Producing Animation: Paul Kewley (“Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon”)
Aardman’s latest feature Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie – a sequel to the studio’s 2015 hit Shaun the Sheep Movie and latest extension of the internationally beloved Shaun the Sheep television series – hits UK cinemas this Friday. Directed by Richard Phelan and Will Becher, the ‘sheepquel’ is produced by Paul Kewley, written by Mark Burton and Jon Brown, with Mark Burton, Richard Starzak, Peter Lord, Nick Park, Carla Shelley and David Sproxton serving as Executive Producers. The film continues Aardman and StudioCanal’s production partnership following the recent success – grossing $106 million worldwide – of the first film.
Strange lights over the quiet town of Mossingham herald the arrival of a mystery visitor from far across the galaxy…
When the intergalactic visitor – an impish and adorable alien called LU-LA – crash-lands near Mossy Bottom Farm, Shaun soon sees an opportunity for alien-powered fun and adventure and sets off on a mission to shepherd LU-LA home.
Her magical alien powers, irrepressible mischief and galactic sized burps soon have the flock enchanted. Shaun takes his new extra-terrestrial friend on the road to Mossingham Forest to find her lost spaceship, unaware that a sinister alien-hunting agency is on their trail.
Can Shaun and the flock avert Farmageddon on Mossy Bottom Farm before it’s too late?
In anticipation of its UK release Skwigly were delighted to get an opportunity to speak with the film’s producer Paul Kewley.
I did a Film Producing Masters at UAC, which is probably the preeminent film producing degree in the world. I got heavily involved in the film industry over there. What I’m interested in is storytelling, making films that will travel. I’m not an animation person pursue. I’ve become emerged in animation over the last ten years and longer then I thought I would do.
When we were finishing the first film we kept talking about story ideas and we genuinely felt that there was an opportunity to do more with him. The first film established that we could tell a long form story with Shaun and it was very organic to his world and we really wanted to try something where we could put him in a slightly different setting. So that was the thing that kind of pushed us really and of course the first film was successful and there was an opportunity to do that. People from Studio Canal were willing to get behind a sequel and people at Aardman were equally keen.
Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie (Aardman/Studio Canal)
How did Farmageddon begin?
It started very close to the end of the first film as Richard Starzak, who created the series, started to talk about aliens with me. Funnily enough him and I were talking about it for a long time. I’ve been at Aardman for ten years now and within the first couple of weeks of me being there I was pitching ideas and so it felt organic to grasp that. Richard started to draw a funny alien with drawings and bits of concept work and it sprang out from that.
The challenge was how do you make the film in a setting we’d like to do. We wanted to expand the world and we wanted to be true to Shaun’s universe to keep to the quality that the audience like and the storytelling quality was really important. The thing I’m drawn to making these films are making the story and setting work. We worked very hard on that and of course we made decisions to try and make the sets bigger and we were making the world much more expansive by looking at space and how we could do that. There are a lot of practical considerations and lots of new challenges for the crew.
The genesis of the character came out in a story meeting. So very early on when we were working out the script we established that we wanted this character, we had the idea of this alien and so we built the character up to have a very clear idea of who the character was and how she would work in our world. A story artist named Ashley Boddy came up with the design of Lula and did lots of work on that and one of the directors recently told me her head is roughly the shape of a UFO and her body was a kind of beam that came out of it so that was the inspiration for her shape. And then we worked a lot on her colour. We had a concept artist who did different colour ways for us and we settled on the colours you see in the film. The model making team started working on trying to make her robust enough to work on sets so there were some pretty clever mechanics that made the puppet as well.
I knew both of them already and so I worked closely with Rich in particular over the years on the story side and I knew Will as an animator and animation director. It was fun to start working with new talent and allows them to get under the skin of the process. I think they did a brilliant job because the job of animation directing is massively time consuming and demanding. They both took it brilliantly and worked incredible hard to realise the film.
Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie (Aardman/Studio Canal)
What makes the characters really appealing to children?
My theory would be that we understand them and feel like characters that we kind of know in our everyday lives. I think the family dynamic was established early on and we looked at the first film and it’s very clever and it’s universal, we all know that experience. Shaun as a character is a kind of kid I’d want my son to be; he’s a bit cheeky and pushing the boundaries but he’s also got moral fibre so he knows when he’s done the wrong thing and knows how to put things right. For kids that’s a very relatable and understandable thing. It’s that sense of we recognise them and identify with them and I think that’s why kids love them.
To make a film at this scale you have to appeal globally. The UK market isn’t big enough to support a film on its own and the truth is the film market is a global market place so you have to think about that. My role as a producer is to find a way to build these stories and content that will travel for universal appeal. It’s just as important for the audience in China to enjoy the film as much as Chelmsford. I think that’s crucial that any director or writer I work with is that’s the key thing because frankly if it doesn’t then we can’t get the finance and it won’t work.
I always love the slapstick comedy and I liked the scenes in the spaceship, particularly when we put the Chemical Brothers over it as they’re one of my favourite bands of all time. A lot of the emotional moments, closer emotional pieces.
Yeah you’ll definitely see more of Shaun.