Cinema & The Arts as Sermons: A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman

Video from Aardman Productions

A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman

"Narrated by Julie Walters, the program looks at Aardman’s multi award winning work across film, TV and advertising including all the much loved characters from Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, Morph and Creature Comforts." from video introduction.

Ok I know you need to laugh!

My favorite is "Shawn the Sheep" Here's an example:

Vide from Aardman Animations

"Peter Lord and David Sproxton began their animating partnership at school. In 1972 they registered the name Aardman Animations. After graduating, they moved to Bristol in 1976 where they produced their first professional production, creating Morph for the children’s programme 'Take Hart'. from the website.

Aardman Productions website (link)

"Aardman Animations is a prolific Academy Award winning British animation and multimedia studio founded by David Sproxton and Peter Lord in 1975, primarily known for their distinct brand of Stop Motion Animation and British sense of humour.

It began, as most successes have, in a garage. The studio's name comes from the title of Sproxton and Lord's first traditionally-animated short, "The Aardman", about a superhero who evoked stereotypical western English machoism, i.e. an "'ard man".note When it came time to deposit their cheque for the film, they realized they needed to create a new bank account for it, which became the Aardman Animation account. Several other films commissioned by The BBC, as well as hugely popular TV ads, would follow throughout the decades.

In the '80s, they began by producing The Amazing Adventures of Morph, a claymation series of children's shorts. Around this time, they hired a fresh-faced film school student named Nick Park to work for them on Peter Gabriel's famed "Sledgehammer" video while he finished his thesis film, A Grand Day Out. Park not only earned the studio its first Academy Award with Creature Comforts (which was nominated against A Grand Day Out), but the characters from his thesis would become the first of the studio's Flagship Franchise, Wallace & Gromit, for which they would later produce three more shorts and a feature film, earning several more Oscars in the process.

Aardman would break into feature films at the dawn of the 21st century and have worked with a rotating cast of American distributors. Their first and most successful three were made in collaboration with DreamWorks Animation, followed by two films with Sony Pictures Animation, a split due to diminishing returns, then two with Lionsgate followed by another split due to diminishing returns. As of this writing, their latest partner is Netflix, with an exclusive new series of Shaun the Sheep specials, a sequel to Chicken Run and a new Wallace & Gromit film, amongst other projects, being produced as part of the deal.

They have also done the English dubs for the Belgian-produced A Town Called Panic." from the article: Creator / Aardman Animations

Ok you can laugh now!

#extraordinarygod