. When I took over from my wife, our daughter was 9 months old and if you put her down somewhere, she would probably still be in pretty much the same place until you moved her again. She made sounds (from both ends) but not words, food went in the top and the stuff you’d expect emerged from all available openings at unpredictable but manageable intervals. By the time I went back to work a year later she was walking around and talking in sentences. Throughout this time I read countless books to her but one of the most moving and engaging among them was Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth by Oliver Jeffers, it was soon very well thumbed by big thumbs and little thumbs alike and had to be repaired a fair few times. I loved how the book was so rich that each time you read it (even the 100th time) you would notice different things and be able to discuss them with the new little human on your lap.
In August 2019 I got a message from a friend asking if I was interested in working for Studio AKA on a short film, he didn’t know what the project was but I found out the director (Philip Hunt whose work I knew and liked a lot) and that there were some people I knew animating on the project who were brilliant and lovely folk. I got hired without knowing what the film was, arrived on my first day excited to be in the same building as Hey Duggee and to meet a few animators and directors whose work I’d long been following (since the days of Pica Towers in 2003!). I was led up the spiral staircase to meet the team. Eager to please and a little nervous about returning to work in a new place after my ‘break’ I was all smiles and affability. I met various people then the director appeared and said “So, here we are!” and then someone said “he won’t know what you mean yet” then my eyes scanned the walls and noticed a lot of familiar artwork and after a few seconds it clicked. We were making Here We Are! Now, new parents are on the edge of crying a lot of the time but in the UK it is not commonplace to well up in the first 5 minutes of a new job. I was so overwhelmed, grateful, excited and just generally emotional to be a part of bringing this beautiful book to life. My role would be relatively minor in some ways – I would be animating all the characters and animals in the background of the shots – but I knew that I wanted people to see new things every time they watched the film just as my daughter and I had seen new things every time we read the book together. I hope I did an ok job helping that to happen.
In February 2020 child number 2 arrived – I believe Mr Jeffers has written a book to accompany this one too!
Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth premiers on Apple TV+ on 17th April 2020 – Earth Day.
Digby Dragon
I had a brilliant time last year animating on the second series of Digby Dragon. It was so good to work on a show with such a clear and beautiful aesthetic. The characters are well written and brilliantly performed and so have a level of authenticity and emotional subtext that’s rare in cartoons for young children and an absolute gift for an animator.
Here are a selection of the shots I animated (it’s too long really, but it was hard to choose favourites)
Miffy
I was just updating my showreel and sorting through old work when I got lost in the (seemingly endless) footage I animated for Miffy’s Adventures Big and Small a little while ago. It was such a pleasure to animate Dick Bruna’s cute little bunny at Blue Zoo. It’s a deceptively simple design that demands a great deal of care and subtlety to animate. The whole team really pushed the quality throughout the production (while also being impossibly lovely, much like Miffy herself). My favourite bits were usually the small gestures and slow, adorable sections of dialogue which aren’t necessarily the most obvious things to include on a showreel, especially when animating a character with such a limited set of facial features. Nevertheless, here are some of the bits I animated. Hope you enjoy watching them as much as I enjoyed animating them!
Mac & Izzy
For a few months earlier this year I worked on a series called Mac & Izzy at Blue Zoo Animation. It was excellent fun to work on. The action centres around the secret lives of two imaginary friends who live in a place called Cloudville. We adopted a very squashy, stretchy animation style which made it really refreshing to animate for. Here are some of the shots I animated for the show:
You can watch all 7 episodes in full on Youtube
Tree Fu Go!
For the last 10 months I’ve been busily beavering away as part of an amazing team of splendid folk at Blue Zoo Animation working on series 5 & 6 of kid’s TV series Tree Fu Tom. Series 5 is currently being aired on the CBeebies channel and the first episode I worked on was shown today and can be seen on the BBC iPlayer in the UK. Here are a couple of gifs of shots I animated from episode 4 “It’s a Kind of Magic”:
Life Drawing 2013 & 2014
This is how I spent most of my previous 100 Thursday evenings
Matthew Stephenson 