From
Australia's The Age ( www.theage.com.au ), 04.03.03
The ABC's (Australia Broadcasting Corp.)secret is about to be let out.
Deep within the bowels of its Elsternwick offices sits a
self-effacing animator with white Colonel Sanders-style
facial growth who creates magical puppets. Each bug-eyed
creature is carefully handmade, painted and primed before
making its star appearance in Nick Hilligoss'
short films. Animation is incredibly labour intensive,
but Hilligoss takes it to another level. Not only does he
make several versions of each puppet for different shots,
he meticulously builds and paints the life-like
three-dimensional sets. Only then does he start filming.
It is why Hilligoss who is attached to the ABC's natural
history unit, often vanishes --- into his cluttered
office version of the backyard shed - for long stretches
of time. "He disappears for a couple of years at a
time and the whole ABC hierarchy changes around him, but
I don't talk about him because people might find out he's
there", laughs, Dione Gilmour, the head of the ABC's
natural history unit.
Gilmour lured Hilligoss, then a modeller at the ABC, to
the unit after she spotted his miniatures of extinct
animals for the Nature of Australia series in
1998."We dragged Nick in here because I could see
that there were signs of brilliance about the guy",
she says. Hilligoss' knowledge of dinosaurs, honed as a
kid matches that of any dinosaur expert in Australia, she
says. So his first job was to make animated versions of
dinosaurs and other extinct animals - the only creatures
the unit's wildlife cameramen couldn't capture on film -
for documentary, Once Upon Australia.
"Unfortunately for me, when I was halfway through
doing it Jurassic Park came out and overnight it
was obsolete, so I tended to go a little more towards the
humorous approach because I wasn't really going to
impress people with how amazingly real these dinosaurs
were", Hilligoss says. The show which took two and a
half years to complete, won a number of international
animation awards. "After that I wanted to do
something shorter more manageable, and I ended up doing
five shorts called Bunch of Fives in the same
time", he says.
His latest labour of love is the five-part animated
series Good Riddance, which chronicles the
exploits of an eco-friendly pest controller and his
uninvited house guests, a streetwise gang of rats.
"A five-minute film is about six months of
work", Hilligoss says. "That's if all goes
well, but if there is difficulty, delays creep in".
The main character - a laid back pest controller with
fluorescent orange mohawk and army green shirt - was
loosely based on Peter. A possum catcher called in by the
ABC to deal with some stray pigeons."He was the
inspiration for the possum film (Bunch of Fives) but it
also got me thinkng about pest control. I started
thinking of different pests and what might be used to get
rid of them".
Hilligoss' cavernous studio is neatly stacked with
up-ended paint brushes, piles of puppets. Cute latex rats
and various odds and ends that can, and probably will,
make their way into one of his films. In here, he has
spent eight years bringing foam latex to life using
stop-motion animation. The technique, made famous by the
Aardman characters Wallace and Gromit, involves
shooting models one frame at a time moving them slightly
each time. It is a excruciatingly slow process that
demands nerves of steel. Hilligoss says stop-motion
animation has surged in popularity because digital
filmmaking techniques have made the process easier. Furry
little puppets can move like they've never moved before
thanks to digital post-production. Now, instead of hiding
puppet props from the camera, rods and fishing line can
be digitally erased after a sequence has been filmed.
Gilmour says Hilligoss' films are full of humour and
heart and appeal to a wide demographic. "He can sum
up really complex arguments about the environment in five
minutes in such a way that nobody feels that they are
being preached at ", she says. "This whole
series (Good Riddance) is about a biological
pest controller, but most of his solutions don't work the
first time so he's not saying biological pest control is
the panacea for all problems, he's saying there's a heck
of a lot of trial and error.
"You can appreciate it for the characters and the
amusement, but if you look at it any deeper there's many
layers of meaning underneath all that".
Good Riddance will screen on the ABC
this year. -------------------Elisabeth Tarica
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Stop Motion Works note: You can see some behind the
scenes of Good Riddance at Nick's Photo Album Site and other projects he has worked
on. I am not certain, but Nick Hilligoss works at ABC on
a project to project basis. He might be available in the
future to do freelance work. At least, he told me, he
might also pursue his own independent Stop Motion
projects. You may reach Nick at his email address, hilligoss.nick(remove
this)@abc.net.au
Or you can contact Nick or talk with him through the
Stop Motion Animation Message Board
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