„Look under your seat please, maybe you will find something“ – this is how the Aardman Night began on Friday the 4th of November 2016. Following this, all 330 guests in the sold out ball hall in the Schaubühne Lindenfels looked under their chairs hectically. Soon two happy guests found free tickets for the Frankfurt film museum, where Shaun the Sheep and Wallace and Gromit are exhibited.
David Sproxton, co-founder of Aardman Animations, then entered the stage and the show began. The 62-year old Brit presented old and new pictures of the Aadman crew, who stand behind films such as Chicken Run and co. With a very self-ironic ton, he gave great insights into the clay character factory. He told the story of how he got his first camera as a teenager and immediately produced his first stop-motion-video with Peter Lord, his partner until today. The film was also shown in Lindenfels. Confident, he provided insight into the other projects from the first years and explained where the company’s name comes from: The animation studios were named after the lanky superhero Aardman, who in 2-D in the beginning, still moved through a hand drawn world. However, Sproxton also brought the long-living clay character Morph with him; he was standing right next to Timmy, the sheep, Wallace and Gromit, the pirate captain and Rocky the Chicken on stage. Sproxton, who was long time in charge of light and camera at Aardman, talked a lot about the background and production and his ambivalent experiences with the American market. The American humor is just a bit different than the European, as Sproxton explains. Not only because of this, does he see Aardman Animations – even though Brexit – as European.
He also gave a closer look into his family and made clear that his father, who worked for BBC, and his mother, who was an artist, played a big role in his career choice. He praised his colleagues Nick Park and Peter Lord. The success of Aardman is really due to their creativeness. As a crazy person you could really make a lot of money at Aardman Sproxton concludes.
