Peter Lord, CBE

Peter Lord, CBE is an English animator, film producer, director and co-founder of the Academy Award-winning Aardman Animations studio, best known for its clay-animated films and shorts.

Lord was born in Bristol, he and David 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 (a series for deaf children 1964-1976).

He co-founded Aardman with David Sproxton on April 12th 1972. When the BBC asked them who they should make their first cheque out to - they decided to name their business after the title character they had created for Vision On.

A childlike nature. I think that’s quite important; playfulness. It’s not all laughing and giggling all day but this is a playful business and telling funny stories ought to be a playful business, and we remember that.

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 amoral friend 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 audio soundtracks resulted in a series of films produced as animated documentaries. 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). 

I remember playing with Plasticine at a very early age... I love the material, the cold, strange smelly stuff! I also found it a very instinctive way of working, animating with your hands with a little clay figure, moving the arm and then seeing the shoulders move.

I found drawing entirely technical, but this was instinctive and of course people have always loved to sculpt. Neolithic man piddled about with clay. There is something godlike about it.

These were followed in 1983 by Conversation Pieces, a series of five-minute long films produced for Channel 4. The series included On Probation, Sales Pitch, Palmy Days, Late Edition and Early Bird.

In 1986 Aardman helped to create the iconic video for Peter Gabriel's groundbreaking single Sledgehammer (directed by Stephen R Johnson).

We were just hired as the animators... I didn’t know who Peter was; I wasn’t into Genesis even though it was my period - and yet Peter came in and was very well-informed about animation! That was a bit embarrassing.

There was a brief period after Sledgehammer when I was the most famous stop-motion animator around.

Sledgehammer won nine MTV Video Music Awards and stands as the most-played music video in MTV history.

In 1991 Lord animated Adam, a 6-minute clay animation that was nominated for an Academy Award.

Other awarded productions by Peter Lord are Chicken Run (2000), which became the first feature film from Aardman and the Academy Award-winning Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).

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

In 2013 Lord was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 85th Academy Awards for Pirates! Band of Misfits.

On 9 July 2015, Lord received a Gold Blue Peter badge !

He also directed The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! which was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 85th Academy Awards.

On 9 November 2018, Aardman Animations announced that Peter Lord and David Sproxton would be transferring majority ownership of the company to its employees in order to keep the company independent.

In January 2019, Lord and Sproxton released a book detailing the history of the studio, called A Grand Success! The Aardman Journey, One Frame at a Time.

In a world saturated by computer graphics and visual effects Aardman have embraced technology where it can make a difference without losing the heart and artistry that has made them such a world leader in the field of animation.

The possibilities are so much greater now than when we first started especially with the Internet; anyone can publish their work which is amazing. There are so many more outlets and channels which is exciting, and the new technologies like virtual reality is very intriguing. Then there are games, movies; the opportunities for animation are just mind-boggling.

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