Richard Goleszowski, creative director of the Shaun the Sheep series for Aardman Animations, will be speaking at the Silent Comedy Festival in Bristol on 30 January 2011. This follows the announcement that Aardman Animations, the Oscar-winning company behind Shaun the Sheep, has started work on a new feature film starring the character.
Writers at Aardman's Bristol studios have begun developing a script for the film, which is hoped to be ready by the end of 2013 or beginning of 2014. The company won Oscars in 1993 for the Wallace Gromit film The Wrong Trousers and in 1995 for A Close Shave, where the character of Shaun first appeared. Aardman are currently filming 3D movie,The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists, a $60 million feature being made in partnership with Sony Pictures Digital Productions, shooting with Canon digital 3D cameras.
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A spin-off from the Wallace and Gromit movies, the first episode of Shaun the Sheep was shown on BBC television in March 2007. It has now sold to over 150 outlets across the globe and is particularly popular in China and Germany. It has won a number of awards and the sheep oriented silent comedy story type has been extended into multi-media formats such as iTunes.
The team developed an online game for CBBC digital television channel viewers, and Aardman Animations recently announced a partnership with Nintendo 3DS to create an exclusive series of one-minute shorts of Shaun the Sheep for the 3D console.
Aardman creative director Richard Goleszowski said that one of the inspirations behind Shaun the Sheep was the 1920s silent movie star Buster Keaton. He told the BBC, "My goal is to make a modern day silent movie starring Shaun. I grew up watching slapstick films and some of the jokes have become embedded in my psyche."
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Aardman are sponsors of the festival, and with good reason, the story of Shaun's development suggests. Goleszowski told press that the senior team at Aardman had been thinking about running screenings of silent films to help the newer animators develop their skills. "When we started writing the television series we stuck a picture of Buster Keaton on the studio door."
He said one of the reasons he had originally developed Shaun the Sheep as a non-speaking character was because animation with dialogue is time consuming and expensive. He said: "I thought making him silent would make it cheaper and easier but it makes life more difficult. "Telling a story through pictures means you can't cut corners. It's very cinematic and involved."
Richard Goleszowski is to speak at the Silent Comedy Festival, Slapstick, in Bristol on 30 January at 1400 GMT at the Watershed. Aardman Animations and South West Screen are the principal sponsors of the festival, which is recognised internationally as amongst the largest celebrations of visual comedy. Highlights of Slapstick 2011 include several UK premieres during the event, including of newly-discovered Charlie Chaplin footage.
Valerie Williamson - Dr. Val Williamson is a freelance journalist and academic specialising in historical and popular culture topics.
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