'Wallace & Gromit' creators turn 50 with spook-tacular Shaun yarn

Animators at this basement studio huddle around tiny sets, bringing to life the latest adventures of Shaun the Sheep. Scheduled for release in mid-September, this film will mark the 50th anniversary of Aardman Animations. The Bristol-based studio has won audiences' hearts for decades, with titles including Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit, and winning four Oscars along the way. In a film industry flooded with computer-generated effects, Aardman is looking to bring their signature claymation style to new generations. The whole world changes around us, but there's lots of things that stay the same at Aardman. Maybe that's partly what people like about it, there's a familiarity to it. The studio has stayed true to its roots in stop-motion animation. For each film, designers painstakingly create miniature clay figurines. Animators then manipulate them on set, creating the film one frame at a time. It's a meticulous process as old as cinema itself. To animate them, we have to literally move them a tiny bit at a time and take a picture. So we're working with 24 frames to make a second. An animator on most of our feature films will only be doing maybe a second or two a day, depending on what their shot is. A finished film at Aardman is made up of around 100,000 stop-motion frames. With each one made by hand, it's a testament to the enduring appeal of the studio's craftsmanship and its cast of endearing characters.