Aardman marks 50 years with new Shaun the Sheep film

Aardman Animations is marking its 50th anniversary with a new Shaun the Sheep feature film made using the Bristol studio's long-running stop-motion methods.

"Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom" is due to be released in UK cinemas on September 18. It is the third full-length film starring Shaun, who first appeared in the 1995 Wallace and Gromit film "A Close Shave".

The Halloween-themed story follows Shaun and his flock as they try to save their farm's pumpkin patch from a frightening creature. Designers have worked on the film for three-and-a-half years in sets built at Aardman's Bristol base.

Aardman, founded in Bristol in 1976 by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, is known for characters including Wallace and Gromit and has won four Oscars. The studio continues to use stop-motion animation, in which puppets are moved and filmed frame by frame.

Animation director Claire Rolls said the aim was to make viewers believe the puppets were alive. One sequence described at the studio involved tiny movements of sheep puppets between camera shots; after two days of work, about two seconds of footage would be filmed.

The completed film contains more than 100,000 stop-motion frames. Aardman's puppet department uses interchangeable parts for facial expressions and keeps spare sheep arms and ears because the figures can break during filming.

Producer Richard Beek said digital effects were used as an addition to the handcrafted work, but artificial intelligence was not used for the latest Shaun film.