WallaceAndGromit.net

A 5 year old inventor in the United Kingdomhas been named the youngest inventor in UK history – and credits Wallace and Gromit as being inspiration.

 “Inspired by his heroes Wallace and Gromit, Sam has become Britain’s youngster inventor by patenting an idea for a new type of broom.”

– Mirror.co.uk: Sam Houghton, 5, is the youngest patent holder

Aardman, in keeping with their fantastic reputation with community involvement, they have donated original artwork to a local charity for a race.

 “Aardman Animations, makers of The Wrong Trousers and Curse of the Were-Rabbit, is supporting the 2008 Acorns Children’s Hospice Triple Run by donating original artwork from the movie Chicken Run and producing special signage for the event.”

–  Worcester News: How creators of Wallace and Gromit are helping hospice

Wallace and Gromit visit hospitals gearing up for the Wrong Trousers Day 2008, their goal this year is to increase participation from 400,000 in 2007 to one million this year:

 “Characters Wallace and Gromit visited a north London hospital as part of a nationwide tour to promote a fund raising event.

The life-sized pair met youngsters at the Whittington Hospital ahead of the Wrong Trousers Day next month.”

– BBC:  Grand tour for Wallace and Gromit

They also visited Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Whittington Hospital, and others.

Finally, an article that talks about the fabulous  Wensleydale Cheese with Cranberries. It turns out that the skins used to make that cheese come from skins of Ocean Spray raspberry juice production in the US, so that cheese I buy has quite a journey before it gets on my table back here in the US.

“American firm Ocean Spray produces gallons of cranberry juice each year but has no use for the skins.

So each month, tonnes of the skins arrive from the US at the Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes, North Yorkshire, to be used in one of its best-selling cheeses.

The skins form a prime component of Real Yorkshire Wensleydale Cheese with Cranberries.”

– The Northern Echo

Yum Wensleydale!

Aardman managed to walk away from the British Animation Awards with 4 awards this year – two of which went to Shaun the Sheep on CBBC, which won both the best children’s series and the children’s choice award.

• BBC News: Aardman scoops animation awards
• Guardian.co.uk: Aardman shines at animation awards

The new upcoming Wallace and Gromit film, A Matter of Loaf And Death (formerly known as Trouble At Mill) has started voice casting. After hearing Sally Lindsay on a radio interview, Nick Park was able to hire her to voice Wallace’s new love interest, Piella Bakewell.

• Empire Movie News: New Wallace & Gromit Gets Love Interest

Finally, Easter is tomorrow – and the Shaun the Sheep mailing list has sent out an Easter greeting for all subscribed. Check out Shaun’s latest Newsletter here. Not subscribed? Sign up here.

Calling all Wallace and Gromit fans!
Nick Park is selling the van that inspired the Anti-Pesto van in Wallace and Gromit : The Curse of the Wererabbit on Ebay. Bidding opened today with the starting bid at £999.99, closing on the 27th October. All proceeds from the sale will go to Wallace and Gromit’s Children’s Foundation.

For more information visit www.ebay.co.uk.

www.thisisnorthscotland.co.uk for news article.

 On a side note:

 Timmy the adorable lamb from Shaun on the Sheep is set to get his own TV show in 2009. There will be 52, 10 minute episodes, each following a day in his life at Nursery. The series is aimed at the pre-school market (who cares!) and has already been sold to CBeebies (BBC pre-school channel) and is currently securing worldwide sales.

http://www.aardman.com/html/news.asp?type=html for more information!

Fresh from the dizzy heights of Hollywood fame, Wallace and Gromit are set to star in a brand new 30 minute short for BBC One in late 2008!

With a brand new windmill installation at 62 West Wallaby Street, the film will see our heroes embarking on yet another business…baking!

According to Nick Park, the business is called ‘Top Bun’ and offers a dough-to-door service, which leads to a new love interest for Wallace, in the form of the lovely Piella. But, as always, somewhere along the line things start to go amiss, as the bread tension rises when Gromit spots that a number of local bakers have gone missing, as the murder mystery begins!

