26/11/2020 Animators research

Nick Park

Nick Park is a British animator who was best known for his stop motion animation. His most known work for writing, directing and animating the Wallace and Gromit franchise. He was born in 1958. As a child he grew up with a passion of drawing cartoons, and at 13 he made short films with the help of his mother. In 1985 he joined Aardman Animations and worked as an animator for commercial products. In 1989 he finally completed the first film in the Wallace and Gromit franchise which was 'Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out'. It won many awards and when the next two films were released they also won two Oscars. After this he made his first feature length film 'Chicken Run'. His most recent film was 'Shaun The Sheep: Farmageddon'. His films mostly involve stop motion and each frame is hand touched to move objects and models, they could be very stressful and tiring to make and needed a lot of patience, this is mostly why his first few films were shorter compared to feature length films.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are American actors, voice actors, animators and writers. They're most well known and successful creation is 'South Park'. In the pilot of 'South Park' the animation was made by using cutouts and stop motion animation, its very noticeable when you look specifically at the animation. However they later used computer animation but still kept the feeling of stop motion with paper cutouts and tried to mimic it. Episodes usually have three stages of production involving storyboard sketches (still keeping the style of the series by using basic shapes), then they use stock character models and then end it with the fully rendered and animated product.

Stephen Hillenburg

Stephen Hillenburg was an American animator and a marine science educator. He didn't get into animation till his early 30s. Is first big project was a show called 'Rockos Modern Life' which premiered on Nickelodeon in 1992. He then later pitched an idea for a show about a talking sea sponge to Nickelodeon which later on went on to be one of the most if not the most successful and well known animated shows in History. 'Spongebob Squarepants' premiered on nickelodeon in 1999 and still runs to this day even after Hillenburg's death in 2018. Spongebob still goes on to be a successful series to this day, the franchise has had 3 movies with the latest one coming out November of 2020 and will later get a spin off series which will be a prequel to the original series featuring the main cast as kids. However Hillenburg never wanted to do a Spongebob spin off seires, he simply refused when Nickelodeon proposed the idea. But after his death in 2018, Nickelodeon have chosen to make a spin off since they are now in charge of the seires.