Aardman, the four-time Academy Award winning British studio behind “Wallace & Gromit”, has teamed up with Apple to bring its most famous characters to life in London this Christmas.
The hapless inventor, Wallace, and his canine best friend (and connoisseur of fine things), Gromit, will be lighting up Battersea Power Station throughout December in a new short animation that is being projected onto the former coal-fired station’s 101 metre (331 feet) high river-facing wash towers.
After being decommissioned in the mid-1980s, London’s iconic Battersea Power Station reopened as a multi-use retail, residential and leisure destination in 2022. In autumn 2023 it welcomed its newest tenant, Apple, becoming home to the Cupertino-based brand’s U.K. headquarters. Since moving in, Apple has turned lighting up the station’s towering chimneys into something of a tradition: last year it enlisted the help of artist David Hockney for “Bigger Christmas Trees”, his then latest work created entirely on an iPad, and this time round it has teamed up with Aardman on the new “Wallace & Gromit” short that was – you guessed it – shot on iPhone.
Apple has long touted the technical and creative potential of its iPhone lineup, particularly its “Pro” models, and for its latest work Aardman used the iPhone 16 Pro Max – eight devices, to be precise – to shoot thousands of stills that were later turned into a short stop-motion animation. The iPhones were “mounted on motorised heads” at two different angles and the studio utilized the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s “5x telephoto” camera to capture a total of 6,000 super-high-resolution still photographs in ProRAW that were then painstakingly “assembled frame by frame to produce a stunning 6K video.” Gavin Strange, a director and graphic design lead at Aardman, called the project a “cinematic fusion of tech and art” and a “dream to direct,” one he hopes will inspire people to “start shooting their own stop-motion masterpieces with iPhone.” You can watch the making of the new film here.
To see the new “Wallace & Gromit” animation in person, head down to Battersea Power Station where it will be on display each night from 5 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. between now and New Year’s Eve.
And, if you’re interested in creating your own stop-motion animation, Apple and Aardman have put together a 42-second tutorial that you can watch below.