Bob Baker, and Nick Park have scripted the screenplay and shooting begins in January at the Aardman studios in Bristol for approx. 7-8 months, the fastest WandG shoot to date!

Very, very, very exciting news! Finally a new short, with Aardman in complete control!

Check out the video interview with Nick Park at www.wallaceandgromit.com where you can also sign up for the production video blog and enter a competition to win tickets to the premiere.

“I’m making this for myself again and the people who love Wallace and Gromit.” – Nick Park, BBC News.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7024834.stm

Back in July you might recall that a Wallace and Gromit flower display at the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Flower Show at Tatton Park in Cheshire won a gold metal! I never reported about this, but an article about it is here. The news now is that the display has been moved to a local florist in Preston to remain on display, according to this article in the Lancashire Evening Post:

Margaret Mason, who runs the Friargate florists, said: “It would have been a shame if they had ended up in a cardboard box. It will be the in the shop for a few weeks.

The next bit of news is just a note to mention that Hit Entertainment is going to manage licensing and home entertainment rights in the US and Canada. According to this article on c21Media:

Hit will manage the rights to three properties: Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Aardman Classics. Stephen Moore, chief operating officer at Aardman, said: “Hit’s talent at managing top international brands will give Shaun and Wallace and Gromit a great springboard for tremendous success.”

This is exciting news for those of us across the pond. In spite of their movie debut in the US their influence has been somewhat limited, perhaps with the backing of such a big firm their influence will start to grow.

Lots of exciting news tidbits has filtered through over the past couple of months starting with….

BBC News reported plans a couple of days ago for a Wallace and Gromit Statue to be erected in Nick Park’s home city, Preston. The bronze tribute is to be designed by Nick Park who says he is “delighted to be working on the designs.” The cost of the statue is estimated at £100,000 with funding coming from the council, Aardman Animations, Grosvenor Ltd. and private sponsors. This news comes on the back of a similar story posted on July 1st 2006, but with one main difference….the location of the statue!

Whether both statues go ahead, or if this latest news means that Bristol will no longer be getting a monument, remains to be seen……

www.wallaceandgromit.com got an complete redesign recently with video clips from the madcap duos adventures and lots more besides. Review coming soon!!!

Wallace and Gromit even got their own garden at the RHS show in Tatton this year, see the video of Nick Park’s visit at the BBC Website

April saw Gromit step into some rather large “pawprints’ according to Nick Park, as he modelled for a new, special edition of the HMV logo!

Gromit animators sign movie deal Yes, its official! Aardman have joined up with Sony Animations for a three-year movie deal, could a new Wallace and Gromit feature be on the cards?

The duo are also moving into a new home as a 10 million pound state-of-the-art studio, Aardman’s new home!

Shaun the Sheep ‘Series 2’ began in the UK on Monday 3rd September and will be broadcast with two episodes back-to-back every afternoon for two weeks on BBC1. The official website of the series has been updated with clips from some of the new episodes, a competition and special offers on Shaun merchandise. The Disney Channel is also broadcasting the 1st series at 7.55pm on Sundays with next weeks episode called “Mower Mouth”.

‘Shape up with Shaun’ is due to be released on Region 2 DVD on 17th September and will feature the episodes Shape Up With Shaun; Bathtime, Fetching; Take Away; Still Life; Scrumping; Little Sheep Of Horrors and The Kite.

In June Shaun the Sheep won the won the Cristal for Best TV Production at the Annecy International Animation Festival in France, Congratulations!

 Phewww…. there’s bound to be things that I’ve missed, but that’s a rough summary of all the new info!

It’s been a busy year for me, and the lack of updates for the past few months has been unfortunate. My excuse is this overhaul! The migration to this new website format is now complete. We now have an RSS feed, comments enabled for posts for 2 months, and the ability to give email AND posting accounts to regular contributors to the site!

So the site is back – I’ll be doing news updates regularly again and I hope to hear from many of you in the coming months.

Just a quick note to say I’m still alive and planning on doing some site updates in the very near future.

As always, thoughts and suggestions for the site are always welcome, just click on Contact for my email address and drop me a line!

Cheers everyone.

