Stop-motion training in a digital world

There’s a real sense of satisfied surprise in Mark Simon Hewis’s voice when he recalls how, during the past two decades, the terrain and perception of stop-motion animation has radically evolved. “When Aardman was starting with Chicken Run they just couldn’t find enough animators,” he reveals. “They just couldn’t find people who did stop-motion. Stop-motion was incredibly unpopular if you weren’t Disney doing 2D, and it certainly wasn’t something that a lot of people dreamt about doing. And so Aardman realised that they almost had to train people up. So that’s what they did. They got people in who’d done a little bit or showed a lot of interest and they started doing a three-month course which trained people, and a lot of them walked straight onto Chicken Run; onto the highest-grossing stop-motion film in history. And, actually, some of the people who now teach on the Academy, who are directors and senior animators, they did that course.”

With that lineage outlined, it’s clear that it echoes something essential about Aardman’s creative culture. In turn, about seven years