Aardman Commercials

Aardman is famous for Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Morph. The Claymation god's in the animation world, so why does the majority of their commercials use 3D animation?

Well I was fortunate enough to see Peter Lord's talk at Bradford Animation festival that explained the set up of the studio, and how normally he himself doesn't deal much with the commercials because he loves being hands on with the feature films so much. But also that actually when the feature films aren't being made they don't like to make staff redundant and then rehire them when the next one comes along, instead they have relied on the commercial department to make them enough money to keep them a float until the next project. So it seems like to me that those who work in the commercial department have a bit more free reign, but they are under a lot of pressure to keep producing work fast to hold up the studio. The thing is with stop motion is it's biggest limitation is that it is unbelievably time consuming, and also to do it to aardman standards it would probably take up a lot more bodies and therefore they would need extra pay for that department. Which they probably don't want to do because it's just there to make money.

So I thought I would start with my favourite Aardman Commercial, Pythagasaurus. This visual aesthetics are a lot darker than that of your average Aardman film. And it's also quite long for an advert it is more of a short film. But I love the characters. So the first thing I'm going to discuss is how I feel that these characters in this 3D software is a further development of the Claymation models. And they are probably the closest to the claymation models out of all the trailers. I think the attributes the characters have are more in the style of Aardman than some of the other trailers. Especially the way the cavemen wave their arms, this is very much a Nick Park creature comforts take. It's a lot more charming than say for example there funky pigeon trailer.




I decided to discuss Pigby next because this commercial is a lot more recent, and I think you can see how much the department has developed in there 3D work. Also I found the "pigasso" pun really funny.  I think they've tried for these characters to have a claymation feel to them with there texturing, but I don't think it's worked in the sense that it doesn't have the same handmade quality to it. I also think that the font doesn't help here either. Which is why I decided to show this commercial with the claymation characters which are basically colourful morphs to compare and contrast.



So my limitation for this post is how 3D CG animation isn't for everyone, and not every studio can adopt there style into it without losing there best craftsmen. At the moment Aardman don't need to because so many people love there quintessentially english claymation films, but if they were forced to go into 3D I don't think there studio would work the same way at all. I don't think it is an issue for them but I think it is a limitation for the software if it was more userfriendly or more able to generate handmade qualities I think it would have a lot more users.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnMHDfP23lIVgwoIK2sjJTQ