Creature Comforts Stop Motion Animation

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’.