I love Wallace & Gromit! And Chicken Run! So when I saw this at BBC News I was just devastated! Animation archive up in smoke
- the Aardman Animations warehouse caught fire on Monday and it destroyed artwork, sets and archives.

The people at Aardman are spectacularly known for their stop-motion animation work which is mind-blowing production work. While you are gawking at the terrific computer generated effects you watch on Star Wars, honestly tapping a few codes or bouncing off images on a computer is not as mind-blowing as how stop-motion animation works.

Stop motion is an animation technique which makes static objects appear to be moving. Stop motion requires a camera, either motion picture or digital, that can expose single frames. It works by shooting a single frame, stopping the camera to move the object a little bit, and then shooting another frame. When the film runs continuously for more than 15 frames per second, the illusion of fluid motion is created and the objects appear to move by themselves. This is similar to the animation of cartoons, but with real objects instead of drawings.

Can you imagine? Moving a little clay character a tiny bit at a time, shoot a frame (24 frames = 1 second) and move the character again and again until you get a whole movement? That's not all, if you've seen Chicken Run, then you would have seen that the chickens interact with each other too. So you've got limbs to move, facial expressions to replace and a couple of characters to do that to... ONE BY ONE! Tell me that's not tedious work. And these people to it for a living to produce amazing series and animated films.

The firm stored most of its past works in the warehouse and the biggest loss was the original Wallace and Gromit storyboards by creator Nick Park, Mr Sproxton says.
That's historic material to them. =( What a pity. I haven't found any of the W&G merchandise here in Malaysia, but I actually bought my ex a cute Gromit and the DVD... which I regret, and should've kept for myself. =(( Bleh.

I love animation. More so than filmmaking. ^_~ So I'm really looking forward to Aardman's latest film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.