With Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl in cinemas and set to debut on TV on Christmas Day, TVBEurope reveals some interesting facts about the film’s production.
According to the film’s co-director Nick Park, advances in technology since he made The Wrong Trousers meant the production team were able to do things that weren’t possible in 1993.
“We embrace the technology,” he said, “as it helps us expand the world. For example, there’s a lot of water in this film, and we couldn’t do it all with clingfilm like we used to!”
The water effects for the canal sequence at the climax were custom-made in-house by Aardman’s CGI team.
“We’ve got stop motion which is one of the oldest crafts in cinema,” added co-director Merlin Crossingham, “but we’re fusing it with some of the latest cutting edge production technology. We can ask for visual effects that we wouldn’t have dreamt of asking for even a few years ago.
“But the fundamental philosophy is to ask ‘Can we do it in front of camera?’, that’s always the first question. And if we can’t, then what’s the solution?”
Key facts from the film:
- The crew totalled over 200, with over 40 units [individual sets within the studio], 32 animators each producing up to 5 seconds of animation a week, and eleven different teams: production, story, editorial, puppets, art department, animation, rigging, camera, lighting, motion control and VFX.
- Actor Ben Whitehead recorded 22.5 hours of takes for Wallace’s dialogue.
- The line which had the most takes was Wallace’s “I was grabbed by the Norbots!…Very unpleasant experience!”, which was recorded in 44 different ways.
- In total, 432 lines of dialogue were recorded to create the film which took the directors 216 hours to select the final versions.
- The water in Wallace’s opening water-slide scene is made from replacement resin pieces, while the bubbles in his bath were created with glass beads stuck to foam and wax.
- The Kitten puppet re-uses the eyes from the Ginger puppet in Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget.
- In total, the uppet department created 750 hands for the various Norbot puppets.
- A total of 600 eyes were created for the different characters in the film.
- Feathers McGraw’s eyes are black glass pin-heads – the puppet department had to go through 50 pots of pins to find enough that were exactly 2.77mm in diameter for the 11 identical Feathers puppets.
- There were 10 Norbot puppets with 20 interchangeable heads. The Norbot puppets are a mixture of silicon, resin and 3D printing.
