Golly, Shaun's shepherd happy to be sheepish
AMONG the film-makers giving youngsters the inside story of their craft at the Showcomotion festival is Richard Goleszowski, BAFTA-winning director from Britain's leading animation house, Aardman.
Known to everyone as Golly, he is the man responsible for shepherding Shaun the Sheep from bit part player in Wallace and Gromit to star of his own series.
"He made a big impact in Wallace and Gromit even though he was only in it for six minutes," he recalls. "We thought we have got something here and could make a series just based on Shaun."
Scripts were commissioned but when Golly came to direct one of the first episodes he soon came to the conclusion that something wasn't working. "Shaun was going into town, using a cash machine and going to the shops, behaving like a human being.," he reflects. "I felt we needed to take it back to the fundamentals of what a sheep does. When you think about it all a sheep has is in its life is grass, a sheepdog and a farmer. I felt we needed to make it more sheepish."
Golly lives in the country and began to take a keener interest in sheep. "I was walking past a field and all the sheep came over to look at me. I noticed they were all different as they stared at me and they sounded different too, some were a real baritone bleat and others can be more like a bleep.
"When sheep come through a gate there's no etiquette. They charge through the gaps and some get wedged in and then get squirted out like an orange pip. That's something we have never used," he muses.
Shaun the Sheep has now been sold to 150 territories around the world and has made the biggest impact in Germany. Why should that be? "They have a big tradition of slapstick over there and they like visual comedy," he says. The upshot is that German broadcaster WDR is a co-producer with the BBC on Shaun the Sheep.
Aardman are about halfway through producting the next 40 episodes, he reports. Long-term he would like to do some longer shows, a half-hour Chrismas special perhaps, and even a feature film.
But Golly has a much broader brief across the TV division of Aardman. The award-winning director has also been responsible for Robbie the Reindeer and Rex the Runt for the BBC and ITV's Creature Comforts and was creative consultant on A Matter of Loaf and Death, the fourth Wallace and Gromit adventure which aired on TV last Christmas.
Golly has been with the Bristol-based animators since its early days in 1984. "It was just a cottage industry then but it was also around the time Channel 4 was starting up and commissioned five-minute films from us, so it was an opportune time to join.
"I was a model maker and did a bit of everything at first and have moved up to become creative director."
A Talk with Richard Goleszowski is at the Showroom Cinema on Friday.
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Wednesday 08 February 2012
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