Co-Directors Discuss Shaun

Messrs Burton and Starzak talk about tandem work routines:

Richard Starzak: There was no real separation until production. We worked on the script equally. ...

Mark Burton: We had a traffic light system, which is, “Red light means we have to work together on it. Green light you can go ahead and do it,” and by the time we got to the second half of the movie, we were much more relaxed about it. ...

Richard Starzak: It was a 10-month shoot. I think a month or two in, we had an easy rhythm. There’s a yin and yang element to it, but I think we both equally contributed to the script. ...

It kind of varies between 12 or 25 movements, or frames, per second and so that per animator we were expecting them to do about two plus seconds a day. Again that’s quite fast, but we had the advantage of no dialogue so we could work a bit faster. ...

Mark Burton: It’s a trial and error exploration, in terms of how it all hangs together. ... You’re constantly watching the film. ... What you do is you sort of throw the film up and you’re constantly watching it in very basic form. If stuff is working on the animatic, then you have a good sense that it should work when you actually animate. ....

All animated features have similarities. They get boarded and put on story reels. Most are scripted. The differences, of course, come in the way they move through production.

Hand-drawn features have people working over light-boards or Cintiqs with their drawing instruments, creating characters and environments in two dimensions. The process used to be analog, with cameras, painted backgrounds and painted cels. Now much (all?) of the pipeline is digital.

CG features also have animators, lighters, surfacers, and programmers creating their movies on computers.



Only stop motion animation remains much as it was when King Kong was tromping through the undergrowth on a miniature set, terrorizing Faye Wray. Shaun the Sheep, like every stop-motion feature and short before it, existed in time and space while it was made, with small physical characters in their small physical environments. Shaun had 12 to 20 setups going at any given time. with Burton and Starzak orchestrating (and molding) the movies progress.

The fact that they were doing it much the way Willis O'Brien did the same thing 80-plus years ago is a credit to the durability of the art-form.