Background

Nicholas Wulstan Park was born on December 6, 1958, in Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom, to Mary Cecilia Ashton, a seamstress, and Roger Wulstan Park, an architectural photographer.

Education

At first, Park attended Cuthbert Mayne High School (now Our Lady's Catholic High School). He also studied at Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University), and then he was a student of the National Film & television School in Beaconfield, England. In 1980, he received a Bachelor in Fine Arts from Sheffield City Polytechnic.

Career

Park's parents and teachers recognized his talent for art at an early age, and the encouragement he received led him to devote many spare hours to making his own drawings and doodles. Inventive play of all sorts was a family pastime, the filmmaker explained to Kevin Macdonald in Projections 5: Filmmakers on Film-making, for his father liked to experiment with homemade contraptions and the family once created a homemade caravan for camping. The young artist was fascinated by animated films, not only because they were a lot of fun but because he was intrigued to know how they were made. While the animated works produced by Walt Disney’s studio were entertaining, Park found the mythological films of Ray Harryhausen, which used stop- motion animation to portray bizarre gods and monsters, particularly inspiring. When a cereal-box contest offered a super-8 movie camera and projector as its prize. Park embarked on his first attempt at animation. While his zoetrope - a simple device which creates a “moving picture” by spinning a cylinder - did not win the prize, it did give the youngster the film making bug.

Park learned about the basic theory behind animation from his father, a photographer who had some previous experience with the form, and borrowed his mother’s standard-8 mm movie camera, which had a single-frame button that could be used to shoot one image at a time. Now equipped with the basic tools of animation. Park needed to find a subject; recalling that Walt Disney got his start with a single character, the young artist drew up several possible stars for his film. He was thirteen when he began his first animated work, starring “Walter the Rat” and shot from a flip book of drawings. When that film was lost during processing, Park was undiscouraged. He took the opportunity to try a different method, creating characters cut out of felt and placing them against a felt-covered background. Once set up, he shot “Rat and the Beanstalk” in a day and ended up with two minutes of film. His family and friends were soon treated to an unending string of short animated films, made during his spare time after school and on weekends. The fledgling filmmaker experimented with a variety of techniques, using everything from paper cutouts and makeshift cel animation to puppet and clay animation.

Park was a teenager when his work started gaining wider attention. A teacher learned of his hobby and encouraged him to share his little films with his schoolmates. Soon after, Park entered his work in a competition for young animators hosted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Although his film did not win a prize, the station still wanted to air it on television nationwide. After “Archie’s Concrete Nightmare” was broadcast, Park noted, that he received instant fame in his school at the age of fifteen, and he thought he had reached the pinnacle of his career. After leaving school, he enrolled in an arts foundation course, which allowed him to explore different artistic media, from sculpture to stained-glass. Animation remained a hobby, although the young filmmaker decided to improve the quality of his work by switching to super-8 film. However, as the picture quality increased with a super-8, the flaws became more obvious to him. That was his first lesson in taking greater care with the animation, and helped him appreciate how humor can be achieved through simplicity. Thinking it would be too difficult to break into the film industry, Park had kept his hobby a secret from his college advisors; when they finally discovered his films they suggested that he focus his studies on animation.

By the time he had completed his degree in 1980, Park had moved on to using 16-mm film in working on three separate animated films, two using puppets and one using chalk images on blackboard. The animator only completed the last film, a version of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but it was enough to win a prize in a student competition and secure him a place in England’s National Film and Television School (NFTS). Park spent his first year of study learning the basics of film work, taking short courses in camera operation, lighting, sound recording, and editing. He was then able to specialize in animated film and began to work on a 35-mm film that would serve as his graduation project. He wrote a script detailing the adventures of an inventor who takes a trip to the moon, assisted by his faithful dog. To bring his vision to life, Park decided to use models made of Plasticine, a malleable substance that can be molded in a similar fashion to clay or wax. Unfortunately, the animator discovered that the NFTS did not have a camera suited to model animation, as no one at the school had previously attempted a film of that sort. By the time they acquired the right equipment, Park was in the middle of his third year of study; another year passed, and he had only filmed the first page of his script - and he was running out of time and money for the project. Luckily, part of the NFTS course included talks given by current filmmakers, and it was through one such session that Park met Peter Lord and David Sproxton of Aardman Animations. They were interested in his work, and soon offered him a position at their studio in Bristol, England.

Both the NFTS and Aardman had an interest in seeing that Park finished his Plasticine animation project, and so the filmmaker was allowed to work part-time at his new job and use the studio’s facilities to complete the film; the NFTS supplied additional funding. At this part-time pace, it took Park an additional four years before A Grand Day Out was finally ready. While this frustratingly slow progress often discouraged the animator, he persisted nonetheless. The finished film ran twenty minutes and introduced the cheese-loving Wallace, an eccentric inventor who frequently ends up being rescued from his own devices by his forbearing but devoted dog, Gromit. The film, which was Park’s contribution to a series of brief television spots produced by Aardman, features a several “interviews” with various zoo animals about their living conditions. With two successful and critically acclaimed films under his belt, Park was ready to further develop both the characters of Wallace and Gromit and his animation techniques.

