Rob Millard — Creatiview

Rob Millard is a freelance stop motion animator from the UK but currently living and working in New Zealand.

Curator’s note: I had the joy of frequenting the same secondary school as Rob. Back then, and I may be putting words in his mouth, I think we both found comfort, reassurance and inspiration within the environment our then A-Level Fine Art tutor helped create. Since those early days, we’ve both gone on to pursue careers within the creative industry. Rob is an extremely funny, friendly and talented gentleman and it doesn’t surprise me that he’s gone on to do some pretty cool things. Not least, most recently being credited as a Animator on Wes Anderson’s critically acclaimed ‘Isle of Dogs’ film. I think it’s fair to say the field of stop motion animation can be pretty competitive but it’s to his credit that he’s getting noticed, and rightly so. Please do read on to gain an invaluable insight into this magical discipline and Rob’s journey towards being a part of it.

*A behind-the-scenes shot of Rob on the production of Wes Anderson’s film: ‘Isle of Dogs’*

I grew up, like many of my generation, watching the work of Aardman Animations. Chicken Run, Creature Comforts and the Wallace and Gromit films were all a real treat whenever we could catch them on the telly, or rewatch them on a grubby old VHS. It wasn’t until the age of 11 that I questioned how, exactly, they were made. On a school trip to the science museum in Bristol, I came across a small but detailed exhibit of sets and puppets from various gems of Aardman’s back catalogue. Whilst the rest of my year group were having fun painfully learning about how momentum and gravity work on a giant human hamster wheel, I was, to put it lightly, having something of an epiphany. I felt I had stumbled upon a secretive dark art, in which one can bring inanimate objects to life, play god...

Jump-cut forward 12 years, and having fed my obsession with every waking moment since that day, I had landed my first bit of work in a stop motion animation studio in Manchester. The studio, Factory, mainly produce children’s TV; they are responsible for the Clangers reboot amongst other things. Whilst there I worked in the art department and the puppet department, making props, set dressing and fixing broken puppet limbs. It was a very exciting time for me. Getting work of any kind in an animation studio had felt like an impossible task for years, I had very nearly put the idea to bed altogether. It was my extremely firm and pessimistic belief that beyond university, there lay a barren wasteland, littered with fellow wandering graduates, howling in the fog. I suspected that in fact there were no animation jobs to be taken, barely any animation studios to offer them. So you can imagine how giddyingly chuffed I was to land some work at Factory.

It wasn’t strictly animation work, but it was close enough for me. I was immersed in a buzzing environment where people earned a decent wage from doing all the stuff I’d been doing for the last decade (admittedly with an awful lot more care and skill than me). Many of them were fairly young, around my age. I slowly became friends with many of my colleagues across the two departments, and also began chatting with the animators. At this point I still put animators on a pedestal, as if I were not worthy to breathe the same air. An industry filled with like-minded nerds who spent their childhoods in darkened rooms pushing plasticine around shouldn’t ever feel intimidating. And yet, to me it did. In contradiction to my ill placed misconceptions, not a single one of the animators at Factory had the slightest bit of ego about them. It was here that the idea that maybe this was a world I could fit into started to sprout. The handful of slightly older animators I met had between them CV’s peppered with almost everything I had watched and cherished whilst growing up. And the younger of them had already done the rounds of various studios I had my sights on. This was the notorious “industry” I’d heard so much about all these years. These were the giants and pioneers behind my craft to whom I owed so much. And they were sat right here, eating a Boots egg and cress sandwich, waiting for me to pester the socks off them. Upon plucking up the courage to make small talk, I quickly discovered that a few of them had made it here via a short postgraduate animation course run by Aardman. The course was 12 weeks long, there were 6 places, and it cost a fair old bit of money. But nearly everyone who had done it had gone on to great things. I told myself I wasn’t good enough, that my half arsed showreel would get blown out of the water by the billions of other, far superior applicants. Then I told myself to stop being a tit, and I applied.

6 months later I found myself walking through the doors of Aardman’s studios on Spike Island in Bristol. Heading the course was Loyd (just the one ‘L’) Price, a key player in much of Aardman’s work since the early days. Upon watching Chicken Run during my stay at Aardman, I was thrilled to see that Loyd Price was the first name to pop up during the opening credits to a military chorus of kazoos. I couldn’t quite believe that one of the big guns behind a film of such huge influence on me as a child was now my personal trainer for the next 12 weeks. The thing that instantly struck me about Loyd was what a normal guy he was. This was one of the best in the business, with a real gift for teaching his craft, and yet he was just a really nice, humble bloke you could very comfortably sit down and have a cup of tea and a natter with. He would often reassure us by saying “I still make mistakes, I’ve just learned how to work my way out of them.” The Aardman course lifted my animation skills from “keen-hobbyist” to “holy-shit-someone-might-actually-employ-me-for-this-nonsense!” within 12 weeks. But without a doubt, the most valuable thing I took from it was a realisation that the industry I had romanticised all these years wasn’t so out of reach as I had once thought. In actual fact it was quite the opposite.

