February 11th, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
Shaun the Sheep and pals are back in their second feature film. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon is Aardman’s new sci-fi stop-motion comedy debuting on Netflix this Friday, February 14th. Directors Will Becher and Richard Phelan chat about the “Shaun” sequel, fresh-off a trip to the BAFTAs.
Jackson Murphy: “Shaun” was nominated for the Best Animated Film BAFTA. The ceremony was Feb. 2. How was it?
Will Becher: It was amazing. It was a star-studded… a festival of all the best things about film and British film. We had a great time.
JM: Farmageddon opened in the UK in October. That’s how it was able to qualify for the BAFTAs and a few other awards groups. How was it doing one round of marketing, and then taking a little break, and now doing another round of marketing?
Richard Phelan: It’s nice to have a little break in between, so I can re-vamp all my questions and answers. It’s been great. It’s been really enjoyable. I really enjoyed the press tour in October, and I’m looking forward to sharing this with everyone in North America and South America.
JM: When you have a new movie at Aardman, you like to bring the characters with you on your press tour. So you take them to the junket and the premiere and radio shows. Do you get nervous bringing these characters places because they’re so valuable?
WB: Yeah. To be honest, it’s a bit nerve-wracking. Obviously we’ve got to have them with us at all times. It’s a bit like being a security guard for the most famous sheep in the world. And he’s got his own special case that we carry him around in. He often causes quite a lot of interest with x-ray machines. It’s lovely to see people react to the actual Shaun the Sheep. Quite often people imagine he’s bigger in real life. When they see him, and they see how detailed he is, they give us a great response.
JM: Is there a difference you notice in how kids react vs. how adults react to seeing the characters in person?
RP: The kids get really excited, and the adults will regress into childhood. It’s really wonderful because I think everyone suddenly becomes a kid when they see it – because of the magic of toys and wanting to play with them.
JM: The first “Shaun” movie came out in 2015. It was Oscar and BAFTA nominated for Best Animated Feature. But this concept is a complete 180 of the first movie. Why did you decide to go sci-fi this time?
WB: It’s something we’ve never done before at Aardman, and that really excited us. But also the idea to this film started pretty much as soon as the first film had come out. It had just done its round at the cinemas, and there was a lot of love for it. We knew that there was an appetite for a feature-length sequel. And the thing was, we wanted to make the world feel bigger and go somewhere we hadn’t been before – but also find a new character that we could bring into the story. This idea of an alien came from a mixture of people, but mostly from the creator of the series: Richard Starzak. He was heavily involved in coming up with the initial idea. When we hit upon sci-fi, we realized that it fit really well with the farmstead: farms, corn and cornfields… that sense of the wilderness. We thought it could work really well as a comedy.
JM: It does. You laugh so much because there are so many details when it comes to references to “The X-Files” and “ET” and “2001” (among others). What kinds of research did you do to get the really funny details just right?
RP: We’re all huge fans of sci-fi at Aardman. The whole crew got excited about this. Literary references to H.G. Wells… we watched tons of films… everything from the 1950s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” B-movies up until “Arrival” and “Interstellar”, which we were immersed in. And then it became, “How can we make it funny? How can we find jokes in these things?”
JM: Lu-La, the alien creature, has such a great spirit to her. What was the process like in designing her look and tone?
WB: We knew we had a bit of a challenge because Shaun and the rest of the characters are so iconic. Everyone knows them so well. We had an open brief to start with, and we had all sorts of model makers in the art department. Everyone had a go at what their alien might look like. It was a case of picking the elements of what worked best. Ultimately it boiled down to one of the story team who drew a Roswell-style UFO. And that formed the shape of Lu-La’s head. And then this rocket-thrust, triangle shape underneath. We love that because it was really classic – really clear, but also it gave us this childlike element to her.
