By GREG WANE
ONE of Australia’s most memorable advertising campaigns was also a hit for Torquay’s Glen Hunwick.
The 54-year-old ‘claymation’ expert created all the quirky characters for chocolate manufacturer Cadbury’s ‘Wouldn’t it be Nice’ campaign.
“We worked around the clock for three months to create the ads and they’ve certainly become recognisable,” the stop-motion animation artist recalled.
Originally from New Zealand, Mr Hunwick grew up in Melbourne but moved to the Surf Coast with his young family 11 years ago.
“It was for the surfing,” he admitted, “and, yeah, the lifestyle, too”.
Mr Hunwick’s career in animation began accidently more than 25 years ago when he enrolled in an illustration course at Melbourne’s Swinburne University.
“I loved drawing and I thought it was a great way to tell a story.
“I walked into an animation class by mistake and from then on I was hooked.”
Mr Hunwick bought a big bag of plasticine and began making characters to animate them.
He quickly learnt how to make his characters tell their tales.
“I’d take a still frame of the plasticine character then move it, take another still and so on – put them all together and the character comes to life.”
Mr Hunwick said movies like Chicken Run and Wallace and Gromitt popularised claymation.
The Cadbury ads held their own challenges, requiring the characters’ skin to look like edible chocolate in every frame, he recalled.
“We had to make five scale models of one character. We used epoxy resin, silicone as well as the plasticine.”
Mr Hunwick also produced a stop-motion short film Mutt, a story of a ball-obsessed farm dog.
The film’s success took him to Los Angeles where he worked with some of the industry’s best writers.
After several years working overseas on big-budget campaigns with short deadlines, long hours and travel, the work eventually took its toll and he opted for the quieter lifestyle at Torquay.
Now he’s preparing to lead a stop motion animation course at Gordon Institute of TAFE this month.
“The course will run over eight evening sessions with students learning animation techniques working under a fixed, industry-standard digital camera,” he said.
Enrolments for the course are available at The Gordon.
