Andy Bailey can still remember watching the first Chicken Run film in the cinema.
"I was just so excited by the whole thing, the animation and all the miniatures," he says.
"It was before I was really in film school, but as the credits rolled by I was like, 'Someday I want to be working on a movie like that'."
Twenty three years later, Andy has had the "mind-blowing" opportunity to work with the stop-motion powerhouse Aardman on Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, achieving something he "had dreamed of being able to do".
The Vancouver-based dad of three boys (and surely the winner of bring-your-dad-to-school-day) is also known for his viral YouTube account Andymation, where he hones in on the art of the flipbook, and his work on Laika studio hits including ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls.
We asked Andy the question he always gets asked — how do you find the patience? — along with a bunch of our other stop-motion wonderings. These are his words.
'Stop motion grabbed me'
When I saw claymation and stop motion for the first time I think it grabbed me because as a young kid, it felt like something that I could maybe do. I kind of understood the principle of how it was made, and that I didn't have to be a great artist like the level of Disney movies.
I wasn't able to do a lot because we didn't own a camcorder, but my parents did have an old Super 8 film camera, which had a feature where it could shoot one frame at a time.
That was amazing for me, because I could go outside and set it up on the sidewalk and make some figures move around and play with it that way.
I had these worm-shaped clay figures that I used to make, and I had this one who would kind of ride a skateboard.
It wasn't really a plot, but I feel like as a child it's easier to have that kind of mindset, where you don't overthink it.
It was also interesting shooting that way because there was no instant feedback to what you were doing. There was no preview.
I would shoot on film, send it off to get developed, and I wouldn't see what it actually looked like for a couple of weeks.
There was all this excitement around actually getting the roll of film back and putting it on the projector and seeing it up on the screen for the first time.
'Animators press the heads by hand'
It was really exciting getting that call [from Aardman] to come and work on the new Chicken Run.
My whole family and I moved over to the UK for six months. It was four months on the movie, and then we got to travel and see a bit of Europe also.
In those months, I worked on a handful of shots. It wasn't like I got to do an entire scene or anything like that, because doing something like a couple of seconds of the film in a day would be kind of normal.
The dialogue is already there, pre-recorded, so that you know what to animate to. You first meet with the director, who will brief you on what shot they're putting you on.
Then you go into your unit and you do rehearsal, where you'll roughly do the shot once just to hit your key poses. Then you'll talk over any changes and get launched on the actual shot.
3D printing is definitely being incorporated a lot more — in Laika [films], the faces, the brows and the mouths are 3D printed — whereas on Chicken Run, the heads are still clay.
There's a whole team of assistant animators who press the heads by hand and make all the clay mouths over and over. They have moulds that they use, but it is a lot of handiwork still.
There's metal armature inside the bodies with joints, [covered in] like a silicone rubber. Then from the neck up, it's clay.
We have a whole mouth kit. It's a box full of all the different mouth shapes — there's an E shape and an S shape and a TH and an L and an O.
Depending on what sound the character's making, you'll pop the mouth off and put on a different shape. And because it's clay, while you've got those prebuilt expressions, you can still modify and tweak them a little bit as you're easing in and out of a shape.
Every time you put a mouth on or off, you'll have to blend it in a little bit, because there's usually some sort of a seam. I usually use my fingers or baby wipes, just to smooth over that edge.
'You get into the zone'
Usually when people find out what I do they say, "You must be very patient".
But I'm not really. There's this kind of artistic focus that happens, where you get into the zone.
Some shots take so much focus and attention that I just need the quiet, but other times it's a little bit easier, and I can have a TV show or some music or something in the background.
Getting to play with these miniature things and having them perform and make them look like they're alive, or having emotions, it's really satisfying.
Animation is interesting because you're trying to convey the magic of those performances, and that acting. You spend years doing what in live action would just happen right away.
I always struggled with being painfully shy as a kid, and I wonder if that was something that drew me to stop-motion animation too.
Because in a sense, it feels like I'm the actor in the movie, but I'm invisible. It means I get to perform, but it's like wearing a mask.
I feel like there's a timelessness with stop motion. It's not always the smoothest animation — you get some chattering and stuff like fur jitters around. But somehow it's part of the charm, and it never looks dated to me.
Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is on Netflix now.
Quotes have been altered slightly for clarity and brevity.
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2023-12-14 21:23:26Z
CBMiamh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIzLTEyLTE1L2FuZHltYXRpb24tY2hpY2tlbi1ydW4tYWFyZG1hbi1kYXduLW9mLXRoZS1udWdnZXQtbmV0ZmxpeC8xMDMyMTkzNzLSAShodHRwczovL2FtcC5hYmMubmV0LmF1L2FydGljbGUvMTAzMjE5Mzcy
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