Working with a team of designers, model- makers, and animators, Park spent thirteen months and some 700,000 pounds (over $1 million) to achieve thirty minutes of film. While The Wrong Trousers displayed the higher standard of design, animation, and music permitted by a higher budget, it was Park’s signature wit and detail that made the film another huge success. With the ongoing success of Wallace and Gromit, Park had no trouble gaining an even larger budget and crew for their next adventure, A Close Shave. With only eighteen months to write, story-board, design, and animate the film, Park ended up taking more of a supervisory role in this project. After spending two weeks teaching his team of animators the “style” of Wallace and Gromit, Park spent most of his time directing their efforts instead of creating his own segments.

With the increasing complexity, and success of his films, it is not surprising that Park would take stop- motion techniques into the realm of the feature film. Since A Close Shave, the director has been working with Aardman co-founder Peter Lord on the studio’s first full-length feature. Informed by Park’s summer-job experience in a chicken-packing factory, the up-coming comedy-adventure Chicken Run takes place on a Yorkshire farm in the 1950s. In the end of 2011, Park directed a music video for "Plain Song" - a song by Native and the Name, a Sheffield band led by Joe Rose, the son of an old university friend. The video was filmed at Birkdale School, Sheffield, and Park also selected the track as one of his Desert Island Discs when he went on the show in 2011. In April 2013, Park was involved in the British stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki's animated film, Princess Mononoke. He was the executive producer of Shaun the Sheep Movie, and he also voiced himself in a cameo. For 2018, he directed another Aardman Animations stop-motion film, titled Early Man, which tells a story of a caveman who unites his tribe against the Bronze Age while unintentionally inventing football.

Achievements

• 

  Nick Park is known for the creation of the Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep short and full features. Nick Park's style of animation combines plasticine models and stop-motion animation, which gives life to this inanimate characters. Using Plasticine models in the stop- action technique commonly known as “claymation,” writer and director Park has collected three Academy Awards for his films in just six years.
  
  His first film, A Grand Day Out, introduced the tandem of Wallace and Gromit and the duo’s popularity has increased exponentially with each new film. The adventures of the endearingly guileless inventor and his long-suffering canine companion typically involve a struggle with technology run amok and feature a wealth of visual detail and humor. This work earned awards from the British Academy for Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and international animated film festivals, as well as an Academy Award (“Oscar”) nomination for best animated short.
  
  His film The Wrong Trousers earned record audiences when it first aired on the BBC, and captured over thirty international awards, including Park’s second BAFTA and Academy Awards. Park also received a third Academy Award to the long list of accolades for his work A Close Shave.
  
  He also contributed to Classics from the Comics at the same time, picking his favorite classic stories for the comic reprint magazine's new Classic Choice feature.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Grand Success!: The People and Characters Who Created Aardman

    (With A Grand Success!, Lord, Sproxton, and Park tell the ...)

    1985
  • A Close Shave

    (Wallace and Gromit have trouble with a lamb called Shaun ...)

    1995

• video

  • Watch Early Man

    (Set at the dawn of time, when prehistoric creatures and w...)

    2018
  • Watch Wallace & Gromit's Cracking Contraptions

    (With multiple Academy Awards under their belt, Wallace an...)

    2002
  • Watch Shaun The Sheep

    (Shaun gets more than he bargained for when a day off lead...)

    2015
  • Watch Chicken Run

    (While the chickens on evil Mrs. Tweedy's farm dream of a ...)

    2000
  • Wallace and Gromit: Graphic Novel: A Grand Day Out 1989
  • Creature Comforts 1989
  • Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers 1993
  • Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit 2005
  • Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf or Death 2008
  • Pee-wee's Playhouse: The Complete Series 1986

Views

Nick Park's animation oposes the idea that the jerky and old stop-motion animation is outdated.

Quotations: “I’ve always thought of myself as a film-maker first and foremost. With The Wrong Trousers, I wanted to do something much more complex and ambitious than A Grand Day Out. From the very start we took an overtly cinematic approach in the lighting, in the animation, in the music. I really wanted The Wrong Trousers to have the look of a mini-feature film with Hitchcockian and B-movie references thrown in.”

“When looking back on my education, it is interesting to note that I was largely self-taught and didn’t actually have any formal animation training! I did appreciate the opportunity to learn basic film crafts of direction, writing, story telling and editing which were part of the package of a live-action oriented course. Now working full time as a director/animator I regret not taking the opportunity to learn these skills more seriously, especially since I consider myself more a filmmaker who animates than an animator. Overall, the most valuable aspect of my education has been to make my own films without commercial pressure and to nurture my own style and ideas. My animation has developed over the years but my fascination for the magic of animation which began at thirteen has remained unchanged.”

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• “Disney and Pixar not withstanding, Britain’s Nick Park is the undisputed, undefeated king of animation.” - Richard Harrington
  
  “The most important thing in animation is not the technology but strong characters and a compelling story. Nick Park clearly understands this and proves it with his ability to take a hunk of clay and make extremely memorable characters.” - Toy Story director John Lasseter
  
  The film The Wrong Trousers offers further proof that Nick Park ranks among the best clay animators of his generation.” - Charles Solomon

Connections

On 16 September 2016, Park married Mags Connolly.

Father:

Roger Wulstan Park

Mother:

Mary Cecilia Ashton

Wife:

Mags Connolly

References

• Projections 5: Film-makers on Film-making
  1996