New Wallace and Gromit Episodes Coming Online

chachi5000 noted that CNN is running a story about Aardman releasing Wallace and Gromit Shorts Online. There will be a dozen of the one minute clips featuring the awesome plasticine duo. Also bits about the feature film coming in (sigh) a few years. Anyone who hasn't seen the existing Wallace and Gromit trilogy is missing out.

Now I understand...

...why people were commenting on Wallace and Gromitt in the Powered Suit thread.

Yes, I do live under a rock today. Or rather, I live in a cubicle with limited Internet access. Same difference.

Good old-fashioned animation, eh?

It is nice to know that despite the preponderence of computers in animation today, something that's this "old-school" can still occur (albeit online-only, I guess).

May clay-mation never die.

-J

Woohoo!!

I can't wait, and neither can the kids.

The Wrong Powered Exoskeleton!

Funny, this being right above the article on powered exoskeletons. [slashdot.org] I wonder if they will be remote controlled and able to walk up walls?

Cracking good cheese, Gromit!

Re:The Wrong Powered Exoskeleton!

And not a day since measuring the distance from the Earth to the Moon [slashdot.org] was posted. You KNOW that Wallace is behind this one as well.

There's some good cheese up there, you know.

A few years? Sooner than that...

Ain't it Cool News had a story [aintitcoolnews.com] on this earlier. Looks like the title will be The Great Vegetable Plot and the director is shooting for a release 2 years from now. Here's to hoping it turns out better than Chicken Run, which just rubbed me the wrong way for some reason. *shrug*. I just can't make myself care about the well-being of chickens, which are so darn tasty. ;)

One Minute?

How can anyone accomplish anything in one minute? The real episodes were a little squished into their 40 min frame, and one minute is really pushing it.

But what I really want is Chicken Run 2!

details, details, details

One thing I love about the Wallace and Gromit shorts is their attention to detail. Every scene has interesting little bits in the background -- stuff going on that you might catch on the fourth or fifth viewing. I'm afraid that in stretching things to a full-length feature, some of this will be lost. Chicken Run, while fun enough, disappointed me for exactly this reason. It was kinda funny, and had some amusing references to other movies -- and certainly they put a lot of work into it -- but it just doesn't have the *depth* that Wallace and Gromit do. I hope Nick Park will prove my fears unfounded.

This isn't a live action version , is it?

If it is, the casting is great!

NetNanny and this Article ...

Read the article and enjoyed. Will be funnier than anything to see the inventions.

As I read the last part:

"Park has now expanded the idea to make them into mini-movies where Gromit demonstrates the innovations, which include a high-powered cricket ball bowling gun and a toaster-cum-TV."

I had an idea. I ran to my daughter's room where her PC is protected by Net Nanny and put the url in. No go :-) You gotta love the protection it provides. :-)

nausiating

nick park's animations make me sick just thinking about the amount of tiny movements that he has to make for each second of animation (being in the uk, i guess he's got the advantage that it's 25 rather than 30, but it's still a lot). surely he'd be better off using a 3d modeller, and just animating key frames and then going back and filling in the bits where the key frame interpolation wasn't what he wanted. it's not like there's any advantage of making everything out of plastercine!

it'd also mean no film grain and these online versions would compress better. oh well, maybe ardman are just technologically impaired ;)

oh, and the secret to why they're successful is the stories; not the animation technique[1], as pixar have always pointed out.

[1] see comparisons between shrek and final fantasy

Re:nausiating

it's not like there's any advantage of making everything out of plastercine!

Apparently there is some advantage, otherwise Nick Park wouldn't spend so much time working in plastercine.

I've seen "Wrong Trousers", I've seen "Final Fantasy". Both were created from a different medium (stop animation vs computer graphics). Both movies are great examples of what can be done with the medium.

But Wrong Trousers had a depth to the animation-- There were things going on in the background... the expression on the characters faces... the Pengiun was evil, and you knew it. My 2 year old Nephew knew it.

Final Fantasy was a fun and groundbreaking movie, but it lacked detail. Yes, their hair moved realistically, but the characters were cold, their expressions were hard to read, the background scenes were cluttered and hard to make out. The only reason I could tell that there was any attraction between the lead women & lead man was because of the dialogue. If the mute was on, I couldn't tell you *what* was going on. Not so with the Wallace & Gromit movies...

Comparing those two movies, I would say that there isn't much advantage to using computer animation over plastercine ! (not yet, anyways).

Ever wonder why...

Their American following has never been that great? I mean, humour is humour, and it's just a shame that "Gumby" and "Davey and Goliath" are the only true claymation options that they have...

Re:Ever wonder why...

