Animators React to Wallace and Gromit!

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Airalo ► Get Airalo today, and use my code CORRIDOR3 for $3 USD OFF your data plan: https://try.airalo.com/CorridorCrew  Our videos are made possible by Members of CorridorDigital, our Exclusive Streaming Service! Try a membership yourself with a 14-Day Free Trial ► http://corridordigital.com/  Niko is joined by Wallace & Gromit Creator, Nick Park, and his Fellow Director, Merlin Crossingham, to break down the origins of Stop Motion Animation, their start at Aardman Animation Studios, and the History of Wallace and Gromit. They're also joined by the Actors themselves, Wallace, Gromit, Feathers, and Norbot!  Watch Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl on Netflix ► https://www.netflix.com/title/81351936  Instagram ► http://instagram.com/corridordigital Merch ► https://corridordigital.store/  Creative Tools ► Puget Computers: https://bit.ly/Puget_Systems Aputure Lights: https://bit.ly/Corridor_Lights B&H Photo: https://bhpho.to/3r0wEnt ActionVFX: https://bit.ly/TheBest_ActionVFX Greyscale Gorilla: https://bit.ly/GreyscalegorillaPlus Cinema4D: http://bit.ly/Try_Cinema4D Houdini: https://bit.ly/HoudiniSims Nuke: https://bit.ly/Nuke_Compositing JangaFX: https://hubs.ly/Q030gZZ20 KitBash 3D: https://KitBash3D.com/?ref=corridorcrew BorisFX: https://bit.ly/BorisFXsuite Octane Render: http://bit.ly/Octane_Wrender Epidemic Music: http://bit.ly/Corridor_Music  Chapters ► 0:00 Animators React to Wallace and Gromit 0:53 The Actors are In Studio 2:40 Stop Motion Animation Inspiration 4:03 A Grand Day Out (1989) 10:52 The Wrong Trousers (1993) 13:09 Chicken Run (2000) 16:10 Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) 22:51 The Longevity of Wallace and Gromit

Transcript

00:00Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of Animators React, this is a very special

00:07episode today. We're joined by Wallace and Gromit here, plus Feathers McGraw and Norbot.

00:14Wallace and Gromit were kind enough to bring two incredible guests with them.

00:17I'm Nick Park, I'm the original creator of Wallace and Gromit and have also co-directed

00:22Vengeance Most Foul with Merlin.

00:24I'm Merlin Crossingham, creative director of Wallace and Gromit, also director with

00:29Nick of Vengeance Most Foul.

00:31Good grief, it's you, again!

00:34Nick, Merlin and their studio Aardman Animations have played a foundational role in claymation

00:39and stop-motion animation. In this episode we're going to go from the earliest Wallace

00:43and Gromit short films to the technical marvels of Vengeance Most Foul. We're going to dig

00:47into a bunch of stories, this is going to be a good episode.

00:53Well first and foremost, can we talk about these guys?

00:55Yeah.

00:55These are the models used on camera.

00:57Yeah.

00:58These are the actual actors.

00:59And the scale as well.

01:00This is how big they are.

01:01When you go close up, we go close up on a model this size.

01:04All of Wallace's face and Gromit's face, it's all about the size of your thumbs and just

01:08being able to tweak the things in the way that you want.

01:10I thought these were clay initially, because, you know, it's called claymation.

01:14In the early films, in Gromit and Gromit, it was like a clay torso with aluminum wire

01:20inside, we say aluminium in the UK.

01:24But in the more recent Wallace and Gromit films, are they still made of clay?

01:27When you look at Feathers, he's all clay. When you pick him up, you'll feel it.

01:30Yeah.

01:31But on Curse the Were-Rabbit, we started using foam latex for Wallace's shoes and trousers.

01:37And silicone has developed there, hasn't it, over the years?

01:40Silicone, historically, you could have it looking good, but it wouldn't be durable enough

01:43or it would split. Now, you can more or less have both.

