Peter Lord

for the art historian see Peter Lord (art historian) .

Peter Lord CBE
Lord in 2014 demonstrating Morph
Born	(1953-11-04) 4 November 1953 Bristol, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Occupation	Animator, film producer, director
Notable work	Wallace and Gromit, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!
Signature

Peter Lord, CBE (born 4 November 1953) is a British animator, film producer, director and co-founder of the Academy Award-winning Aardman Animations studio, an animation firm best known for its clay-animated films and shorts, particularly those featuring plasticine duo Wallace & Gromit. He also directed The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! which was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 85th Academy Awards.

Lord is the executive producer of every Aardman work, including Shaun the Sheep Movie and Arthur Christmas.

Life and career

Lord was born in Bristol, England. In co-operation with David Sproxton, a friend of his youth, he realised his dream of "making and taking an animated movie". He graduated in English from the University of York in 1976.^[1] He and Sproxton founded Aardman as a low-budget backyard studio, producing shorts and trailers for publicity. Their work was first shown as part of the BBC TV series Vision On. In 1977 they created Morph, a stop-motion animated character made of Plasticine, who was usually a comic foil to the TV presenter Tony Hart. With his alter-ego Chas, he appeared in a series of children's art programmes including Take Hart, Hartbeat and Smart. From 1980-1981, Morph appeared in his own TV series The Amazing Adventures of Morph.

Experiments with animated clay characters synchronised with 'live' recorded soundtracks led to a series of films in the style of animated documentary. The first two were part of the BBC TV series Animated Conversations and were called Down and Out (1977) and Confessions of a Foyer Girl (1978) . These were followed in 1983 by Conversation Pieces, a series of five-minute long films produced for Channel 4. They were called On Probation, Sales Pitch, Palmy Days, Late Edition and Early Bird.

In 1985 Nick Park joined the group.

Lord, Park and Sproxton developed and finalised their style of detailed and lovingly designed clay animation characters from stop motion techniques (though directed by Stephen Johnson their claymation is shown in the music video Sledgehammer (1986) by Peter Gabriel). In 1991 Lord animated Adam, a 6-minute clay animation that was nominated for an Academy Award. Park created the "odd-couple" Wallace and Gromit-shorts in co-operation with Lord and Sproxton. All three together worked as producers, editors and directors. Other awarded productions by Peter Lord are Chicken Run (2000), the first feature film from Aardman and the Academy Award-winning Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).

In 2006, Lord, Sproxton and Park were all given "the Freedom of the City of Bristol". In that same year, Lord (along with Sproxton) visited the "Aardman Exhibit" at the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan, where he met Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki has long been a fan of the Aardman Animation works.^[2][3] In 2013 Lord was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 85th Academy Awards for Pirates! Band of Misfits.

Lord was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) on 17 June 2006.

On 9 July 2015, Lord received a Gold Blue Peter badge.^[4]

Filmography

Feature films

Year	Film	Director	Producer	Writer	Other	Notes
2000	Chicken Run	Y	Y	Y
2005	Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit		Y
2006	Flushed Away			Y
2011	Arthur Christmas		Y
2012	The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!	Y	Y		Y	Actor: "Additional voices"
2013	The Croods				Y	Special thanks
2015	Shaun the Sheep Movie		Y			Executive producer

TV series

Shorts

Books

• Peter Lord & Brian Sibley: Cracking Animation (1998) Thames & Hudson; ISBN 0-500-28168-8

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Peter Lord.

• Peter Lord at the Internet Movie Database
• Q&A With Peter Lord about The Pirates! Band of Misfits