Two things hit my in-box earlier for the, currently showing, Shaun The Sheep. The first is a great list of bits of trivia about the film and our hero.
From how many people worked on the film, how much of the film they made a day to how many sweets the editing crew got through in making the film! They are all great. SOme are quite strange but they will all make you smile.
The other is a great selection of animated GIFs of the flock. That’s on the next, couple of, pages as there are quite a lot of them. Please download them and use them for your own nefarious purposes on social media. You can even use them on your own website!
Model making:
- There are 21 Shaun puppets in total. It takes a week and a half to make a Shaun puppet from scratch.
- A Shaun puppet stands 17cm tall and weighs 100g.
- The total number of puppets used on the Shaun the Sheep Movie was 354 (157 humans and 197 animals – of which 116 were sheep!)
- The puppets need constant maintenance. It takes 45 minutes to re-fleece one sheep.
- Over 80m of fleece fabric was used to fleece the flock. The fleece has to be stiffened with a spray of diluted PVA glue, to stop it ‘boiling’ under the studio lights and moving around when the animator touches it
- Number of mouth pieces used was 3,000
- The tiniest prop used were Bitzer’s whistle, The Farmer’s glasses and Shaun’s tape recorder.
Animation:
- A full crew of 17 animators worked on the Shaun the Sheep Movie, producing an average of 2 seconds of animation per day.
- The film is comprised of 25 sequences, which range in length from one minute to five-and-a-half minutes each.
- There were 58 cameras, shooting across 33 units.
- 549,777 frames were taken – that’s 5.5 billion (British billion, not American billion), or 5,586,174,141,600 pixels.
- There were 79,237 storyboards drawn.
- 1,051 of the shots had visual effects on them, ranging from tiny clean-ups to major CG shots.
- Most number of characters animated in the same shot was the town plaza scene – 42 puppets
- If there was 1 animator making the whole film, how long would it have taken to shoot? Each animator on average shot 2 seconds of footage per day, as a starting point so 9 years (or 8 years, 341 days, 20 hours, 58 minutes and 33.6 seconds to be more precise)
Movie Crew:
- The edit department got through 8 catering-size tubs of kids sweets during production.
Shaun The Sheep The Movie Trivia:
- Number of baas in the movie: 1,589
- For the first time ever we meet the characters as babies and The Farmer as a young man
- Blue Peter badge (from the iconic BBC children’s show) appears on Shaun’s satchel. This has appeared in other Aardman productions including The Pirates
- Timmy is disguised as a back pack when the flock are in disguise in the city
- Nick Park was cast in a cameo role as the bird watcher
- A Radio Times (a UK publication) competition winner is featured in a scene – a likeness was created by the Aardman model making
- We pay homage to other movies throughout the film. For example in the animal containment scene we feature a cat whose behaviour is inspired by Hannibal Lector
- Rizzle Kicks did a version of the internationally recognised Shaun the Sheep theme song ‘Life’s a Treat’
- Eliza Doolittle also recorded a song for the movie called ‘Big City’
Shaun the Sheep Trivia:
- Shaun is 11 years old in sheep years!
- Shaun first appeared in Wallace & Gromit short film, A Close Shave, 20 years ago.
- 130 x 7minute episodes of Shaun the Sheep have been made for TV
- Shaun the Sheep episodes are on TV in over 170 countries
- Shaun the Sheep has won 2 BAFTAs
- Shaun the Sheep has over 5 million Facebook fans
2015 is lunar Year of the Sheep
Just click on the pages below to see all the GIFs.
