MEET THE ARTIST: Julian Clark

By Observer Staff
| 1:01 a.m. January 22, 2015

Arts + Entertainment
Arts + Culture

We all love a great stop-motion movie, and British-based Aardman Studios, producers of “Wallace and Gromit” and “Shaun the Sheep” make some of the best.

But did you know that inside many of the on-screen characters is a handmade skeleton called an armature?

With nearly 20 years of experience in sculpting, model making, precision engineering and product design and development, Julian Clark is one of the world’s top armature artists.

Inspired by the release of the “Shaun the Sheep” movie around the world this year, West Orange film students Laura Hamaric and Wyatt Parks scooped the first U.S. interview with Clark to find out how he helps brings some of our favorite animated characters to life.

WYATT: What inspired you to start making armatures?

JULIAN: I just love creating things ever since I was a boy. So what got me into armatures was a bit of a chance happening, actually. I’ve been a sculptor by trade since I can remember, so I was sculpting the little characters — the models — that the animators would work from. And I got into the armatures because I was always engineering-minded and I was in a job where I was building camera systems that go into planes — like Google Maps and Google Earth — the camera systems that hang out of the bottom of planes. Basically, it was all engineering on a big scale, and it then just got me into doing what I love with the animation and using that experience to create and designing metal parts and working things. But yeah, I just love creating things.

LAURA: Do you create individual armatures for each character?

JULIAN: Yes, in the animation industry, you’ve got scales that a lot of studios stick to — like a 9-inch scale or 12-inch scale puppet — which can cover a lot of characters. But when you’ve got a film that has a certain theme going, like “Aardman,” for example, they do love their short and chubby squat characters which don’t follow normal anatomy; everyone has to be different. You can have big shoulders on little skinny people. So the fun bit is trying to get every armature to match every character. It’s a lot of fun; a lot of late nights, as well.

WYATT: Did they use armatures in “Wallace and Gromit?”

JULIAN: Yes, they did. The very first one which a chap called Nick Park had kind of done pretty much on his own on a very small student budget but he still managed to use armatures — very basic and rudimentary. But of course, as those films progressed and he had done a lot of TV specials, the armatures got more and more sophisticated.

LAURA: What’s the process for turning the metal “skeleton” into a sheep?

JULIAN: Say for example Shaun the Sheep: the process is longwinded. It takes a lot of time; with the main characters, they kinda got to look at what part of the body will be used a lot and what they’ve got to do in certain shots. Shaun the Sheep, for example — there’s not just one, there’s a lot. I think on the film, they had about 16 or 17, but some are designed to do different things.

The legs are actually wire armatures, because they’re very flexible and bendy and all over the place, but they do have a ball-and-socket core. The actual fleece itself is a fleecy material, which actually makes it difficult to animate because it moves, and it’s very difficult for the animators to create a smooth animation with it, but that’s a sheep for you, I suppose.

WYATT: What’s your favorite film and why?

JULIAN: Oh wow, there’s hundreds. I still love “ParaNorman,” simply because it’s not only visually beautiful, but they managed to bring something that is quite an old industry and they bought it up to date using technology but still paying homage to the whole handmade, ultra-realistic building but with 3-D printing.

LAURA: What advice do you have for students wanting to get involved in stop-motion/animation?

JULIAN: Lots and lots of patience. Don’t be afraid to be creative. You don’t need to be a brilliant artist. You don’t have to be brilliant at sculpting. You don’t need to be top of the class for understanding anatomy, for example. It’s how you can portray emotions in characters, and that’s what it boils down to. It’s a lot of practice, and it’s just letting your creative side ... just let it loose. I’ve seen great animations by people that can only really draw stick men or sculpt little plasticine lumps, but the way they animate is incredible. But yeah, it’s a lot of patience and practice.

WYATT: How long does it take to make the creatures for Shaun the Sheep?

JULIAN: The whole process can take months per character, but that’s taking it from a design stage right to the point where it’s ready to animate. But once you’ve got a physical armature, it normally takes about 10 days to get that complete with a foam latex skin, which is incredibly difficult. They basically bake it in an oven to create a skin, then, they put clothing on it. But I can turn puppets around in a couple of days. It depends really on what they’re doing in the film.

LAURA: How did they do all this before the armatures were invented?

JULIAN: Well, armatures have been around since day one. The late Ray Harryhausen, he kind of pioneered armatures, but they were very basic, rudimentary armatures for the dinosaur movies that he worked on, “King Kong,” etc. Very bulky, but they pretty much started like that, so from day one, it has been like that but, of course, very expensive and very difficult to produce, so for small studios to get by using armatures it was quite difficult, and that was like that up until 15 years ago.

Really only the past five years have (filmmakers) been able to spend couple hundred dollars and get themselves a ball-and-socket armature. That’s because of me and a couple of other companies around the world that do armature kits and things like that, so it lets people start producing good-quality animation without spending thousands and thousands of dollars.

WYATT: So why are the skeletons called armatures?

JULIAN: The word armature is something mechanical that moves. It really is as simple as that. It’s something that’s mechanical that’s moved through either hand or machine. Part of a clock includes an armature; it’s just a moving mechanical item.