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There's no I in TEAM...
 Pick up any job ad and check out what they want. Bet you it’ll want someone who can work in a team. It’s a popular request and quite rightly so.
A group of talented individuals working towards the same goal?
Sounds like your average football team. But look around – can you find a job that doesn’t involve working with others at all?
‘Acting in slow motion’
Head Animator at Aardman, Loyd Price, knows exactly what it’s like to be part of a dynamic team. As a Supervising Animator on feature films, he creatively manages the animators, making sure that they produce exactly what the directors are looking for... as well as doing some animating himself, of course.
 Aardman are a busy bunch. They’re currently working on another Wallace and Gromit adventure for the BBC and have three feature films in development. Would they be as successful if they didn’t all work well together?
‘Teamwork is critical,’ says Loyd. ‘Although Stop Motion animation sometimes means working by yourself to create the perfect shot, you have to work with others. For example, meeting with the directors, working with cameramen and set dressers or anyone else needed on set at that time. Say you need a character to fly. Just call in the riggers – they build the rig and make it happen.’ Loyd tells us that you need to be quite a problem-solver when you’re animating.
‘You’ll be shooting two or three seconds of film a day, and your day is 8-10 hours long. So it’s not patience you need, it’s concentration. One thing goes wrong and you’ve lost the whole shot.’ But he doesn’t think that making mistakes is the problem. ‘It’s knowing what to do with it, like an actor who messes up his lines. Do you find a way round it or just do it all over again?’
 Everyone’s expertise and talents count which is why communication between all team members is equally important.
‘When Curse of the Were-Rabbit was being shot, there were 30 or so animators working on the film and each one would have animated Gromit at some point,’ says Loyd. ‘Every one of those animators knew that Gromit should look the same and behave in his characteristic way. If the animators didn’t communicate this, who knows what Gromit would look like each time an animator got their hands on him?’
Loyd graduated from Manchester Polytechnic’s (now Manchester Metropolitan University) Film and Theatre School and worked at Cosgrove Hall (famous for Wind in the Willows, Danger Mouse and more recently, Fifi and the Flowertots), then in San Francisco on Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas, and freelanced for Aardman on A Close Shave before joining them full time. Even though Loyd last studied science at the age of 15 (and says he was no good at it), he finds that physics creeps into his work... in fact, he even had to teach it to other animators on the animation course set up in conjunction with Aardman and the University of West of England.
 ‘When you’ve got a character who has to carry a heavy object,’ explains Loyd, ‘the reality is that the object is light, or else the model will topple over. But we need the audience to believe that the object is heavy, which all comes down to mass, movements, dynamics and gravity... basically physics!’ Loyd feels that whilst imagination and creative thinking are great qualities for future animators, the ability to make what is seen on screen as believable and accurate as possible is even more important.
 How predictable would it be of us to discuss Wallace’s wonderful inventions – now that’d be an engineering lesson!
Come on team, I think it’s time for some Wensleydale instead...
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