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| "When you make a short animated film, and send it out into the world to fend for itself, it feels very much as if you're sending away a delicate and much-loved child. Every day you dread to hear some awful news. Every day you sit by the phone wondering "why doesn't it call". In the world of animation, unlike the world of Feature Films, your creation is probably launched very quietly. Wat's Pig for example was shown first to all the Aardman people in a studio premiere without benefit of spotlights and starlets. Since then it's been shown at many short film festivals, and was then included in the Aardman Collection (which has been touring the world's cinemas very successfully). The reviews have been excellent - well I assume they've been excellent, they were written in languages with which I'm not familiar. But I haven't been there, I haven't been on hand to enjoy my baby's success. Then suddenly this, an Oscar® Nomination! My little film has not been mixing with the wrong sort of people, as I feared, but has done well for itself. Friends congratulate me on its success "We always new it would do well" they assure me. It was a long slow haul making Wat's Pig . The idea started about three years ago, on holiday in the Dordogne region of France. On one stretch of the river, two enormous fortresses face each other only a few miles apart. One was occupied by the French during the Hundred Years War, and one by the English. Having enjoyed the beauty and the spectacle of these old castles, and admired the romantic histories of the knights who lived in them, I couldn't help thinking about the poor devils who lived somewhere in between. I imagined them doggedly getting on with their lives, doing their best, resigned to constantly having their farms looted and their crops trampled by passing armies. Anyway, these sombre reflections on the lifestyles of the mediaeval poor set me thinking about a film based on such a character. I wrote a number of outlines for a 30 minute film but couldn't get the story to work. Then one evening at Aardman we were chatting about story ideas (we call it a Creative Pizza) when Steve Box mentioned the idea of split screen. He was talking about a different film entirely, but the idea stuck in my head. Split-screen storytelling - the idea of two parallel stories - seemed perfect for my mediaeval story. The whole point of Wat's Pig is that the Earl in his castle is utterly unaware of the existence of the peasant Wat, but continuously affects his life in the most profound way. What beter than to have both of them in vision together? I loved the idea of telling two interlocking stories simultaneously; it seemed like great fun and turned out to be a real intellectual exercise; it was incredibly difficult to choreograph the action on both sides of the screen. At a certain stage I admitted to myself that telling the whole story that way would simply be too contrived, so in the end I decided to drop in and out of the split-screen world as the story seemed to demand. We had a great crew on Wat's Pig. Small but dedicated I would say. We didn't shoot it at our main studios in Bristol, but in an old building that had been our main studio five years ago. So the whole shoot was a sentimental journey (though in a second class carriage). Having been heavily involved in all the hurly burly of multiple productions at Aardman for five years or so, it was a wonderful luxury to concentrate on just the one film for so long at a stretch. The film was designed by a young designer called Rachel Moore - it was her first film in fact. She draws beautifully. Her drawings are quite graphic and highly textured, very unlike the look that people normally expect from Aardman, but that was great because I wanted to do something significantly different from most of our films. Jan Sanger was in charge of the model making, a job she did for Aardman for many years (and I'm happy to say has just started doing again). She made the wonderful flexible puppets that allow the animators to perform properly. The film was lit by Andy MacCormack who is a great DOP. We've worked together on many projects over the years - both short films and commercials - but this was the longest time we've ever worked together. My right hand man (and sometimes left as well), sharing the animation with me was Sam Fell. He not only shot a good half of Wat's Pig but also found time (when I was on holiday I think) to shoot his own short film POP . He seemed to think it was a sort of light relief to shoot a film in his spare time. That's dedication. Mike Booth was another relative newcomer to us who ended up animating quite a lot of the battle scenes. We were really rushing at the end to get the film completed, and Mike nobly stepped in to help us out and did a wonderful job too. Andy Price composed the music. He really got into the notion of combining a mediaeval sound with modern orchestration. The old instruments, played by a band called Sirinu, are slightly approximate in their tuning and a million miles from synthesised music and that gives the sound a terrific energy. I listened in awe ( and just occasionally alarm) to the sackbut, the crumhorn and the hurdy gurdy belting out Andy's themes in the recording studio.They combined beautifully with more contemporary film orchestration that gives the music its emotional drive. There were many more people of course at every level, all contributing something special. As a director, you are very privileged that people are happy to contribute body and soul to what at the end of the day is regarded as Your Film. Great gratitude and thanks go out to all involved and lastly and especially to Claire Kitson at Channel 4 who commissioned the film, to Michael Rose at Aardman who did the deals and brought all the elements together, to my partner at Aardman, David Sproxton, who gave me advice and help all the way along and also did me the enormous service of allowing me to spend all my time on this one project – an enormous luxury! And Jo Allen, my producer who worked with me all the way through, fighting for more money (God knows where it came from), backing me up, ordering the Indian takeaways, telling dreadful jokes and generally keeping the whole thing together. Thanks pals! " © Copyright 2000 Aardman Animations Ltd. All rights reserved. |