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Wallace and Gromit Studio Loses History
TheFarmerInTheDell writes "CNN is reporting that the Aardman Animations building in Bristol, home of Wallace and Gromit, has been destroyed by fire From the article: 'Today was supposed to be a day of celebration, with the news that 'Wallace and Gromit' had gone in at No. 1 at the U.S. box office, but instead our whole history has been wiped out'"
It really is a shame, to loose all that work. It was a big fire too, the smoke could be seen and smelt about 10 minutes walk away. Techincally now, I own part of that history from breathing it in. :)
...was there no preventative measures in place to protet the irreplaceable memorabilia?!
Be thankful that Slashdot isn't like GameFAQs. Take a look at all of the rules they have there. Did you know that you can be banned from those forums if you use a line consisting of more than three characters to separate your posts from your signature? The rules are that fucking strict, and that fucking pointless. And as such the place is an utter shithole for true, open, thought-provoking discussion.
Now, let's be fair. At least Slashdot has a fairly public moderating system, unlike a dictatorship like GameFAQs. You can still see any and all posts that have been moderated down, unlike at GameFAQs, where they're deleted outright. At least you can say what you want here, even if it may take people browsing at -1 for it to be seen. Contrast that to GameFAQs, where once deleted your post is not seen by anyone.
The moderators themselves at GameFAQs are most likely the worst problem, secondary to the absurdly complicated and intrusive forum rules. A lone moderator can delete your posts, even on the basis of just not liking you as a person. While that can happen here to some extent, at least other moderators can come around later and fix a mistake or abuse.
Funnily enough, at GameFAQs you can contest certain moderations. Of course, your appeal goes right to the moderator who either fucked up or intentionally abused their power in the first place. So the vast majority of the time you have no recourse when you have become the victim of a rogue moderator. At least here there are other moderators who can come along and remedy the problem.
Every time that someone talks about how horrible it is here at Slashdot, I just think about GameFAQs, and how truly horrible their system is. At least here we can express some disappointment with the Slashdot system. At GameFAQs you would have most likely been banned.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
An animated movie isn't an island. You can learn how things were done in previous shows by actually looking at how they did it. Digging into the storyboard, layouts, sets, etc. can be very helpful. During the movie if artists needed to see what Wallace's bedroom looked like previously, they didn't have to look at the DVD and try and construct a 3D model in their minds--they could actually go and look at the sets used in the previous shows. Blueprints, too, I would imagine. Then there is the world of licensing. In the CG world all that stuff is kept around in digital files. In the analog world, you have warehouses.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
The storyboards, the sets - why are we saving all that crap? Isn't the work itself the treasure, not necessarily the tools used to make it?
Why save drafts of scripts or books? Why save blueprints? Why save props and costumes? Why save sets after a show wraps up?
Well, there's historical value to researchers and collectors, as to what the thinking process was, how something was constructed. Sets and props can be reused to save costs. Actual physical objects are cool to look at (note that some of the items went on tour), and took a lot of work to make. Are you going to save EVERYTHING? Hells no, but I doubt that's what the warehouse was storing (except, probably a corner that the prop shop was using.)
I have to say personally, I was extremely discouraged while learning to draw, until I saw rough sketches and early works by painters and artists like Van Gough. They made the same mistakes in perspective and proportions in learning that everyone else does, but you'd never have known it from the final product. As an animator, I learned a lot from studying storyboards and other materials that audiences will rarely see outside of DVD special material.
If you had asked whether the final product from George Lucas (the film - choose one) was the thing to treasure, and that all the props, models, costumes, and other materials should have been discarded, you'd probably get an argument from many folks. There's a lot of detail that goes in to prop work that is never shown on screen, and much of it is art in its own right. I think one person I ran into said it best - we aren't the best people to judge whether something is historic or not, because we lack the perspective that society in 20, 30 years will have on the times we're living in.
Many of the characters you think of as being plasticine are actually foam latex, or a composite (ie: only the face being plasticine). For example, Morph is 100% plasticine, Wat (from "Wat's Pig) is a composite, with a more traditional foam latex body and clay hands.
(This is true with a lot of things you might consider being "clay" animation. For example, Klayman from "The Neverhood" was a foam latex character in most of the shots).
