It’s been a long journey to the big screen for Shaun the Sheep ever since he made his debut in the 1995 Aardman short, A Close Shave. Watching that or any one of a number of Wallace and Gromit features, have you ever wondered just what goes into the making of an Aardman movie?

If you were one of those kids like me that spent summer days (the rainy ones you couldn’t go outside and play baseball) making stop-motion short films you probably have a remote idea as to how it’s done and might even be able to fashion a guess as to how long it takes. If not, here are a few bits and bobs that might give you pause should you ever toy with the idea of making your own stop-motion clay animation feature…even if it’s only seconds long.

Image Credit: Aardman Animations

• A full crew of 17 animators worked on the Shaun The Sheep Movie, producing an average of 2 seconds of animation per day.
• There were 58 cameras, shooting across 33 units. 549,777 frames were taken – that’s 5.5 billion, or 5,586,174,141,600 pixels.
• It takes a week and a half to make a Shaun puppet from scratch. 21 were used in the film.
• The total number of puppets used on Shaun The Sheep Movie was 354 (157 humans and 197 animals – of which 116 were sheep!)

For more behind-the-scenes facts about the making of Shaun the Sheep The Movie, head over to Radio Times for some genius tidbits about Aardman’s most recent bit of brilliance.

While the movie premiered earlier this month in the UK, the North American release date is, sadly, still listed as ‘dates coming soon’ on the official movie website. Depending on where you are, you can probably catch Shaun the Sheep The Movie in the not-too-distant future (unless you are in North America or South Korea).