01:47So these days, you're often using silicone pieces moulded from the clay.

01:50Now, in the original pieces, there's a lot of, like, fingerprints and stuff like that in the models.

01:54I notice you actually have some fingerprints here on his hand.

01:56Yeah, and it's important that even though these are silicone trousers, for example,

02:00and silicone sleeves, the originals are, you know, clay.

02:04And the fingerprints, we deliberately make sure it's not too slick and not too smooth.

02:08Even until very recently, the biggest problem was that silicone always looked shiny.

02:12And we want a very matte finish, so it looks like the clay.

02:16Our model-making department discovered that when it's curing, if you sprinkle icing sugar on it,

02:21it gives a matte finish.

02:22Wow, okay. How did they discover that?

02:24I don't know.

02:25It was like, sugar, whatever!

02:28The idea was to give it a very light sort of stippled effect.

02:32To stop the surface going completely smooth, icing sugar can just wash right out.

02:36I have a bunch more questions about these puppets, but before we do,

02:39I want to step back in time to your origins as stop-motion animators.

02:43What is one of your favorite stop-motion pieces?

02:45Of all time?

02:46Well, I was always a very big fan of King Kong.

02:51I used to pour over my brother's books on dinosaurs,

02:54imagining what it would be like to live among them.

02:57I remember I was about 11 when I first saw it,

03:00and this was like the first time you could actually see a dinosaur.

03:03As a kid, it just opened up my imagination, and you just believed it.

03:07And that was Phyllis O'Brien.

03:09It looks kind of a bit crude now, when you look like the dinosaur and stuff.

03:13It was cutting edge at the time.

03:15It's still so impressive.

03:16King Kong, he's got character.

03:18He's got an eyebrow, I think, that kind of moves up and down,

03:21which is not unlike Phyllis.

03:24How are you, Merlin?

03:25A little later on, it'd be Jason and the Argonauts.

03:29The beauty of it was, when watching it, you're so in the film,

03:32you're lost in the movie, and then afterwards you go,

03:34hang on a minute!

03:36How did they do that?

03:38A lot of it's to do with Ray Harryhausen and his observation of posing

03:41and the way that the characters are moving like humans

03:45in a way that you don't really question.

03:47And the fact that it interacts, like there where the skeleton

03:49went over the top of the actor.

03:51Yeah.

03:52Even today that's difficult to do.

03:53It's so hard to do.

03:54He wanted the feeling that they existed in the same space.

03:57Ray Harryhausen very much opened the door for what we do today.

04:00You know, there's no question.

04:02So the first Wallace and Gromit film is A Grand Day Out.

04:05We'll go somewhere where there's cheese.

04:09This is a film that you made as a student?

04:11Yeah, it was pretty much a student film on a budget.

04:15Yeah, I started making it in about 1982

04:18and it took me right through until 1989 to finish.

04:21Back then you're building a lot of sets yourself

04:24and you're creating a world.

04:26Growing up, everything you saw on TV was as if shot on a stage.

04:29And it was nice to take it beyond to a movie set,

04:33where it's lit and it's three-dimensional

04:35and you believe that even though we're looking at that wall,

04:38we believe that there's another wall behind it.

04:41Oh, hi there.

04:42It's me, Jordan Allen.

04:44Most of you probably didn't know, but I'm a British citizen.

04:47And this is exactly how we look when Americans aren't around.

04:50I actually travel back to the UK quite a bit.

04:53And one thing that really bothers my crumpets,

04:55excuse me,

04:56is when I have to use my phone.

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06:05Right-o!

06:06Let's crack on and get back to the episode.

06:08Ta-ta!

06:11What happened?

06:16This shot with Wallace walking down the stairs,

06:18his trousers are separate.

06:20They're replacement legs on every single frame.

06:22Oh, really?

06:23So you're just swapping in new pants or new legs every time?

06:25That's right.

06:26I had about a set of five.

