Aardman Animations

David Sproxton and Peter Lord complete their first film, Aardman, for BBC Bristol. Founding Aardman Animation, Sproxton and Lord create new character, Morph, for BBC's Vision On. Animated Conversation concept is developed into series of five "Conversation Pieces" for Channel Four. A Grand Day Out, the first film featuring Wallace and Gromit, directed by Nick Park, is released. The second Wallace and Gromit film, the Oscar-winning The Wrong Trousers, is released. Wallace and Gromit's third film, A Close Shave, also earns an Oscar. The first Aardman feature film, Chicken Run, is released to critical and popular success. Filming begins on first full-length Wallace and Gromit film, with a proposed release date of summer 2005. Aardman Animations Ltd. is among the world's most celebrated film and video animation studios. Aardman has achieved widespread recognition for its stop-motion animation techniques--filming three-dimensional objects frame-by-frame--and especially its series of Wallace and Gromit short films, including the Oscar award-winning The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. Led by cofounders Peter Lord and David Sproxton, Aardman has branched out into feature films, including the 2001 success, Chicken Run, through a $150 million, four-film production agreement with DreamWorks. That agreement also includes the first full-length Wallace and Gromit film, expected to be released in 2005. Yet a primary source of the private company's revenues has long been its groundbreaking production for the advertising industry. Aardman is also a noted animator for the music video industry, particularly through its work for the 1980s hits "Sledgehammer" by Peter Gabriel and "My Baby Just Cares For Me," by Nina Simone. The company continues to produce for the British television industry, as well as for other television markets, including the Crackling Contraptions series aired on BBC One in 2002 and streamed on the Internet, through AtomFilms, in 2003. Peter Lord and David Sproxton met in school in Woking, England, in the late 1960s and began making short animated films using Sproxton's father's 16mm camera. The pair were initially influenced by the animation techniques of Terry Gilliam for the acclaimed BBC series Monty Python's Flying Circus. Yet the clay-based animation techniques pioneered by the legendary Ray Harryhausen--whose work was featured in such film classics as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, One Million Years B.C., and Jason and the Argonauts --provided the strongest influence on Lord and Sproxton's own developing style. Lord and Sproxton initially worked on the Lord family's kitchen table, using Lord's drawings and cutouts from magazines to produce their first film, titled Trash, after the Andy Warhol film of the same era. Sproxton's father then showed the film to an acquaintance, a producer at the BBC, who asked to see more of the boys' work. As Sproxton told the Independent: "He said to us: 'Here's a roll of film, if we like what you do, we'll buy a sequence off you.'" Sproxton and Lord set to work developing the new film, and in 1972 created an "idiotic superman" called Aardman (supposedly an Afrikaans word meaning "earth pig"). That film was subsequently purchased by the BBC and broadcast as part of a series of animated films. Sproxton and Lord then went off to university, with Sproxton studying geography in Durham, and Lord studying English in York. The pair met up again during the summers and continued making animated films. Adopting the "company" name Aardman Animations, Lord and Sproxton began producing short films for Vision On, a television program for deaf children produced at the BBC Bristol station. It was during this time that Aardman began specializing in working with plasticine clay, in part because that medium had been largely ignored in English animation circles. The success of this early work led to a request from the station for a new animated character to act as a foil for the program. While Mor