The new Shaun the Sheep kids series from CBBC launched this month with a great deal of fanfare. Digital Outlook was hired to develop the website, which Daniel Brett dropped me a link to as soon as he knew about it (before I did!):

ShaunTheSheep.com – Official site with show clips, information about it worldwide, news and other great stuff. Very cute!

Telegraph.co.uk: Shaun the Sheep returns with his own show – nice article with show clips

BBC.co.uk: In pictures: Shaun the Sheep – Some behind the scenes shots of the show

Now unfortunately for those of us in the United States there is not yet a contract to release Shaun the Sheep here! I went to the official site a few weeks ago and it said the info about a US deal was “coming soon” – but now going back I don’t see any information about it. We can only hope a deal is struck eventually, or that we get a DVD release here. I want to see Shaun! 🙂

And now for some articles about Peter Sallis, the voice of Wallace. We don’t hear from him regularly, but it’s been a big news month for him.

Sallis: ‘Wallace and Gromit are better without Hollywood’ – Among other things, Sallis explains that he likes the 30 minute Wallace and Gromit films more than the feature length one.

Star Sallis shares experiences – Just a short article about an interview he did, gives us a quick glance into who he is.

First off, Aardman and Dreamworks have made the formal announcement about their parting ways. It’s unfortunate that Aardman will no longer have the support of such a large studio, but I hope this means they will regain all their creative license and will be able to create more fantastic films like Were-Rabbit and fewer “hollywoodized” films like Flushed Away. There are dozens of articles out there about this one, but you can check out this Forbes article for a nice overview.

Also in general Aardman news, they recently hired Jackie Cockle “as a development producer with special responsibility for programming aimed and kids preschool aged and younger” – for more information about this hire check out AnimationMagazine.net: Aardman Warms to Cockle for Development.

Now we’ve been hearing rumors about the development of the Shaun the Sheep series – these rumors have come to fruition with the annoucement that the series has been licenses to television stations WORLDWIDE! A preview was also released, which you can see up on youtube: Shaun the Sheep (thanks for the link kimpony!).

There are several articles out here discussing Shaun’s series and his licensing deals, you can check out a few of them:

BBC: Shaun the Sheep set for TV fame

AWN.com: Shaun The Sheep Gathers More Than 60 TV & Licensing Deals

EveningStar.co.uk: A star is Shaun

Perhaps the most exciting news of all, is the announcement from Aardman that they are working on a new Wallace and Gromit film! Quotes taken from this article on MovieWeb.com:

“Wallace and Gromit are alive and kicking,” Aardman spokesman Arthur Sheriff said on Wednesday. “There is a project on the table right now.

“It could be television, it could be a feature film. That depends on how the storyline develops. It will go into production as soon as he has finished writing it.”

How exciting! A couple other articles about it:

Cinematical.com: More Wallace & Gromit in the Works

Metro.co.uk: New Wallace and Gromit film planned

And on a bit of a self-promotion front, I’ve recently begun working with Seb at 62WestWallabyStreet.co.uk on his bi-weekly Wallace and Gromit Podcast. There have so far been 8 episodes, in 7 I read the news and presented an “American Cheese Corner” and in episode 8 I read the news. This will be a regular thing for me, I really enjoy the podcast and am delighted that I can make a contribution. If you want to check it out you can search for the podcast on iTunes, or head over to 62WestWallabyStreet.co.uk and click on “Radio” – you don’t need an iPod to listen to podcasts, they’re just mp3 files that you can download and play on your computer.

Finally, a few tidbits that people have emailed and I’ve stumbled across in the past few weeks:

Evelynn over at CartoonDollEmporium.com dropped me a note to let me know they had created a Gromit doll on their site. It’s an adorable little site.

An article on mywesttexas.com lists Curse as one of the top DVDs of the year: Best DVDs of 2006

Wallace and Gromit star’s tea at Rhodes: An interview with Peter Sallis (voice of Wallace) “March 11… The actor will be taking tea at the South Road venue on March 11 and discussing his career”

And the last of our tidbits comes from Claire McDonough who dropped me a line to let me know about a site she helps run: ILoveCheese.co.uk. It’s a delightful little non-profit site about cheese!