06:28That last set of stairs got the actual replacements mixed up.

06:31Oh, yeah, there it is.

06:33So you're just like, whatever.

06:35Oh, yeah, it wasn't possible to do the whole thing again.

06:37Back then, there was no video recording to watch the shot back.

06:41It was all just done in camera.

06:42Would you ever be worried doing a shot

06:44that's taking you 10, 12, 20 hours

06:46and then be like, I hope it's working?

06:48Yeah, yeah.

06:49You only found out when the film came back from the labs.

06:52So the first thing you hear, like, the pouring of water.

06:54It's stop motion, so whatever you're taking a picture of

06:56has to be able to hold that position

06:58until you take your picture.

06:59How did you do that?

07:00That was using cling film, you know, sandwich wrap.

07:03Okay.

07:04Just take a piece of it and stretch it a bit

07:06and it just looked like water and replace it every frame.

07:09If you put a sound effect on, you just believe it.

07:11It's dead simple to do.

07:14How did you do the water running down the walls?

07:16Oh, that was wood varnish.

07:18The camera was manually operated.

07:20I had to measure it with like a tape measure

07:22and just move it on a little crane

07:24and I would turn the gears and it would go down

07:26another two millimeters or something every frame.

07:30And you have some welding gear.

07:32It's a really nifty effect,

07:33which a lot of people don't realize,

07:35but it's a lot of work.

07:36It's a lot of work.

07:37It's a lot of work.

07:38It's a lot of work.

07:39It's a lot of work.

07:40It's a lot of work.

07:41It's a really nifty effect,

07:42which what I assume is like a sparkler

07:44or something like that.

07:45It was a sparkler.

07:46And actually what I didn't realize is that

07:48the sparkler was so hot it set fire to the set.

07:53That shot before they wallowed is hammering.

07:55It's the most naive simple shot in the film.

07:58But it was kind of done on purpose

08:00to be kind of ridiculous.

08:02There's no other body movement.

08:04And the sound effect's like...

08:11And then this was kind of my first gag, really,

08:14in the grand air.

08:15And my first bit of go motion.

08:18Yeah, I was going to say,

08:19so you have motion blur there.

08:20Yeah, it was on some kind of axle

08:22that went through the drill

08:23and just replaced him with another grommet

08:25with his arms out.

08:26Every time it took a frame,

08:27just spun him a bit on a second exposure or something.

08:33This is the first grommet shot I did in the whole film.

08:36In that shot,

08:37it was so hard to get near a mouth

08:39and sculpt anything

08:40that I just discovered the eyebrow.

08:41And I could express everything grommet felt

08:43just by moving the eyebrow.

08:44And in that very shot, grommet was born.

08:47Could I challenge you to put some expressions on him?

08:50Oh, yeah.

08:51He won't be as malleable,

08:52but you can probably do a little bit.

08:54You usually have to have some contrast

08:55so he starts looking serious or something

08:58or frowning.

09:03Maybe lifting one brow or something.

09:05And then maybe if he starts to kind of look surprised

09:08or something,

09:09you might start by moving the middle up a bit,

09:12bit by bit.

09:13How would you show me happiness?

09:15Happiness?

09:16Well, he doesn't really have a happy expression.

09:19Grommet's key to everything is the protagonist, really,

09:22and it's about how he reacts to everything.

09:25Wallace is the agent of chaos.

09:27You're getting this solid straight-man comedy from Grommet,

09:30which is like, it's so nuanced.

09:32It's like the beauty of clay, really.

09:34It's what clay is so good at.

09:35We can be so, as you say, nuanced

09:37and express feelings which are quite sophisticated, actually,

09:41that has a depth and humanity to it.

09:43I think it's because you're in contact

09:44with the puppet every single frame,

09:46just tweaking and teasing out the emotions

09:49and almost like discovering it as you go.

09:52Set coordinates for 62 West Wallaby Street.

