CMU School of Drama


Monday, February 12, 2018

Organizing a Stop-Motion Film Production at Aardman Animations

Tested: Adam Savage visits Aardman Animations, where the studio is in production for its new film Early Man. A stop-motion film production requires many departments to work together to film dozens of scenes concurrently--so how is all of this organized? In chatting with Early Man's first Assistant Director Ben Barrowman, Adam learns how a sprawling film production is kept on track for its filming deadlines!

2 comments:

Ella R said...

What a cool video! Stop motion is an incredible feat. Each individual scene had its own production going on. This video was so insightful into the ways of the original form of animation. I find the calendar schedule very funny because I feel like their calendar schedule has the madness and crazy organization that our Production Calendar has. The interviewer said something that reminds me of Production Technology Management class actually. “The idea is to use all of your resources.” A huge part of the success of a production is their ability to utilize all the possible resources for all long as one has them. The organizational tactics of this production is incredible. In addition, the ability for their calendar to have flexibility although it is a very tight schedule shows that this company obvious thinks about all possible positive and negative ways a production could run. This video was very revealing and also just super duper cool.

Mary Emily Landers said...

The production of stop motion animation is so incredible. For one, the idea of so many teams working on this one film at once is absolutely insane, but also makes so much sense due to the meticulous nature of the process. Also, this strict, yet flexible scheduling is so intense but so unique. The structure of the schedule is very tight and meticulous in its placement, even months into the process. The physical way everything is done out, from the rubber bands to signify jumps in jobs to the actual clips of story board on the board, is absolutely incredible. I can definitely see the detail it takes to do a job like that and the way you have to account for everything. In the mind of a manager, my biggest fear would be that a leak would happen or some accidental fire and all of the physical work be destroyed.