Words matter. These are the best Nick Park Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I love doing features, but it’s a very different ballgame. Sometimes I yearn for short films again, working with a small team, getting my hands on the clay.
The best films come about through experimentation.
When I was a teenager, my dad watched my films and told me I could go to art college and study animation. He made me see that I could do this for a living.
I’m always there at home thinking of Wallace and Gromit ideas.
We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.
My father, an architectural photographer, was an incurable tinkerer, maker and mender.
I always considered Ray Harryhausen’s work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.
When we first sold the Wallace and Gromit shorts to America, people suggested we get rid of the strange British accents and put clear American voices on them, and we held out.
We have to look forward and keep filming new films and not get stuck in the past.
There is something about the Australian psyche that seems to like films that are slightly offbeat.
But I think people see ‘Wallace and Gromit’ as something akin to an elderly couple. These two know each other so well. Nothing can split them apart.
Mainstream animated movies are dumbed-down and sanitised: they make the world in their own image rather than exploring the limitless possibilities that are out there.
Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.
Americans like the British kind of quirkiness and the strange accent. They find it kind of cute or something, with a certain charm.
I have to admit to not being the greatest technician, but stop motion animation gives me licence to create machines that wouldn’t otherwise be possible – inventions that seem real and actually work.
I went back over the sketch books I’d filled at Sheffield for ideas and discovered Wallace and Gromit, except Gromit was a cat then. I made them into Plasticene shapes and started ‘A Grand Day Out.’ It took me longer than I expected.
As I get on and films take four years to complete, I tend to have a hankering for very short projects so you can move on to the next idea. It’s the ideas I’m interested in. What comes out of your head.
Get out and make films. There are so many cameras now to suit any budget, so there are no excuses.
After studying in Sheffield, I went down to London to do my post-graduate degree at the National Film and Television School, embarking on the movie that would eventually become ‘A Grand Day Out.’
Gromit was the name of a cat. When I started modeling the cat I just didn’t feel it was quite right, so I made it into a dog because he could have a bigger nose and bigger, longer legs.
