Creature Comforts Stop Motion Animation
Creature Comforts was originally a British
humorous animated short film about how animals feel about living in a zoo in 1989,
featuring the voices of the British public which had been given to various
animated animals. Nick Park alongside Aardman Animations created and
established it.
Creature comforts went around the country
interviewing all types of people weather they be foreign, religious, small,
large, high/low pitched, old or young.
They recorded all the interviews, which are
not scripted and rely soley on what the person says.
When starting up creature comforts they
went with the use of plaster-scene stop motion animation instead of computer
animation because they felt that they could get across the emotions and
expression’s of the characters much more clearly. They began to see that the
stranger and more foreign the voice the wider range of animals and situations
could be used.
The amount of preparation that went into
each episode was outstanding; they had the initial interview, which was not
edited at all, followed by the creation of the characters, followed by the crew
acting out the scene whilst lip sinking the voice to show how the act would
come together, then lip sinking the interview with the created chosen
characters and whilst getting all of the scales/proportions correct. This was a
huge amount of work, they also when measuring proportions had to evaluate the
size of the set and the animals themselves, if they had a full sized German
Shepard to create that out of plaster-scene could way up to 300 pounds, so
obviously they had to be scaled down to the write size for convenience.
By the end they had over 600 hours of
recorded interviews, which contained embarrassing, personal, boring and
outrageous knowledge. The interviewers realized that people began to open up in
the interviews and almost ‘get a load of their chest’.