AARDMAN ANIMATIONS

AARDMAN AMNIMATIONS

Link to the aardman animations webpage : http://www.aardman.com/html/home.asp

Aardman is the world leader in animation winning a current total of 4 oscars from 9 nominations. Peter Lord and David Sproxton are the two founders and creaters of Aardman animations started animating from school in 1972.

MORPH was the comapanies first creation in 1976 made for the childrens programme 'take hart'. He was a plasticine stop-motion character produced for the BBC. Morph appeared mainly in one minute 'shorts' to which him and hart woud have conversations to which morph talks in 'gobbledygook' but with meaningful gestures to his problems. Later on, Morph was joined by cream-coloured chas, who was badly behaved. Morph was later reborn in 1996 in 'Morph ,the morph files' again for a childrens audience.

In 1982 channel four commissioned a television programme called conversation pieces. This was aardman's first adult audience animation programme that featured puppets animated to talk about real meaningful conversations that reflected humour and sensitivity. A similar project of their's was the creation of the puppet film 'Early Birds'.

In 1985 Nick Park joined the team, who was discovered in school as he was creating an animation piece called 'A grand day out'. Nick park recently created the channel four programme creature comforts. In 1986, Peter Gabriel suggested that they collaborate with director Stephen Johnson and the Brothers Quay to create a new rock video. sledgehammer went on to collect many awards that year.

 

WALLACE AND GROMIT

In 1993 Aardman created their most famous piece to date, 'The wrong trousers' staring the nationaly loved Wallace and Gromit, their first 30 minute animation film. It was acclaimed world wide and has won over thirty awards, as a result 'the wrong trousers' has become one of the most successful animated films ever made. With the success of this animated film the company went on to make another oscar winning film with the comical duo called 'A close shave' in 1995. The Wallace and Gromit Franchise is well known by people of all ages as the characters are so loved, the animation has also become well realted to families and is often a christmas special.

 

In autumn 2002 Aardman released Cracking Contraptions, a series of 10 x 1 minute Wallace and Gromit films. The films debuted on the Internet and were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people world-wide. All 10 films were then shown on BBC1 over the 2002 autumn and Christmas schedule. The films were also released online in the US via AtomFilms who went on to offer a subscription package for all ten. 'The curse of the warerabbit' was wallace and gromits first full length feature film produced in 2005 and funded by dreamworks,The film topped the box office charts in both the US and UK and garnered many prestigious international awards including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film and a BAFTA for Best British Film.
Chicken Run was Aardman's first full-length theatrical feature film to be funded by DreamWorks. Directed by both Peter Lord and Nick Park it was released in June 2000 in the US and UK to excellent reviews and outstanding box office receipts. Chicken Run grossed over $220M at the worldwide box office. Another of their full length films to follow later in 2007 was Flushed away, this featured rats that went on a lifechanging adventure this could teach the audience not to judge people by where they come from and that there is not only one way to live life. this film also got nominated for a BAFTA.

From the creation of 'a close shave' a character emerged unexpectedly to have his own programme on the BBC, this character was 'Shaun the sheep' as he gets into trouble on a farm with his friends but never gets caught by anyone human.

Agencies appreciate the contribution that Aardman's directors and animators can make to an original idea and a client list including Chevron, Serta, Hershey's, Tennants, Central Office for Information, McVities, Kelloggs and Leonard Cheshire Disability. Aardman produce approximately 75 commercials each year, using a wide variety of animation styles. As well as working in stop frame, productions in CGI, Flash and mixed media are thriving.

ANIMATION AS A GENRE

EARLY HISTORY
Animation can be dated back to cave paintings but were created at this point to merely capture the motion of movement in a static form (drawings). A Chinese zoetrope-type device had been invented in 180 AD. The phenakistoscope, praxinoscope, and the common flip book were early popular animation devices invented during the 19th century.These devices produced the appearance of movement from sequential drawings using technological means, but animation did not really develop much further until the invention of cinematography.

STOP MOTION
Georges Méliès was a creator of special-effect films; he was generally one of the first people to use animation with his technique. He discovered a technique by accident which was to stop the camera rolling to change something in the scene, and then continue rolling the film. This idea was later known as stop-motion animation. Méliès discovered this technique accidentally when his camera broke down while shooting a bus driving by. When he had fixed the camera, a hearse happened to be passing by just as Méliès restarted rolling the film, his end result was that he had managed to make a bus transform into a hearse. This was just one of the great contributors to animation in the early years.

