In this week’s episode of The Screen Podcast, Aardman co-founder Peter Lord discusses 50 years of the historic UK animation company. Listen below
In this week’s episode of The Screen Podcast, Aardman co-founder Peter Lord discusses 50 years of the historic UK animation company.
Listen below or click on the image above to watch.
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Ahead of the Annecy film festival, senior international reporter Ben Dalton speaks to Lord about co-founding the Bristol-based company with David Sproxton over 50 years ago and their decision to become an employee-owned business in 2018.
“The conventional thing for Dave and me to do, as we approach retirement, we’d flog the company off to somebody and then retire to Tuscany and live in the palace,” Lord joked.
”We really didn’t want to do that because, as I said to the company at the time, our main reason is because we love the company.”
The animator, whose credits include Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run, also discussed AI and how much Aardman would embrace the modern technology.
“When CGI became dominant, which is now a long time ago anyway, there was a time when people said, ’Well, what Aardman do is now obsolete, you know, because it can all be done with CGI’,” Lord explained.
“And we took that seriously. We do quite a lot of CGI within the company, in support of our main business, which is stop frame, which is handmade. So I think that’s my approach with AI.”
The Screen Podcast is produced by Ellie Calnan, with Wendy Mitchell serving as editorial director. New episodes every Thursday.
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