From that point on, we had a shape to work with. We wanted to add lots of mystery and color. The next thing we did is work with the art department and modeling team to try and create a brand new look for this character. She’s much brighter. She’s got… glitter in her ears – to make her stand out and feel like she’s from a different world. But ultimately always going back to the fact that she’s got this classic Aardman, big eyes, wide smiley mouth. And you can see the thumbprints and craft and love that go into her.
JM: There’s a specific scene in “Farmageddon”. The camera is steady on Lu-La in an aisle of a Food Mart. And she’s going off the wall. It is so funny. How did you pull off that scene?
RP: That scene took an entire year to shoot.
JM: Oh my gosh.
RP: For all the animators, we gave them the puppet and said, “Go crazy. Try different things out” – and see how they could bend it and break it. One of the animators took the armature out, so they could squash all the plasticine flat. And then they kept on experimenting this to basically energize her beyond any human movement. And then we made her best hits compilation with all the animation tests. The animator who did it when through them and cherry-picked the best ones. And it took him a whole year to shoot that scene.
JM: It paid off. The timing is so good when it comes to the comedy. Do you ever find yourself literally working on a scene, but then you come-up with something better in terms of comedy – and then you gotta adjust the animation and adjust what you have to do?
WB: Yeah, definitely. We’re refining all the way through the process. We try and start with a funny scenario. We spend a lot of time in the story process trying to find what would be the best situation to put Bitzer or Shaun into. And Lu-La in the supermarket, we try to get those scenarios working first of all. But then all the way through storyboarding and then the animation testing, we’re constantly trying to refine those jokes. And there are so many layers to the jokes. The art department will add jokes in the background.
Sometimes just on the day we’re gonna shoot, someone will come up with a great idea. Rich and I would always try to put in the funniest thing we could find. We’ll definitely reinvent it at the last minute. If we have to pause a scene because we thought of a new gag, we’ll do such. And we act everything out, so in terms of our timing, we look at the masters like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton – just to see how they nailed that physical comedy so well. We use that as influence sometimes.
JM: And in the final act, there’s a signal tower that becomes a key factor. It looks large. How big is that tower in real life?
RP: It was huge. We made the film in a huge warehouse on the edge of Bristol. And the tower is so big, we had to lie it on its side to on shoot it. If we stood it up, it would go through the roof. All the cameras are on their side. It’s a crazy thing to look at for the animators. Eventually we cut the tower into three sections, so the animators could look at the top of the tower, some could work on the middle, and others could work on the base – depending on where we were in the story. And then we built a miniature of the whole set so we could shoot wides as well.
JM: That sounds really complicated but fascinating. I’m gonna have to go back and watch that section again. The carnival that the Farmer character builds: was that one of the more complex sets that you’ve ever had to build?
WB: I’d say pretty much all the sets we did on this were brand new one-offs. We really did make it complex for ourselves. The underground base is the largest set we’ve ever made and contained the most elements and the most characters. And on top of that, we decided to shoot a chase sequence in the middle of it. We had 4 or 5 set pieces like that that involved these huge chases. And they all pushed the limits of what our teams and departments have done before.
JM: You two have been at Aardman for a long time. There’s another highly anticipated sequel in the works at Aardman – “Chicken Run 2”. Any details that you can share?
RP: It’s got chickens in it.
JM: (laughs)
RP: Literally – we’ve just started. It’s very early on. Hopefully you’ll see some of your favorites from the first film. And that’s all I can say.
WB: We’re all really excited by it, though. It’s really nice to get those characters back again. They were so loved around the world. It’s nice to see them again.
JM: When “Chicken Run” came out 20 years ago, it revolutionized stop-motion and Aardman all over the globe. Very excited for “Chicken Run 2”. And this time next year, we’ve got the 2021 Academy Awards. Netflix received two Best Animated Feature nominations this year. Are you guys prepared to talk about “Farmageddon” for another year?
RP: Absolutely!
WB: We’re there! We would love for the American audience to see “Farmageddon” in that light…
RP: …and at the Academy Awards.
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