After completing the Aardman course, I had a small dry spell before volunteering to help out briefly on a short student film at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield. The film was called “The Love Story” and upon arriving I quickly realised the entire production was a bit of a shambles. The director, Nush, was one of the sweetest, most heartfelt, featherbrained and disorganised people you could ever hope to meet. Her vision was strong, but she had so far only shot about 1 and a half minutes of footage. All of her peers were just about wrapping up, putting the finishing touches on their polished pieces of award hungry works. Nush still had 8 minutes left to shoot (a heck of a lot in animation terms), and almost no time to shoot it in. I was called in to help speed things up, but it seemed like an impossible task. I was only there a matter of weeks before I had to head north for some properly paid work (student films don’t pay too well, unsurprisingly). A few months down the line, and I heard along the grapevine that her film had, by some miracle, had actually been finished. It then got nominated for a BAFTA, and won.

Dont. Judge. A. Book.

Short film by Young studio for Scouts.

The Northern job I jumped Nush’s ship for was at a small studio I had previously been in touch with called Young, based in Stalybridge, just outside Manchester. Primarily a digital animation studio, Young wanted to try their hand at stop motion, so drafted in ME - the so called expert. With next to no equipment, and even less of a budget, our first job was to produce a multimedia video for the Scouts. Much of what Geth (the director) wanted involved down shooting - basically, animation done on a flat surface and captured from a birds eye view. To get our camera high enough without investing in some very expensive rigging gear, we assembled the most precarious monstrosity you could possibly imagine. The camera was fixed to a cheap wobbly tripod, which was laid horizontally on top of a step ladder (camera poking over the end). This was strapped firmly using several rolls of duct tape. To gain more height, we then had the step ladder on a table, which itself wasn’t the sturdiest, all supported by a squeaky wooden floor of the old mill studio space they occupied at the time. The leaning tower of nonsense was so rickety that everytime anyone else in the studio wanted to get up to take a piss they had to inform me, to avoid capturing a frame whilst the camera rattled from side to side. Despite this amongst numerous other setbacks (the mill setting on fire being one of them) we finished the project and it looked slicker and shinier than I could have ever imagined.

It was during my time here that I realised, you don’t need all the high tech gear and decades worth of wisdom to pull a job off. It certainly helps, but so many of the things I grew up watching were surely made under much similar circumstances. I remember as a child seeing a behind the scenes photo of Steve Box animating the scene where Gromit leaps after the penguin in the Wrong Trousers. In the image, Gromit is mid air, and propped up by a used, grubby Staedtler eraser. I was amazed by the Lo-Fi techniques they used to make these amazing films. It felt like that single image summed up the entire art of stop motion animation. You might have the most astonishing looking finished piece, but hiding just out of the edge of frame is all the glue and blu tack and spit it’s all botched together with. These days all the big budget feature films can afford the right equipment, but behind each dazzling BAFTA winning student film and every low budget studio commercial there’s a hefty stench of unprofessionalism, and I love it that way.

*A behind-the-scenes shot of Nick Park propping up Gromit with an eraser, on the set of ‘The Wrong Trousers’.*

After Young, I moved to London to start work at Three Mills studios on a curious new feature film project by Wes Anderson. The film is now out there for everyone to sink their teeth into, but upon arriving on my first day I knew practically nothing about Isle of Dogs, other than it was a Wes Anderson film, it was stop motion, and it was about dogs. The project was long and arduous, but certainly the most rewarding experience I’ve had as an animator. I started as an animation intern. I thought this meant I would make the animators coffee and stand about like a spare prick, but in fact they got me working straight away on some pretty interesting things. Because I had joined the production very early on (they had shot about 1 minute of footage when I arrived) there was an awful lot of stuff to be figured out. Anyone who’s seen the film will know there are several moments where characters well up, and you can see the tears dancing across their tiny eyeballs. My very first job on my very first day on Isle of Dogs, was to try and figure out how to create this effect. I tested all sorts of different tear like materials and brands of lube until we found something that worked. It wasn’t until 2 years later when I got to see the finished film that I realised what a brilliant first task they had entrusted me with. And so the job went, every day I would be faced with a new challenge; Make this dog talk. Make this dog snarl. Make this dog whistle. Make this dog vomit. Make this dog explode. Over the course of the 18 months I was there, I slowly but surely graduated from intern, to assistant, and was finally credited as a full blown animator. In that time I learned not to be afraid of screwing up a shot. “You can always go back and re shoot, you might annoy some AD’s but nobody’s going to die, you’re not a surgeon” I would tell myself. And so a fair old bit of my shonky, nervy, daring, blood-sweat-and-tears animation was good enough for Wes to put in his film for Trillions of people to watch and judge.

Rob’s showreel for ‘Isle of Dogs’.

The thing that always drew me to stop motion was the tactility and imperfection of it. And that imperfection comes from unsteady hands trying their best but making mistakes. I think it can be said that for every animator and every prop maker and every puppet fabricator there is an awful lot of skill and dedication needed to do what they do. But when you boil it down and look closely, they’re still all just kids playing with toys. And that to me is such a warm and unthreatening thing to be a part of.