09:56The thing that really strikes me when I'm watching this

09:58is just how, like, handmade and DIY everything looks.

10:00Like, the characters themselves, they have a roughness.

10:02Is that an aesthetic you're trying to bring to this?

10:05I wanted it to be kind of hand-fisted, you know,

10:07like, not too fine or anything.

10:09You know, the tactile nature of everything.

10:11It's part of the humour, I think, that comes with clay.

10:14It's more Simpsons animation than Disney.

10:16Not to worry, Miss Penny Farthing.

10:19Crumble will soon have your garden gnomes

10:21back in tip-top condition.

10:23I think there's a kind of a nice matter-of-factness about it.

10:26Its lack of fussiness, I think,

10:27are one of the things that establish the style.

10:30I think it's a little bit of imperfection

10:32that keeps stuff feeling human.

10:34When we have two legends on the couch like this

10:36on a React episode,

10:37we make very special extended editions

10:39on our website, corridordigital.com.

10:41If you like the show and you enjoy watching,

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10:52The next Wallace & Gromit short was called The Wrong Trousers,

10:55and that came out in 1993.

10:57The train sequence, it's pretty amazing.

11:00The feeling of speed and movement

11:02and just the hectic nature of everything,

11:04not to mention the backgrounds moving by.

11:06Nothing's moving when you're taking your picture,

11:08so how are you doing this?

11:10How are you making it fly by like that?

11:12Very much wanted it to be an erratic

11:14and fastest thing you've ever seen sequence.

11:17We built a set of 20, 30 feet long,

11:19but it meant going at the speed we wanted to go,

11:22we would run out of set easily,

11:24so we had to find ways of repeating the set

11:26if a shot lasted more than a second and a half.

11:29I was assuming that when you did the sequence

11:31the characters are sitting still with a camera on a tripod

11:33and you're sliding the whole set back.

11:35It's the opposite.

11:36You guys actually moved the characters down?

11:38Yeah, the train, say with Gromit on, for example,

11:41is attached to the camera, and the camera's on rails,

11:44and every time we'd take a frame,

11:46the animator would move Gromit,

11:48would then take the camera back and push it,

11:51and take the frame at a certain point.

11:53And you'd do it while the camera was moving?

11:55It would be an exposure of a second or two.

11:57Wow.

11:58But you'd have to move between the two marks,

12:00you couldn't just push it, you'd have to go,

12:02practice it, and go, and go.

12:04Yeah, so it's very, in a way, non-precise.

12:06So when you'd be animating,

12:08and you get to the end of your 30 feet of set,

12:10but the scene's not done,

12:12you just roll the characters all the way back to the beginning?

12:14That's why we had foreground furniture whizzing by,

12:17because that gave a good kind of cutting point

12:19to jump back to the beginning again.

12:21Wow.

12:22We'd run out of stuff.

12:24I love this sequence.

12:26By the way, people have left messages on YouTube

12:28that say, this gun shoots eight bullets.

12:35So in The Wrong Trousers,

12:37there's a scene where Wallace is walking up the side of the wall,

12:41and you also have other characters that are sitting on ledges,

12:44and you're dealing with all these different directions of gravity.

12:46Are you just bolting in your characters?

12:48How are you doing that without them falling over?

12:50Because Wallace's legs,

12:52it would put a lot of strain on the joints of his legs,

12:54so when on this shot, we tipped the whole set on its side,

12:58and tipped the camera on its side,

13:00and it was more easy to get a track than it was to get a crane.

13:05And the difficult bit was sticking feathers to Wallace's trousers there.

13:09No chicken escapes from Tweedy's farm!

13:16So Chicken Run was the first feature film from Aardman,

13:18and that came out in 2000.

13:20Was this the first feature film that you animated for?

13:21Yeah, it was, yeah.

13:22We sort of didn't know what we didn't know.

