artist research

Nick Park



Nick park is a film maker for stop motion animation, best known for the making of wallace and grommit, shaun the sheep. 'A grand day out' was the first of the wallace and grommit films, where wallace builds a rocket in his garage and flys to the moon. With 'A gtand day out' in post production, he made 'creature comforts' as his contribution to a series of shorts called 'lip synch'. Creature comforts matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about there homes.The two films were for a host of awards.


Two more wallace and grommit films were later produced, 'The Wrong Trousers' and 'A Close Shave' both of these winning oscar's. He then made his first feature length film, 'Chicken Run', 2000. He also supervised a new series of 'creature comforts' for television in 2003.


His second feature length film was 'wallace and Grommit, curse of the were-rabbit', which was released 5 october 2005. Later won best animated feature Oscar at the 78th academy awards in 2006.


Screenshot of creature comforts

experimentation and tutorials

Importing sound

 First off you got to create a layer for your sound to go on, then drag your sound file into your library.

Once dragged in select the layer you want it to go into and create a blank keyframe where you want it to go (f7) then drag it into your document from the library and it wil be in place. You can move it around the timeline by highlighting it and moving it.

Experimentation with onion skinning

What I found out by experimenting at home with onion skinning is that, if you place the heads of your stick men on a seperate layer to their bodies it becomes much easier. Also it keeps everythign the right size and isnt too difficult. So as you can see with the screenshot above I've got my background layer as the layer one, then above I've got the bodys layer, then above that I've got my heads layer.