"I mean, humour is humour"

I think that's the problem right there. In America, humour is humor.

I just hope Feathers McGraw co-stars

that's all...award Karma accordingly.

"Everybody knows that the moon is made of cheese"

According to Wallace, anyway. That ought to be the funniest one-liner from the Wallace and Gromit series. It's from "A grand day out".

These cartoons are perfect for my family: great for the kids, great for my wife, and able to please the geekish sense of humor in me.

My 2-year-old and I rejoice

The Wallace & Gromit trilogy are the only videos my two-year-old and I can both watch, and both enjoy equally. She'll find new things to like about them year after year.

How many things made today can you say that about? (Not a rhetorical question: suggestions please!)

Shorts may be nice, but when will we see...

the Full line of W&G clothing. I mean, people do wear more than just shorts. I think the fashion potential here is fantastic.

Cool!

They already have lots of other stuff here [shockwave.com], at AtomFilms, but this is reallly cool! I love Aardman Animations, they are great! Some of my favorites are Creature Comforts (done by Nick Park) and Pib and Pog (two little kids playing around with sulfuric acid, lol, priceless).

The Title is a Nationality Test.

"The Great Vegetable Plot" :-)

Would Americans get it? They have vegetable patches and Great Schemes.

So let me get this right....

The story seems to be saying that the animations will come on a free CD-ROM, which you stick in your PC. You then surf over to a specific web-site where you download a key to allow you to unlock this weeks episode.

Hmmm, let me guess, get the CD-ROM on the cover of "PC Format", unlock the vac-o-matic episode by visiting dyson.com, bowl-o-matic at nike.com, TV-Toaster at sony.com, well you get the idea. I know they need to pay the bills, but it's a bit much to call them "freely available over the internet".

And how much you want a bet it's Windows only???

What about..

The Wrong Trousers [discover.com]?

Nick Park is a genius...

I first saw Grand Day Out in 1990 at an animation festival in Boston. (Along with a Rug Rats short and something bizarre called Deadsy "You can no play with Deadsy unless you have them great big sex-o-thingies".) I'd never seen anything as funny as Wallace and Gromit, and that mechanical thing they ran into on the Moon had me in stitches. Electronics For Dogs, "Gromit! We've forgotten the crackers!", the "parking brake" on the rocket... just thinking about these moments makes me laugh.

That animation festival also ran Creature Comforts, which isn't as funny, but is its own form of genius: interviews with real people, immigrants from other countries about how they compare London to their home country. Nick Park then made up animations of zoo animals speaking the voices instead of real people. Unique. Unusual. Unforgettable.

For years after that, I looked for Grand Day Out on video tape, but it wasn't until the success of his later shorts that videos became available. Now there's little in my collection I treasure more.

Rock on, Nick Park, rock on!

--Jim

Pease please please

A memo to the powers that be..

Please don't use sorensen codec on these. Give us a good, industry standard, MPEG1 file... Please?

toaster-cum-TV?

Wow, I didn't know a toaster could do all that! I mean, is that the greatest thing since sliced bread or what??

Sorry, couldn't help it. Seriously, is that some kind of British thing? Can someone translate?

Re:toaster-cum-TV?

For all ye to know cum is latin for "with."

This could then translate as "toaster with TV," and all the sexually active minds would stop.

What a notion!

W&G Are A Riot...

They're even more funny if you watch with your language selection set to French. Try it sometime (particularly on the one with the penguin thief and the robotic trousers).

Aardman and CGI

Aardman have produced a couple of CG shorts recently; the first I saw on last year's SIGGRAPH reel featured two posers in a nightclub trying to pick up the same girl, the second is three little plasticene-looking monsters explaining to the camera why they don't have their short film ready in time, and ends with them singing a song dressed as flowers in a desperate attempt to fill time. The later one is VERY hard to tell it's not claymation. They've also used it a fair bit in their TVC work as well as for certain effects in Chicken Run.

I get where people come from when they decry the use of computers in animation these days - sometime I see the quality of 3D kids shows like Beast Wars or Max Steel and I feel like burning my computer in disgust - but the extreme crappiness of a lot of 3D animation is nothing to do with the tools, just a lack of creativity on the part of the production companies. CGI can be used to create stunning imagery [splutterfish.com] and animations [online.no], it's just a shame that as yet most of the stuff the general public sees on TV is just so bad...

Best thing I've read all day

This is great news!

Blummy Days!

For the record

It's good to know my alter ego still has hordes of adoring fans ;)

Reindeer movie

This christmas I saw a funny animated movie about Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer's lazy son trying to earn a place pulling Santa's sledge. It had the same style as the Wallace & Gromit movies, but I can't find any references to it on the Aardman site.
Was it made by the same team?

