Action Plan Research: Aardman

Well honestly Aardman require little introduction, unless you've been hiding under a rock you probably know who Aardman are. Just incase you have been hiding under a rock; Aardman are a Bristol based animation house, a very popular one, responsible for many feature length films including 'Wallace & Gromit', 'Chicken Run', the world-wide phenomenon 'Shaun the Sheep', and more recently 'Pirates: An Adventure with Scientists'.

Unlike many other smaller animation houses Aardman specialise in creating feature films, and are one of the main names competing with other feature film creators like Pixar, Disney, and Dreamworks. On a commercial, main stream film level it's virtually impossible to compete with these companies because of the sheer size of the teams and budgets. 


Any aspiring animator who wishes to work on films, and pretty much all animators when they start out, want to work at a place like Aardman, and I'm no different! I'd absolutely love to get the opportunity to work at a place like Aardman. 


I recently attended a lecture of Miles Bullough, director of broadcast at Aardman and he says that the company employ 200+ people, large for an animation company. He also said that they are always looking for new promising people to add to their staff in all departments, personally, as I've said before I'd love to work in pre production. Thinking up new ideas, writing stories, scripts, characters, building sets, characters, anything... And the pre production team at Aardman is pretty large.


At his lecture Miles mentioned that they also offer lots of internships and allow many volunteers to work there on a free-trial basis to get a feel for what working at such a company would be like, and that ofte they hire from that pool of people (it's like a voluntary, drawn out interview). 


I'm considering contacting Miles to see if it'd be possible to arrange a work experience week when I move in September. Aardman is only a 30 minute drive from where I'll be living in Bath, which for a week or 2 I'd be more than willing to do for that kind of experience, if I can afford to work for free for 2 weeks that is... I'll certainly be keeping my eyes on this page: http://www.aardman.com/about-us/jobs/ where they advertise any vacancies. I imagine they're snatched up quite quickly!