[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jvOTsi3i64&list=SL[/youtube]
Unembeddable…
This morning I was listening to Desert Island Discs on The BBC (radio 4).
It’s a show where they invite the famous to come on and pick ten songs they would take with them to a desert island. Between music cuts, they do an interview.
It’s a clever idea, befitting The BBC and Radio 4.
This morning’s guest was Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit.
Americans may be familiar with two of Nick Park’s Hollywood versions of the Wallace and Gromit series – Chicken Run and Weir Rabbit.
Neither does justice to Park and his genius.
His US studio, Dreamworks, never really understood the unique ‘Britishness’ that made Wallace and Gromit so endearing.
Mickey Mouse he was not.
For some reason, Aardman, the studio that produced the original Wallace and Gromit series does not allow them to embedded, so I am providing a few links so you can see what they’re really like.
A Grand Day Out – this was Nick Park’s first film.
What makes these so interesting to us is that Nick Park made the first Wallace and Gromit claymation film when he was a student at The National Film and Televisoin School.
In his BBC interview today he said that he had the original idea to try and make a stop-motion claymation film and he wrote to the Plasticine company to ask for some free plasticine. They sent him nearly a ton of the stuff – for free. It took him 7 years to finish the first film and the characters of both Wallace and Gromit emerged as he made the first film,
He did this all on his own. He was not a part of a studio. He followed his own very personal and very eccletic vision.
The result was pure genius.
Since his school days, Park has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards and won 4. He has also won a raft of BAFTAs and been awarded a CBE.
Can you create your own personal vision in video and go on to great success? I think so.
I think we see it over and over.
But we rarely see it with a dog who has no mouth.
