Nick Park Quotes

What's happened with computer technology is perfectly timed for someone with my set of skills. I tell stories with pictures. What I love about CGI is that if I can think it, it can be put on the screen.

The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.

The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now.

Computers don't create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.

It's amazing what they can do with animation nowadays. It's really beautiful. The 3D stuff is out of hand.

CG can do anything, but it can't do everything well. What it naturally can do is special effects. But using stop-motion comes from our desire to do handmade stuff. There are always going to be kids who get out whatever it might be - clay, bits of wire, Barbie dolls, Legos. They want to tell little stories.

As I look back on my career, I had a goal, which was to build the first feature computer-animated film.

We're not purists about stop-motion. If there's a tool we can use that makes more sense to bring something to life in a better way, we'll use it, whether that's hand-drawn animation or CG or some newfangled technology we're developing.

Working with CGI is more like doing theater where your sort of imagining things. I didn't experience it as restrictive.

Doing animation is great fun. It's like a different world.

You hear people say that there's too much CG in movies today, but CG is what allows me to take a green-painted wall in a studio and make it disappear, and then put 100 miles of landscape in. CG, in the right hands, can be a marvelous tool.

It's been about 15 years, and I've never really worked seriously in CGI and I thought that here was an opportunity to do the kinds of things that I was not able to do on Ghostbusters.

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.

Well, luckily with animation, fantasy is your friend.

When I started work with LucasArts Computer Division back in 1984, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts and saw the Festival of Animation for the first time. I loved the diverse collection of animated films the festival held.

Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.

Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.

I think the CG is an instrument to create reality. I don't think it's an instrument to create a heightened reality.

I think it reflects well on the state of animation that people are knowledgeable about it and love the fantasy and imagination that goes into it.

I grew up watching movies and being amazed at the animatronics you'd see in stuff like 'The Dark Crystal,' and all those kinds of movies. So, I'm always enthralled with how they can make it all work, behind the scenes, with the visual effects.

Comic-book pages are vertical, and movie screens are relentlessly horizontal. But it's all the same form. We use different tools, but we get the job done. I'm completely in love with CGI. It's great for conveying a cartoonist's sense of reality.

If you take a regular animated film, that's being done by animators on computers, so the filmmaking is a fairly technical process.

I remember when I first came around, the computer-generated stuff was pretty wicked. I was like, 'Wow!' but I feel like then for the longest time, we saw so much of it, after a while, you might as well just be watching an animated movie.

Sci-fi films are the epic films of the day because we can no longer put 10,000 extras in the scene - but we can draw thousands of aliens with computers.

A lot of people feel that there is less artistry involved in cartoon making unless they have painstaking control of each frame.