Nick Park

Nick Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nick Park

Park at the premiere of 'Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit'
Born Nicholas Wulstan Park
6 December 1958 (age 54)[1]
Preston, Lancashire, England
Occupation director, animator, writer
Nationality British
Genres Animation
Notable work(s) Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts, Shaun the Sheep, Chicken Run
NicholasWulstan "Nick" Park, CBE[2][3] (born 6 December 1958)[1] is an English filmmaker of stop motion animation best known as the creator of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep.[4] Park has been nominated for an Academy Award a total of six times, and won four with Creature Comforts (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995), and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).[5]Contents [hide]
1 Early Life
2 Career
3 Personal life
4 Filmography
4.1 Film
4.2 Television
5 Awards and nominations
6 Further reading
7 References
8 External links
[edit]Early Life

Park was born on Brookfield Park in Preston in Lancashire, England and grew up on Greenlands Estate, Preston and later moved to Walmer Bridge, where his mother still resides. He is the middle child, offive siblings. He was born to Mary Cecilia Ashton (b. 1930), a seamstress, and Roger Wulstan Park (b. 1925 d.2004), an architectural photographer.[citation needed] His sister Janet lives in the South Ribble area still, in Longton.[6] He attended Cuthbert Mayne High School (now Our Lady's Catholic High School). He grew up with a keen interest in drawing cartoons, and as a 13-year old made films withthe help of his mother – who was a dressmaker – and her home movie camera and cotton bobbins. He also took after his father, an amateur inventor, and would send items – such as a bottle that squeezed out different coloured wools – to Blue Peter.[7] He studied Communication Arts at Sheffield Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) and then went to the National Film and Television School,where he started making the first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out.
[edit]Career

In 1985, he joined the staff of Aardman Animations in Bristol, where he worked as an animator on commercial products (including the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", where he worked on the dance scene involving oven-ready chickens). He also had a part in animating the Pee-wee's Playhouse which featuredPaul Reubens. Along with all this, he had finally completed A Grand Day Out, and with that in post-production, he made Creature Comforts as his contribution to a series of shorts called "Lip Synch". Creature Comforts matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes. The two films were nominated for a host of awards. A Grand Day Out beat Creature Comforts for theBAFTA award, but it was Creature Comforts that won Park his first Oscar.
In 1990 Park worked alongside advertising agency GGK to develop a series of highly acclaimed television advertisements for the "Heat Electric" campaign. The Creature Comforts advertisements are now regarded as among the best advertisements ever shown on British television, as voted (independently) by viewers of the UK's maincommercial channels ITV[8] and Channel 4.[9]
Two more Wallace and Gromit shorts, The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), followed, both winning Oscars. He then made his first feature-length film, Chicken Run (2000), co-directed with Aardman founder Peter Lord. He also supervised a new series of "Creature Comforts" films for British television in 2003.
His second theatricalfeature-length film and first Wallace and Gromit feature, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was released on 5 October 2005, and won Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 78th Academy Awards, 6 March 2006.
On 10 October 2005, a fire gutted Aardman Animations' archive warehouse.[10] The fire resulted in the loss of most of Park's creations, including the models and sets used in the movie...