Preparation - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 163

a gloriously idyllic pastoral scene; a façade that hides the terrors inside. Floating newspaper
headlines say much about Gilbert and Sullivan while other action is going on. Using such visual
devices, it is easy to convey information about the characters or plot when time is short. All the
plays I have designed give the actors a colourful, almost graphic space to play in, bursting in
and out of invisible doors. An architecturally solid set, with no stylistic tweaking, on stage or in
animation makes my heart sink, as the enormous potential is not realised. In all I do, I make sure
every colour, every prop, every item of set has a reason to be there or makes a comment. If that
reason is that it's just pretty, that's not enough. It has to add to the story or atmosphere or go.
Confessions of a set designer - Matt Sanders
I was lucky have quite an auspicious baptism with animation, building sets for Wallace and Gromit's third
fi lm, A Close Shave . MDF and plaster were transformed into streets of houses, shops and warehouses,
whilst I spent the hot summer of '95 outside, sculpting enormous polystyrene cliff-faces for the climactic
chase scene (and getting a great tan in the process!). I produced most of the country lanes (dry-stone walls
et al.) for that chase scene - only to see it all whiz past the camera at fi fty miles per hour. Many model-
makers will tell you this is a recurring theme of their career - weeks of hard work amounts to mere seconds
on screen - but when the resulting fi lm is as good as that one we're simply proud to have been involved.
This was one of my fi rst opportunities to design elements for animation, including some of the shops, and
the clock tower that Gromit cleans, helped by Wallace with the Sud-U-Like gun. This scene must have
been memorable, because Aardman licensed a company to produce plastic alarm clocks based on my
clock tower - though sadly, my royalty cheque is still lost in the post …
Later came Stage-Fright , an animated short set in a Victorian music hall - we built an impressive
miniature auditorium and stage. This was a great project, and the best part was that in some scenes it
was seen years later in a dilapidated state, so I had the unusual honour of vandalising the set, smashing
the walls, and strewing dust and cobwebs.
I was a team leader on construction for Wallace and Gromit's feature fi lm Curse of the Were-Rabbit , where
everything was done on a much grander scale. Indeed, because there were so many animators, we
needed duplicate copies of many sets - so you wouldn't build one Ferris wheel, but three of them. We
built the church to the same scale as the puppets, plus a smaller copy to appear in the background of
other scenes set in nearby gardens. Often, the streets themselves were made by moulding and casting
complete houses - but sadly there were no short-cuts when it came to painting all those bricks.
I produced many of the more unusual set items, for instance an 'aluminium' greenhouse, made of silicone
rubber with a wire armature cast in, so that it could crush and bend when a car drove into it. And Lady
Tottington's Victorian rooftop conservatory, for which the 'cast iron' frames were actually cast in carbon fi bre.
Again three or four copies were needed, interiors and exteriors, plus a miniature version for long-shots of
the house, and breakable sections for a scene in which the were-rabbit attacked - we like a challenge!
One of the fi rst animated commercials I designed, for Direct Line, called for their red telephone-car
to drive around six miniature street scenes - terraced houses, semis, tenements and docklands fl ats,
etc. - perhaps forty buildings in all. We had three weeks to design and build all this, so I put on my
Rumplestiltskin hat and churned out drawings in the evenings, whilst a team of ten model-makers built
the sets during the day. We were so busy building houses, we didn't have time to make model trees for
the gardens, so we bought some miniature conifers and assorted plants from a garden centre. They