You can get more details in the Aardman book "Cracking Animation: The Aardman Book of 3-D Animation" (in the US it's labled "Creating 3-D Animation : The Aardman Book of Filmmaking"). You can see some really wonderful sets and minatures there - it's really a pity that it's been lost.
To answer someone else's question, plasticine is an oil-based clay, so it won't dry out. That also means you can't fire (harden) the material as you could with traditional clay.
Well, why keep the source when you have a working app?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The loss of the Wallace and Gromit material is just one instance of a much larger process of history destruction that goes on continuously. More than half of all the movies ever made have been lost forever, because they mouldered away in vaults and filing cabinets instead of being out in free circulation, their owners hoarding them on the chance that one day they might produce profit, or forgetting them entirely and letting them crumble away. Simple neglect can be as destructive as fire or any other disaster.
As Intellectual Property rights are strengthened, this type of loss is going to happen more and more. Rights holders will have tight control over the distribution of "their property," even to the extent of disabling it whenever they want. Fewer and fewer unmonitored copies will exist, and more and more material will be simply yanked out of circulation because it competes with something newer that somebody wants to sell.
I collect Old Time Radio shows from the 1940s and earlier. Thanks to our Congressmen-for-hire, these shows and ALL audio recordings made before 1972 are still copyrighted, and will remain so until the year 2067. Theoretically the only legal copies are those kept by the rights holders. Ironically, most of the shows that still exist have survived only through the illegal activities of a diehard fan community. Most old time radio shows were never intended to be heard again. They were recorded only so they could be retransmitted later to different time zones, or simply so the studio didn't have to be in the same building as the transmitter. Most were destined for the trash, or sometimes already in the trash, when they were rescued and taken home by radio station engineers and the like, later to be copied to tapes, CDs and mp3s over the years, and sold/traded/handed out to other collectors. These "pirates" have kept this material alive for decades while the original rights holders in most cases did absolutely nothing. These old shows may not be great literature, but they do provide an invaluable record of popular American entertainment during one of the greatest times in our history, showing us what average everyday people thought was funny, interesting and frightening at that time. You can't get that sort of thing out of a book, and we wouldn't have it today if everybody had played by the rules.
Being able to easily make redundant copies of electronic data does not mean the same capability exists when dealing with physical objects made by artisans (I would have thought this was obvious, but apparently not...). The only way around this is to build everything twice, which is simply impractical; if it takes n months to make one, it takes 2n months to make two, which means you're doubling the construction budget without adding anything to the actual production (and contrary to popular belief, film makers do not have unlimited budgets. Aardman isn't Disney, and even Disney has limits). So forget about redundancy; not even NASA, the US center of redundancy, has a method of making backups of historically significant objects, but if you know of one I'm sure they and the Smithsonian would like to hear about it.
As to the wisdom of storing everything in the one place: the options are (1) break up the collection in the hope that any disaster that strikes is only going to affect one site, and add the problems of tracking inventory and aquiring property for little practical value (we're not talking a box of floppies here, this is stuff that needs non-trivial amounts of space to store...think "15 foot wide miniature set for a single 3 minute sequence" and you'll begin to get the idea), or (2) put everything you don't need for current productions in the one place so you know where to look for it* if you need it, minimize your real estate and inventory expenses and work on the assumption that buildings generally don't catch fire.
So Aardman went for the second option, and were wrong about the fire part. Has it affected current productions, destroyed final masters of previous productions or damaged the company's future in any way? No, the items in question were being stored for historical value, they weren't critical financial records, customer databases or the like; different security paradigm. So really you're suggesting that they should have spent probably more than ten times what equivalent digital archives would cost for less than one tenth the benefit. I know trying to keep a business afloat equates to evil around here, but do you seriously think Aardman would still be around after thirty years if they didn't do the cost/benefit analysis of these kind of things?
Just because a backup strategy makes sense for cheap, portable and easily reproducable digital data, that doesn't mean the same strategy is possible in the physical world for expensive, large, or fragile items that must be individually made by hand. If you can't see a difference then I suggest you backup your house and its contents immediately...not because its in any immediate danger, I'm just intrigued to find out how you make an off-site copy without it costing as much as the original.
*This isn't stuff you can easily sort by alphabetic order, size or any other arbitrary attribute, so there is a limit to how organized storage can be; if you've never visited a props store, you seriously don't have any idea how chaotic they are even when well organized.
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