Farmageddon: Behind the scenes at Aardman ahead of Shaun the Sheep sequel

Ahead of the Shaun the Sheep sequel, Hilary A White visits Aardman to see the painstaking process by which the brilliant stop-motion action is made

Aardmore Studios is where the magic of Shaun the sheep unfolds

The Morphs

thumbnail: Aardmore Studios is where the magic of Shaun the sheep unfolds
thumbnail: The Morphs
Hilary A White

The Aztec West Business Park on the outskirts of Bristol is the location for what seems like the dullest warehouse in England.

As insipid and featureless as the proverbial box factory, the place has developed an international reputation for the slow, methodical and finely detailed operations that go on behind its doors. And for some of the most colourful, hilarious and whip-smart animation being made anywhere in the world.

It's not as if merely stepping through doors at Aardman Features brings an explosion of joviality but you do certainly start to feel some effects. Familiar little faces - Morphs, Wallaces, Gromits, Shauns, Early Men - beam back at you from glass display cases as you sign in, before you are led past sketches, storyboards and posters from famous franchises. Faces you've sort of grown up with, whose rounded-off Plasticine exteriors immediately conjure sensations of warm childhood dazzlement and sore sides.

Aardman is just over a year into Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie when we visit. By taking us behind the scenes, it is lifting an elaborate and furiously structured curtain on what is required in order to deliver feature animation that will hopefully stand alongside the studio's other multi-million-grossing, award-courting titles such as Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Chicken Run and the first Shaun feature instalment.

The Morphs

For the stop-motion 'claymation' that Aardman has made its name with, progress is slow and steady.

"Around a second and half of animation a day is what we aim for," says studio marketing head Lucy Wendover, "which is pretty good going. Shaun… is a no-dialogue film so that's actually quite quick."

But take into account the few months of pre-production required as well as the film's 87-minute run time and still it all sounds daunting. Being here makes it strikingly clear, however, just how well-oiled a machine Aardman is now.

Although founded in 1972, it was when star animator Nick Park debuted the enduring charm of his creations Wallace and Gromit with A Grand Day Out (1989) that it began to feel like the studio had hatched something special. When Park brought home an Oscar (Best Animated Short) with Creature Comforts a year later, the Bristol animation company had found a unique and effortlessly loveable flagship.

Today, on the set of Shaun... 2, there are 28 animators working on 35 concurrent units.

It's quiet but organised inside the huge compartmentalised warehouse, the whole thing operating like a giant commercial kitchen where the chefs and waiters can only do their job if the porters and prep chefs do theirs. If an animator or cameraman is delayed because a set needs to be finished off or a puppet needs tweaking, dominoes of delay can begin to fall throughout the entire production.

Co-ordinating things is a frankly sobering shooting board that resembles a wall of hinged panels with cats' cradles of different-coloured string shooting across them, all linking scenes, sequences, time constraints and content.

Rewrites and new ideas are also continually trickling in, so if you are a supervising animator, such as Grant Maisey, you spend a lot of time running about the building getting the messages out to your team and monitoring the spinning plates.

"You should never be able to tell the difference between animators on different units," Maisey explains as we stand in a set featuring Shaun and the other sheep manning a construction site. "It's like having 28 actors who all need to be identical in what they do. Any little hiccup can have huge knock-on effects."

Maisey should be a stressed man, you'd assume listening to all this, but he's not, and this is something you see right the way through a visit to Aardman. The fruit of the orchard is one to be savoured, and there isn't a hint of hyperbole from the man as he tells us how watching back on daily rushes has made him both smile and cry, depending on the scene.

"In The Pirates!, we had to get hand-blown miniature glass goblets made because it has to look real - like down to how the light shines through them. That's the amount of detail we're talking. But it also has to be fun," Maisey says through a well-worn smile.

There is a level of autonomy afforded to the animators in this respect in the form of wink-wink references to other films (in the case of Shaun... 2 and the alien character of Lu-La who turns up on the farm, there are clear nods to sci-fi standards) that they can slip in. In the first Shaun film, there was a concert poster on an alley wall for John Cooper Clarke (after giving his permission, the punk poet requested the poster after filming had wrapped).

Such things keep the production teams amused and engaged during the routinely long and meticulous shoots.

As co-director Will Becher calls it, there is a "hive mind" mentality at work in Aardman to get these productions completed without busting budgets or blood vessels.

The studio mightn't look like a barrel of laughs from the outside, but by the time you've walked through its sets and met those piecing the magic together, the evidence is writ large on the faces (both human and figurine) just how seriously it takes the business of silliness.

Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie opens nationwide on October 18. For more information about Aardman Animations, visit www.aardman.com