Wallace & Gromit, Computer Game

Frontier Developments [frontier.co.uk] is apparently working on a Wallace and Grommit game. (Frontier Developments is headed by David Braben, one of the duo who wrote the genre-setting game 'Elite').

Go to Marjacq.com [marjacq.com] and click on the "Developer" menu and then "Frontier Devlopments" to read about it. Not much information there except that they are working on it.

Aardman DVD

There is an Aardman DVD available that has Creature Comforts, the three Wallace and Grommit movies, and a large amount of behind the scenes video footage. I know it exists because I have it in my laptop at the moment. (I commute 2 hours to work, so it pays to have a DVD-ROM in your laptop)

The Reason the /. crowd is interested in W&G

Is because they had a Penguin, sure it was evil, but it showed that penguins are acutaly masterminds who should be feared. Slashdoters rejoyce, someone else understands the greatness of penguins

any oppinions expressed here in are not mine, but the product of me mixed with some booze

more detail

The amount of detail that the animators put into Wallace and Gromit is incredible. You can watch the video repeatedly and find something new. Like the news papers always fortell what the future may contain.

A particularly advanced example of this is the news paper in "A Grand Day Out". If you read it you'll find out about Feathers McGraw who is in The Wrong Trousers which was completed a few years later.

Also, in "A Close Shave" you can see Feathers Was Here written on the Jail cell that Gromit is in. It does seem that Feathers is perhaps one of the most exciting characters that was created.

Consider that it's a bowling ball but from the two blank little eyes you can tell it's evil and it doesn't even have eyebrows but when it rubs the flippers together you can sense it like the evil from Sauron.

Just a small other point, the hole in the eyes of the characters are so that the animators can put a needle in and move the direction that the eyes look.

Hope this has been interesting, informative, insightful and funny ;)

Catch these Hidden Gems?

The hidden gems in W&G are also wonderful. - Grommit reads a newspaper entitled "Dog Reads Paper" - Check out the name of W&G's wash service in "A Close Shave" for a cute pun (too clever to post here!) - Penguin replaces Grommit's framed picture of a bone with a framed picture of a sardine! So many more... if you haven't seen these before, you simply must purchase them!

Chicken Run

For those who don't know them , Chicken Run [imdb.com] is
their most known feature. W&G are short movies, and are funnier IMHO.

W&G digital

It's ironic that a traditional style comics appear online. Is there any possible way of getting the same effect of the W&G films with digital tools?

I love W&G and all the work from Aardman, almost bought is animal interviews, what's is name, yesterday.

one of the best things I ever saw...

A few years ago, I saw a screening of W&G's 'The Wrong Trousers' at a small arts festival over here in Belgium...

The big thing there was that the movie was being 'scored' by a not-very-well-known post-rock-kinda band called de.portables [kraak.net]...

You should have seen it! It rocked like hell, timing was perfect for every scene, for every move... it was very emotional in the scene where Gromit was leaving, suspenseful when Wallace was stealing the diamond, and the train chase scene had to be seen and heard to be believed...

aardman should get in touch with these guys and let them score the vegetable plot movie!!!


But in the mean time, download some of their music (legally) from here [mp3s.com] and from the site mentioned above...

Aardman Portfolio

subtly hidded on the Aardman site under the banner 'Trade' are about 20 commercials plus some clips from movies. Its got some of their recent CG material too. http://www.aardman.com/trade nice flash intro...ahem

HMMMmmmmm

I seems to remember a car race starring the wallace and gromit characters which came out before the 3 famous films. its never mentioned, but it was definatly them. Can anyone point me in any direction for this?

Busy in the commerical industry

They certainly haven't been lax in the commercial industry either. They did some animations for Burger King a few years ago. And I think some of the Shaun's friends from A Close Shave are starring in a mattress commercial (the counting sheep).

As much effort as goes into making one of these animations, they can really put out quite a bit. Glad to see the dynamic duo is coming back.

Re:The Real Question is....

...will they bring back the penguin (I forgot his name) for the movie?

Feathers McGraw, as far as I recall.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:No W&G!

>>Maybe some claymation Dancing Santas in a cameo?

Try "Robbie the Reindeer in Hooves of Fire" for the clamation Santa...

Re:No W&G!

Nick Park (the guy who created and made these characters) is from my home town - Preston, Northern England. He did a talk at our college about 12 years ago. *very* tedious man (monotone as hell) but very clever. He would chat for a bit, rolling some plasticine around his fingers, then five minutes later he's done a little Gromit without even looking and tosses it into the audience. Mine might be worth something one day...

seany