On this page we’ll try to answer some of your most pressing questions , as well as giving a little insight into the day to day life of one of the world’s most famous animation directors.

While you may know everything there is to know about Wallace and Gromit, you may not know so much about their creator, Nick Park. Aardman gets countless emails and letters from fans interested to know a little more about the man behind some of Aardman’s best loved films, asking everything from how Nick comes up with his ideas to what type of cheese he likes most!

Nick was born in Preston, Lancashire. As a boy, Nick loved drawing, especially cartoons as he was a huge fan of the The Beano comic. He would use his mother’s home movie camera to record his early films; his childhood interest in film-making continued, leading Nick to study animation at the National Film and Television School in Buckinghamshire. It was during his time here that Nick created the characters that would develop into Wallace and Gromit.

Nick created a bald inventor and his intelligent dog assistant for his graduation project, and used traditional stop-motion techniques to bring his characters to life. However, the labour-intensive nature of creating an animation in this way meant that Nick’s film wasn’t complete when he finished his film course.

Nick invited Aardman's Peter Lord and David Sproxton to the National Film and Television School as guest speakers, having seen their animated films and Morph on television. At the time Nick was making his graduation film, which was to become the much loved "A Grand Day Out". Peter and David, who had only recently established Aardman, mentioned they were on the lookout for an animator to come and help with various projects, and Nick ended up visiting Bristol for 2 summers to help them mostly with their work for BBC TV. Nick first worked on prop-making for Morph, Aardman’s lovable terracotta hero! He then moved onto animating Morph the following summer and later joined Aardman full time in 1985 to work on various other projects including a Channel Four funded short called Babylon, and the multi award-winning video for the track 'Sledgehammer' by Peter Gabriel.

The Aardman team then to helped Nick complete his graduation film and later embarked on the "Lip Sync" series of 5 minute films for Channel Four. Nick took on one of these films and created "Creature Comforts". By the time both films were finished it was 1989 and both "A Grand Day Out" and "Creature Comforts" got Oscar® nominations in the short animated film category. Creature Comforts took the award at the 1990 ceremony and Nick started on his collection of the gilded statuettes, adding to it regularly over the next few years.