Will Becher's Masterclass (18/11/2015)

I went to a talk by Will Becher on Aardman's newest feature animation film Shaun the Sheep the Movie. Will Becher himself is an animator from Aardman who worked on it. I can feel his strong passion towards producing an animation, especially stopmotion, which he started doing when he was just a teenager. He has been on a long journey to pave his career path as a successful animator. As a young animator, he said that the job is quite tasking because begginers usually started off as either a middle runner or a junior model maker. His passion makes his presentation even more engaging to the point that it convinced me to watch Shaun the Sheep the Movie for the second time.

Will told us that the challenge in making Shaun the Sheep the Movie is to convey points because the characters are talking in a jibberish manner. They solved this problem through the use of diagrams to explain process and the surroundings to make us understand what is going on in the scenes. 

Creating the world

Design set dressing and model making

The film is set in a typical metropolis city where stray animals are not supposed to roam freely and people adhere to trends. This concept is successfully applied with a humorous touch by the creators. The set of the city is a combination of bits and pieces of big cities architecture in the UK. Not all of the buildings are fully made because those can be seen by the camera is the most important. Will also explains the roles of set artists and model-makers in the creation of the settings. Set artists decides which textures work best for the background while model-makers will make the character concept into puppets which will be used for the filming. The model makers usually make the armature of the puppets from and connecting their joints. This is followed by mixing of the latex batter which is then poured into a tray shaped like the character, baked and coloured traditionally with paint. To make a character stand firmly, screw holes are made on the feet of the characters. Will explains that they decided to dress up the sheeps in human clothes in a quirky manner to show how the sheeps are blending into the settings through the ways they interact in the city. 

After the concept is finalised, the scriptwriters made the animatics which will be printed as panels. Panels are used to summarise what is happening in the scenes and to track the filming progress.

In the Studio

Lights, camera and audio

Will says a lot of useful tips on animating  stopmotion animation in this section. He brought up rigging which helps the puppets to stand still in unstable poses which assists the animators in doing the inbetweens. Rigging the puppets can also be useful as the camera moves because it stabilises them so that they do not shift. He also showed us some clips of Aardman's crew acting as characters in the animation as a reference for the real animation. I think this is the best and the funniest part of his presentation as he joked about his colleague, Golly, being all jibberish and ridiculous. He concluded the presentation by touching a little bit on the soundtrack recording which is done by a British orchestra group in an auditorium.