You can’t accuse the folks at Aardman of doing things the easy way. For its incoming animated treat, Early Man, it required some football chants and crowd noises for one or two sequences in the movie. The economical option was to do some digital work, and mix things together in the edit suite.
Yet if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And thus, when I sat through the credits of Early Man, I noted a couple of additions. One was a thanks to Gareth Malone, he of The Choir and many other projects. The other noted the ground of Bristol City Football Club, Ashton Gate.
I put the sums together and asked Nick Park, director of the film, about Malone’s involvement. And he confirmed that he was hired to conduct the football chants in the movie. “It was at Ashton Gate. We had 750 people, who made quite a noise actually”, Park said.
He also confirmed they did it that way to make it sound more legitimate, and to get very specific words chanted. “The sound designer has been on all my films”, Park told me, “and obviously you can source those sorts of things, but he just wanted it real. So we just recorded it for real! There were specific things we wanted too, and certain chants!”
Those chants were procured, and those are the ones you hear in the movie. And it turns out, they really are quite specific too…
Early Man lands in UK cinemas tomorrow…