13:24We were very much pioneering techniques,

13:26or adopting techniques that we'd heard about

13:28from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

13:30Yeah, we were very nervous, as it was our first feature,

13:33whether our stop motion would work for the cinema,

13:36so we did a lot of testing to start with.

13:38What was one of the challenges,

13:39or something that you guys learned going into this?

13:41Like, oh, this worked for shorts, but it doesn't work for a feature film.

13:44At the beginning of Chicken Run,

13:46we tried to do it without post-production teenup.

13:49We're removing the rigging equipment digitally.

13:51And this was very much in the early days of post-production,

13:53when it was still very expensive.

13:55After trying to do the first half-dozen shots with no post,

13:59the producers realized the film was never going to get made,

14:02so we did then have post-production teenup on Chicken Run.

14:05But we did try to do it all in camera.

14:09It seems like one of the hardest things about doing animation

14:11without any digital clean-up

14:12is when you have to make the characters look airborne.

14:14You showed me this cross-section here,

14:16and you had these mounting points,

14:18where you could put an arm on the character

14:20to have him lifted in the air.

14:21But how do you hide that arm,

14:23especially in the days before digital post-processing?

14:26If you can't hide the rig, you use fishing wire.

14:29So you have a cradle above the set

14:31with arms with spindles on,

14:34which you can wind, and you can hold the character in midair,

14:37and then that would be on some kind of moving rig.

14:41There's a shot where the dog runs towards camera,

14:44and I animated that, and that has no post-production on it.

14:47Wow.

14:48The problem was that you could see the strings,

14:51so I had to move the rig every frame

14:53so the strings were dancing around.

14:55Wow.

14:56We would find ways of just doing it in a way that went in camera.

14:59There's a whole shot where all the chickens run towards the camera,

15:02and that was done practically with a big scaffolding bar,

15:05and the rig is hidden behind them.

15:06Just setting the rig up took weeks.

15:08It actually didn't take that long to animate,

15:10but it just was impractical.

15:12I'm noticing that you're animating the character

15:14on every other frame, so that would be on twos,

15:16rather than every single frame, which would be on ones.

15:18Pretty much everything Aardman does is on double frames,

15:21unless there's a camera move.

15:22Because if both the characters were on twos

15:24and the background were on twos,

15:25everything would just feel really jittery.

15:27We've developed a technique we call one-and-a-half.

15:29You'd hit a pose, take the frame, the camera would advance,

15:32and rather than going to a fresh pose, you'd keep the pose,

15:35but just move the character using your frame store

15:38to match the camera move,

15:40and if you've got a limb that's going counter,

15:42you might need to just tweak that to match its previous position.

15:45You're maintaining the position, but just matching the movement,

15:48and that way you eliminate the clatter.

15:50You're still doing the actual fine-tune animation on twos?

15:53Yeah.

15:54On Chicken Run, things were a lot slicker than later

15:57because once we got this confidence of seeing that it worked,

16:00like when we came to do Curse of the Were-Rabbit,

16:03we consciously went back to loving thumbprints.

16:06Yeah, just having a bit more confidence.

16:08Yeah, yeah.

16:09Hi, I'm your nifty, odd-jobbing robot.

16:12Call me Norbot.

16:14So now in the newest film, Vengeance Most Followed,

16:16we get to see the modern version of these characters.

16:18They haven't strayed that far from the early versions.

16:21Yeah, throughout each film, they've sort of become rounder,

16:24and Gromit's nose is more pear-shaped.

16:27So in the early Wallace and Gromit's,

16:29you're dealing with a fully clay figure,

16:31and you're literally re-sculpting it every single frame.

16:34I know, for example, like in Nightmare Before Christmas,

16:36they had faces for Jack Skellington that they'd swap out

16:39depending on the expression that they want.

16:41What's the technique that you're using these days?

16:43Are you shaping the face for every single frame,

16:45or are you swapping things out? What's the approach?

16:47They're clay heads, aren't they?

16:49But they've got these clay replacement mouths.

