Nick Park
Nick Park
Nicholas Wulstan "Nick" Park, CBE is an English director, writer, and animator best known as the creator of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. Park has been nominated for an Academy Award a total of six times, and won four with Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 December 1958
cartoon lived pile school strips understand yours
My dream was to draw for 'The Beano.' When I was 10 years old, I started drawing cartoon strips with 'The Beano' in mind. I lived in that world. You own a comic, it's yours and adults don't understand it. You could pile them up under the bed, and if you were off school ill, you'd go through them all.
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We're both absolutely delighted. We're over the moon.
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We could have done the Were-Rabbit in CGI. But we chose not to because I find with traditional (stop-motion) techniques and clay there is a certain magic that happens whenever the frame is hand-manipulated. I just love clay; it's an expression.
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With the success of three half-hour shows behind us, it seemed a natural step to go for a feature film,
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Mainstream animated movies are dumbed-down and sanitised: they make the world in their own image rather than exploring the limitless possibilities that are out there.
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It's very hard to adapt something. You end up changing it too much to make a good movie out of it. I prefer to work with things that are custom made for my kind of animation.
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I love doing features, but it's a very different ballgame. Sometimes I yearn for short films again, working with a small team, getting my hands on the clay.
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As I get on and films take four years to complete, I tend to have a hankering for very short projects so you can move on to the next idea. It's the ideas I'm interested in. What comes out of your head.
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There is no worse situation to be in than Oscar night. Not knowing whether you've won is completely draining.
school
I used to get in trouble at school for day-dreaming.
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When we first sold the Wallace and Gromit shorts to America, people suggested we get rid of the strange British accents and put clear American voices on them, and we held out.
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My colleagues and I have to constantly remind each other that we must keep our own view on the world while making films. With 'Chicken Run,' we learned how easy it is to be influenced by outside forces, but you mustn't lose the heart and soul of what you are doing.
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I went back over the sketch books I'd filled at Sheffield for ideas and discovered Wallace and Gromit, except Gromit was a cat then. I made them into Plasticene shapes and started 'A Grand Day Out.' It took me longer than I expected.
chamber clay floating glass inside provided slow
We actually provided a clay bunny, and he was scanned into a computer, fingerprints and all, ... And then he was cloned many times so they could show them all floating around inside the glass chamber in slow motion.