Aardman Animations Ltd. - Kitchen Table Animators in the 1970s

Kitchen Table Animators in the 1970s

Peter Lord and David Sproxton met in school in Woking, England, in the late 1960s and began making short animated films using Sproxton's father's 16mm camera. The pair were initially influenced by the animation techniques of Terry Gilliam for the acclaimed BBC series Monty Python's Flying Circus.-Yet the clay-based animation techniques pioneered by the legendary Ray Harryhausen—whose work was featured in such film classics as The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, One Million Years B.C., and Jason and the Argonauts—provided the strongest influence on Lord and Sproxton's own developing style.

Lord and Sproxton initially worked on the Lord family's kitchen table, using Lord's drawings and cutouts from magazines to produce their first film, titled Trash, after the Andy Warhol film of the same era. Sproxton's father then showed the film to an acquaintance, a producer at the BBC, who asked to see more of the boys' work. As Sproxton told the Independent: "He said to us: 'Here's a roll of film, if we like what you do, we'll buy a sequence off you.'"

Sproxton and Lord set to work developing the new film, and in 1972 created an "idiotic superman" called Aardman (supposedly an Afrikaans word meaning "earth pig"). That film was subsequently purchased by the BBC and broadcast as part of a series of animated films. Sproxton and Lord then went off to university, with Sproxton studying geography in Durham, and Lord studying English in York. The pair met up again during the summers and continued making animated films.

Adopting the "company" name Aardman Animations, Lord and Sproxton began producing short films for Vision On, a television program for deaf children produced at the BBC Bristol station. It was during this time that Aardman began specializing in working with plasticine clay, in part because that medium had been largely ignored in English animation circles. The success of this early work led to a request from the station for a new animated character to act as a foil for the program.

In response, Lord and Sproxton created Morph in 1976, a small humanlike figure that, as its name suggested, could adopt a variety of forms—or none at all. The pair moved to Bristol to be closer to the BBC studios, officially launching Aardman Animations. The success of the Morph character led to the commissioning of a larger series of 26 five-minute episodes that aired between 1981 and 1983.

While Morph helped establish the Aardman name among the United Kingdom's top children's animators, Lord and Sproxton sought to attract a wider, and especially, adult audience. In 1978, the company received a new commission, again from BBC Bristol, for two short films to be aired in the late night segment. For that project, Aardman launched its Animated Conversations concept.

For these films, Aardman used recordings of actual conversations, and then created clay-based animated films to "act out" the dialogue—a radical departure from the standard animated films of the day. The company completed the two films, Down and Out and Confessions of a Foyer Girl, yet the films were ultimately rejected by the BBC. Instead, they came to the attention of Jeremy Isaacs, then in the process of launching the United Kingdom's first independent television station, Channel 4. The new station liked what it saw and Aardman received a new commission, now for a series of five "Conversation Pieces," which aired between 1982 and 1983.

Aardman's work for Channel 4 brought the company to the attention of a new and unexpected market: England's advertising community. As Lord told Campaign: "We never intended to get into advertising. I mean, if we had, I don't suppose we'd have ever set up the studio in Bristol for a start." Nonetheless, the Aardman group quickly learned to appreciate the income, as well as the technical challenges, brought by advertising campaigns for Enterprise Computers, in 1984, and for Scotch Videotape, Lurpak Butter, Domestos bleach, Perrier, and many others through the mid-1980s. With a new source of revenue, the company began investing in upgraded equipment and studios.

Joining Aardman at this time was a young animation student, Nick Park, who had been working on completing his thesis film, A Grand Day Out, featuring the man-and-dog team Wallace and Gromit. Park had been working with animation since childhood, and at the age of 13 had already seen his first film aired on the BBC. Impressed by Park's talent, and particularly his attention to sound (Park had spent most of the budget for his film in hiring a 22-piece brass band to perform the theme music), Lord and Sproxton brought Park in to help on their growing list of projects. In return, they agreed to help Park finish his own film.