16:51Each animator has a whole set.

16:52But they stay clay because we want to keep it organic

16:55so the animator can tweak.

16:56Interesting.

16:57It's actually only about 14 mouths.

16:59They're the basic phonetic shapes.

17:01Essentially, every single facial expression is unique

17:04because it's malleable.

17:05Because suddenly the crew got bigger.

17:07More animators needed to be kept on model.

17:10Otherwise, everyone has their own kind of different style.

17:13And then it speedened up the animation of production as well.

17:21For this opening scene,

17:22I'm seeing the foam sloshing around in Wallace's bath.

17:24What are you guys using for that foam?

17:26That's actually foam resin called Plastazote.

17:29It kind of has a glistening nature,

17:31and it looks like foam when it's carved.

17:33And then we've got glass beads and wax added on

17:36for variation in size.

17:38And within the bath there,

17:40it's just Wallace's head on a stick.

17:42And I think there's about four or five layers

17:44that kind of slide against each other.

17:46So it's mostly hand-animated.

17:49Even those bubbles that are flying are mostly hand-animated.

17:52And I think there's a couple CG ones.

17:54But all of the others were on wires and animated by hand.

17:57OK, wow.

17:58It's not what it's made of,

18:00but the way the animator has interpreted the movement

18:03that tells you what it is.

18:05Come on, I need your help.

18:10And actually, that shot there,

18:11technically that was an interesting one

18:13because we went from a grommet on his haunches,

18:15and he swapped puppet as he went on to all fours.

18:18So we have four different kinds of grommet.

18:20We've got this kind of grommet that's on all fours.

18:22We have standing grommet, we have a sitting grommet,

18:24and we have a squatting grommet.

18:26And actually, we have two kinds of squatting grommet.

18:28We've got squatting grommet where he's got human shoulders like that,

18:30and we've got a squatting grommet where he's sat like a dog.

18:33What was the decision to have grommet walk on two legs?

18:36Like, where did that come from?

18:38I guess it just evolved from a grand day out.

18:41The rules remained sort of a bit vague,

18:43but it became obvious that he should never just stand up of his own volition.

18:49Because otherwise he looks like naked.

18:51He looks like a person in a suit.

18:53There always has to be a justification for him standing up,

18:56like he's pushing a trolley or he's got boots on and he's doing something.

18:59He's usually wearing an apron or he's behind a counter.

19:03So he doesn't look like a naked person.

19:11Feathers McGraw is the most challenging element of Vengeance Most Foul

19:15because he's so graphically simple.

19:17He doesn't have any form of performance other than a blink and maybe the turn of a head.

19:21And when he walks, he just sort of glides.

19:23So he actually becomes the most cinematic character

19:26because you have to use music, you have to use lighting, you have to use the camera moves.

19:29One of the things that kept him alive are the highlights in his eyes.

19:33If he turned away from a key light and there was no highlight, he switched off.

19:38And so we worked very hard with the camera team to always have a highlight in his eyes,

19:42even if there wasn't a motivated light source, they would cheat one in.

19:48So that ending sequence with the boats is amazing,

19:50but it seems like it would be a huge technical challenge.

19:53We didn't want to try and compete with the wrong trousers ending.

19:56So in a way, this is a complete opposite kind of antidote to that.

20:00The slowest possible chase.

20:07That barge is CGI.

20:09Oh, wow. Indistinguishable.

20:11So we used that shot and then there's a big crane shot

20:15where we find the aqueduct for the first time.

20:17Those two boats are also CG and that's the only time we used CG boats.

20:23You have a lot of water happening and, you know,

20:26obviously water doesn't hold still unless you freeze it.

20:29And your studio is probably not that cold.

20:31How are you guys doing the water here?

20:33Particle simulation.

20:34We would LiDAR scan the set to make a 3D proxy

20:37and then they would just match the stop motion barge with this CG proxy

20:42so that then they could get the water to react off the boat and off the banks.