ANIMATION AS A GENRE
In 1899 Arthur Melbourne-Cooper created the first stop motion animated film called matches, it was created with matches wired together that would draw with chalk on a blackboard writing a patriotic call to action message. Another French artist, Émile Cohl, began drawing cartoon strips and created a film in 1908 called Fantasmagorie. The film largely consisted of a stick figure moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There were also sections of live action where the animator’s hands would enter the scene. The film was created by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look. This makes Fantasmagorie the first animated film created using what came to be known as traditional (hand-drawn) animation.

 

As a result of the creation of movement through images there are now many different types of animation these range from : 

• puppet animation 
• puppetoon 
• clay animation
• cut-out animation
• silhouette animation
• model animation 
• go motion
• object animation 
• graphic animation 
• brickfilm 
• pixilation 
• 3d animation
• 2d animation 
• computer animation
• drawn on film animation 
• printscreen animaiton 
• sand animation 
• erasor animation 
• paint-on-glass animation  

RESEARCH INTO THREE SUBGENRES

Psychological Thrillers

The first subgenre that I looked into what psychological thrillers as they are one of my personal favourite types of film so I was interested to find out about the codes and conventions and media techniques that the media world use to make the trailers and films for this subgenre. From looking at the excellent website that is IMDb it has been recorded that these are the top three psychological thrillers created so far...
 
1. THE UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

Plot- A boat has been destroyed, criminals are dead, and the key to this mystery lies with the only survivor and his twisted, convoluted story beginning with five career crooks in a seemingly random police lineup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

Plot - A young man blocks out harmful memories of significant events of his life. As he grows up, he finds a way to remember these lost memories and a supernatural way to alter his life. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. INCEPTION

Plot- In a world where technology exists to enter the human mind through dream invasion, a highly skilled thief is given a final chance at redemption which involves executing his toughest job to date: Inception. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Psychological thrillers are films that play tricks on the mind and get the viewers to think or perhaps suspend their belief's in order to follow a plot. The trailers that are produced for this genre are generally created so that the twist that plays on the consumers mind is revealed or a question is titled within the trailer to make the audience question what it was they just saw, this question can normally be extended into something relatable to their own lives, this would result in the viewer having an interest in the film to discover the answer/solution. psychological thrillers are often created to question the viewer's beliefs and values as it then creates a personal level and makes the film relatable.

 

 

Animation

animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images to create an illusion of movement. the most common method of presenting animation is as a motion picture or video program, although there are other methods. this type of presentation is usually accomplished with a camera and a projector or a computer viewing screen which can rapidly cycle through images in a sequence. animation can be made with either hand rendered art, computer generated imagery, or three-dimensional objects e.g. puppets or clay figures, or a combination of the techniques. The position of each object in any particular image relates to the position of that object in the previous and following images so that the objects appear to fluidly move independently of one another. The viewing device displays these images in rapid succession, usually 24, 25, or 30 frames per second (at a professional standard).

well known clay animations would include Aardmans': Wallace and Gromit, and the sitcom that spired from that BBC's Shaun the sheep.

Romantic drama

Romance films are love stories recorded in visual media they focus on passion, emotion, and the affectionate involvement of the protagonists and the journey that their love takes through courtship or marriage. Romantic drama films make the love story or the search for love the main plot focus. occasionally, lovers face obstacles such as finances, physical illness, various forms of discrimination, psychological restraints or family that threaten to break their union of love. As in all romantic relationships, tensions of day-to-day life, temptations, and differences in compatibility enter into the plots of romantic films. This genre fits well into the theory of Todorov.

Romantic films often explore the essential themes of love at first sight, young with older love, unrequited love, obsessive love, sentimental love, spiritual love, forbidden love, sexual and passionate love, sacrificial love, explosive and destructive love, and tragic love. Romantic films serve as great escapes and fantasies for the viewers, especially if the two people finally overcome their difficulties, declare their love, and experience life ''happily ever after'', implied by a reunion and final kiss. In romantic television series, the development of such relationships may play out over many episodes, and different characters may become intertwined in other romantic arcs. (information from Wikipedia) The top three Romantic Dramas are as follows...

 

1	Titanic	Par.	$658,672,302	3,265	$28,638,131	2,674	12/19/97
2	Ghost	Par.	$217,631,306	1,766	$12,191,540	1,101	7/13/90
3	Pearl Harbor	BV	$198,542,554	3,255	$59,078,912	3,214	5/25/01