Aardman duo on Wallace & Gromit, Oscars and 'villainous' character in new film

Wallace & Gromit. Chicken Run. Morph.

Vengeance Most Fowl co-directors Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham have worked on them all. And in some cases, they've been the hands that literally moulded these characters to life.

Park, now executive director at Bristol-based Aardman Animations, joined the company in 1985.

A few years later, aged 29, he made two Academy Award-nominated films in the same year: A Grand Day Out, the first appearance of Wallace & Gromit, and Creature Comforts, his first of four Oscar wins.

Crossingham, meanwhile, spent his teen years performing as an acrobat, training with the Moscow State Circus. Joining Aardman as a runner in 1994, his first project was the Wallace & Gromit film A Close Shave. And he's now creative director of the Wallace & Gromit brand.

As the iconic characters return to our screens this Christmas for Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, Park and Crossingham share some of their "first ever" moments.

Nick Park: "I wanted to be a Beano artist at the age of 10. But then I discovered my mother had an 8mm movie camera that could take single frames. I got addicted — plasticine was my gateway drug.

"Actually, my first film was a gateway to Wallace & Gromit. It was called Walter the Rat, about a rat that has a pet worm that wants to go fishing. At the age of 12, it was my introduction to comedy duos."

Merlin Crossingham: "I didn't discover stop motion until I was 18. I gatecrashed a mate's lecture on animation and thought, 'I've got to do that.'

"I wasn't aware of animation as a child really, I was too busy adventuring and jumping off things. But when I became an animator, all that physical, crazy stuff meant I was very aware of what it took to do those things - and [I] put it through the puppets."

NP: "I had all these sketchbooks full of characters, and so when I was looking for a project in my first year of film school I plundered those sketchbooks.

"At first, Gromit was a cat. But when I tried to make him, I gave him a brow that seemed to suit a dog, and it just worked better with big expressive ears like a dog. It was much easier making him into a dog. You need to be able to get your fingers in between all sorts of areas in order to manipulate him frame by frame, and I found a cat a bit fiddly.

"Originally, I was planning for Gromit to have a voice. I'd even recorded it. But then I was filming a scene for A Grand Day Out where Wallace is using Gromit as a trestle table to build his rocket. It was just so difficult to reach Gromit's mouth, so I just moved his brow to make him look more and more hacked off. And so Gromit was born."

NP: "I was in our small studio in Bristol, and got a phone call from the Academy to say that we had been nominated. I couldn't believe it – I didn't even know you could be nominated for a short film.

"It was utterly bizarre to be straight into the heart of Hollywood with these two clay films. You're sat in your seat and there's Dustin Hoffman walking past and Sophia Loren a few seats away.

"Part of the feeling was, 'What on earth am I doing here with two films nominated?!'

"I had two speeches prepared, which had the different credits for each film, and my biggest fear the whole time was I was afraid if I did win I might thank the wrong set of people, which is a great problem to have."

In 2005, on the same day that the company learned that The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was number one in the American box office, a fire hit Aardman's warehouse, containing many of the characters and sets for Wallace & Gromit, Creature Comforts and Morph.

NP: "I got a call from one of our PR people that it had happened. At the time, there was a giant earthquake in India. I was doing an interview, and that's what came to mind - my worry was that these clay figures are going to be all over the news when there's this huge disaster."

MC: "With our work, there is such a volume of things being made that we can never keep it all. So we're used to letting go. That was our experience on Vengeance Most Fowl too – we finished filming, and then we came back, the little studio gnomes had been at work and the sets that we'd been living in for probably a year had gone."

NP: "You learn you can't get too attached. The important thing is these characters exist on film."

NP: "The idea for Vengeance Most Fowl goes back to before we were shooting The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Gnomes have always been a part of the Wallace & Gromit world, and so it wasn't a big leap to think about what would happen if Wallace created a smart gnome to help Gromit in the garden.

"But we felt the idea was lacking for a while. Every time we looked at it, we felt it needed a more villainous element to it with an evil motivation. And there was Feathers McGraw staring at us with his beady eyes."

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is available on BBC iPlayer from Christmas Day.