20:46And where we couldn't shoot a LiDAR scan, we would shoot the shot in stereo

20:50so that they could make a depth map from the images.

20:53Oh, cool. Very cool. Smart.

20:55It was important to make the water look like it's fitted with the stop motion world.

20:59All of these water sims are made for live action visual effects.

21:02Right.

21:03So the base starting point is realism.

21:05Right.

21:06So there's a lot of detail.

21:07It just doesn't fit.

21:08And it just doesn't fit.

21:09That's one of the things that we've struggled on Vengeance Most Foul

21:12is that we've used a lot of the very latest in visual effects

21:16but to make them feel comfortable in the lumpy, bumpy world that we embrace

21:20was actually really quite challenging.

21:22I can totally see that.

21:23Because the water here feels like it's part of a model.

21:25That's right.

21:26The particle sizes, the complexity of the detail is reduced a little bit.

21:30Transparency.

21:31So it looks slightly more gooey, if you like.

21:34The colour of the water was really important.

21:36Having the foam on the top.

21:38But it was all very much led by the stop motion.

21:41Oh, this will work a treat.

21:43All the backgrounds here are quite interesting, aren't they?

21:45Yes.

21:46Are those real?

21:47They are real.

21:48But we didn't have enough time to shoot all of them bespoke for the shot.

21:53The art department set up probably about 40 feet of set.

21:57And we shot it on motion control with a 360 camera that shot at 12K or something.

22:04And we'd shoot passes very slow.

22:06And then because it was a 360 camera,

22:08we could take that image and we could scroll around it to get any camera angle.

22:12Punch into it for close-ups or go wide.

22:14And we could choose.

22:15And because it was shot slow,

22:16we could ramp it to shoot the speed of the shot that we hadn't shot yet.

22:20So they were all shot beforehand.

22:22And then we fitted them in in terms of time.

22:24It saved us a huge amount.

22:26Using clay for stop motion is one thing.

22:28But what if you tried to use motion capture and 3D printing for stop motion animation?

22:32That's an experiment that didn't work.

22:35That's an experiment that Daniel and Ren have taken on these past couple months at Corridor.

22:38And that's coming out next week.

22:44So subscribe to the channel so you don't miss it.

22:46We have lots and lots of little 3D plastic Rens all around the studio now.

22:51Wallace and Gromit have been beloved characters for about 35 years now.

22:55Why do you think they've persisted for so long?

22:57Oh, I think the fact that it's clay is actually a very strong aspect of all this

23:03that people can relate to how it's done.

23:06That's really key actually for all the refinement that we have in a film like Vengeance Most Foul.

23:10There are lumps and bumps and imperfections.

23:12We embrace the thumbprints still.

23:14The human touch is vital.

23:17Also as animators, we have to love these characters.

23:20That will show.

23:21And if we are true in that way, then people will pick up on that.

23:25We're a world of pet lovers, particularly dog lovers.

23:28And we all believe our animals have human attributes and can understand everything.

23:32What advice would you guys have for somebody that wants to get into stop motion these days

23:37and make a career out of it?

23:40Don't.

23:42So compared with when Nick and I were young animators,

23:45getting hold of the machinery to do stop motion,

23:48most people have it in their pocket.

23:50If you've got a smartphone, there are free apps.

23:52You can have a go. Roll your sleeves up and dig in.

23:55The art of stop motion is not just about moving puppets and frame by frame.

24:00It's about making the audience believe that those characters are thinking and feeling and have a soul.

24:06You have to act through the puppet.

24:08That's the primary job, really, of the animator, is to be the performer.

24:11Nick, Merlin, thank you so much for joining us here.

24:14It's been an absolute honor and a pleasure.

24:16Everybody, go check out Vengeance Most Foul on Netflix.

24:19Thanks again so much, guys. I really appreciate it.

24:21It's been a pleasure.

24:22See you guys in the next one.

24:23Bye.

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