Animated Adventures Exhibition

Most people will have seen something of Wallace and Gromit over the years. Before I went to this exhibition about all I knew of the way that they were animated was that they were based around plaster sine models that had interchangeable mouths to get the right shape according to the sound that the character was making. The exhibition showed the process from the initial concept drawings through to the animation of these two famous and a few of the studios other characters. The first thing I noticed was how amazing the initial illustrations were, most people will roughly sketch out stick figures of where they want things, but all of these could clearly be linked to scenes in the film.


I loved seeing the different stages of a figure being constructed; the photo I have shown above was one of the Ware Rabbit taking shape. The wire frame is used to build around and in a way restrict the proportions of the character and the way it can move, to prevent this altering too much throughout the film. The time and detail that had gone into each stage was fantastic, I have read somewhere that it can take a whole day to create just two seconds of finished film, it’s amazing to think of the dedication it would take to finish the final 85 minutes.

The exhibition itself had so many different aspects; there were the things you would expect such as the written boards documenting the process from start to finish along with videos of the models being made. But there were also set models, and interactive parts where you could add your own sound effects to a pre done animation or create your own motion sequence with a still set camera and a range of plastic figures and scenes. Another thing I really liked was the fact that they had used the 3D glasses technique but with scenes from the film, these were put inside an interior lit building from the set with the red and blue lenses inlaid. In a way this film showed something of the film, either intentionally or not in that the level of detail is everywhere.


You could really appreciate the time and effort that had gone into both the film and exhibition; I have not actually seen the film myself but think after going to this I will try and look it out. The main thing that this has shown me is how important the little details are, even the newspapers have writing on and the store windows are all constructed. Although I don’t for one minute think that I could produce anything like these results, I think it would be really interesting to explore this and other types of animation in the future.