Another Aardman project that I worked on was the World Wildlife Fund film. It was created to teach younger people about the importance of Biodiversity. I was allocated to create a Beluga Whale. It was a tricky puppet to make as the replacement mouths were very large in comparison to the Whale (lots of smoothing plasticine in between shots).
Here is the original colour drawing created by the Director, Luis Cook:
A couple of shots of me sculpting the replacement mouths and doing an animation test to make sure they worked. The other replacements were kept in the fridge to stop them from melting under the studio lights:
An Assistant Producer put this image together in Photoshop to see if how the puppet would look in a hospital scene:
On the green-screen set. Me, The Whale and the fantastic Animator Mr Terry Brain (Creator of 'Trap-Door' and 'Stop It and Tidy Up'). Terry did a brilliant job animating this huge lump of clay!!:
Many moons ago I worked on a number of T.V. commercials and a few children's episodes for Nickelodeon at the Bristol based Elm Road Productions.
A small team of us created puppets, props and sets for 'Stan and Harvey Do Lunch'. Unfortunately I can't find a link to any of the episodes online.
Here are a few of the replacement heads:
And here's a shot of me sculpting replacement mouths for Jack Nicholson:
Alton Towers 'Ug-Land' ride.
I sculpted this 1 meter long Dinosaur head for the close up shot on the commercial:
Here is the finished commercial. If you look closely, at the final shot you can see that we left a small step-ladder in the left side of the horizon. Oops!:
Alton Towers 'Singing Barn'.
For a quick turn around on this commercial we only made the front half of the puppets knowing that there wouldn't be any full shots of the farm animals.
A shot of me sculpting the replacement mouths on the 'goofy' horse:
I made the sheep from 'Super Sculpey' and many, many pipe cleaners!!
Here is the finished commercial:
Faxe Beer commercial.
I made two ufo's from vacuum formed components and the undercarriage doors were edited in post production to give the illusion of them opening and closing.
Here's the Vimeo link to the final commercial directed by Micheal Wright:
I sketched this image with HB pencil and painted it in Photoshop. It wasn't easy as I had to quickly adjust my focus from a spot light in my eye and staring into a mirror, to pulling my focus back to paint on the screen!!!
It took about 3.5 hours to complete and it's about 15 separate layers in Photoshop.
