How to be a clay manufacturer for Aardman is running out of clay for WALLACE & GROMIT film

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that How to be a clay manufacturer for Aardman is running out of clay for WALLACE & GROMIT film. 

Aardman is running out of clay and have only got enough to make the next ‘WALLACE & GROMIT’ film.

The studio that usually provides them with clay has been shut down.

Even with that inevitability looming overhead, it doesn’t sound like Aardman’s staff is letting it down their spirits. They remain hard at work on Netflix’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, which sees the chickens from the original film (some of which are voiced by new actors) break into a farm controlled by Mrs. Tweedy from the first movie. The movie hits Netflix on December 15.

The material is named after its creator Lewis Newplast, a schoolteacher who created it in his garden shed. The plasticine is easy to mold and able to maintain its shape. And once it’s gone, it’s gone: the outlet revealed Aardman is looking for a suitable replacement, or possibly considering creating its own substitute. As far as where they are on that front, it’s not discussed within the piece itself, and we likely won’t know until Aardman outright says as such, likely whenever that Wallace & Gromit film draws closer to release.

As Wallace himself might say: oh ’eck. A crisis has descended upon Aardman Animations. The world-renowned stop-motion studio is about to run out of clay.

Ever since its founding in the early 1970s, Aardman has moulded its characters from Lewis Newplast – a modelling material named after one Mr Lewis, an art teacher from Chislehurst who concocted the stuff in his garden shed.

This Plasticine-like substance is an animator’s dream: it’s easy to mould, yet keeps its shape under hot studio lights. But in March this year, the only factory that made it, on the outskirts of Torquay, shut up shop. When its closure was announced, Aardman bought up every last block of Lewis Newplast that remained in the warehouse – enough for just one more film: the new Wallace & Gromit, coming in 2024. After that, until a suitable replacement can be found, or invented, that’s it.

A few weeks from the completion of the shoot, the place is a hubbub of colour and texture – a cross between Willy Wonka’s Inventing Room and an explosion in a primary-school art cupboard. Pliable character models made from silicone (which Aardman uses in addition to Newplast when reposability is crucial), built over vaguely sinister Terminator-like metal armatures, are being lightly dusted with icing sugar to give them a more doughy matte finish. (The original puppets were all ­rotisseried – sorry, destroyed – in the Aardman warehouse fire of 2005.)