Edmonton sculptor gets 'surreal' opportunity to make dinosaurs for feature film

A triceratops appears on the screen in the first five seconds of the stop-motion film Early Man.

The dinosaur was created by Edmontonian Verity Filipow, a model maker at Aardman Animations..

"It's probably one of my favourite things that I've ever created to date," Filipow told CBC's Radio Active. She designed, sculpted, moulded, cast and painted the triceratops.

She's currently the only Canadian with Aardman Animations, a studio based in Bristol, England, that was behind the TV show Wallace and Gromit, as well as the films Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep.

Early Man is a stop-motion animated comedy based in the prehistoric era, featuring the voices of Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston and Maisie Williams.Filipow just joined the company for Early Man, so having the opportunity to create her own puppet was a surprise.

"Coming onto the film as a trainee is just amazing, that wealth of knowledge that I can pick and choose from," she said. "We've got such a strong team of really talented people that have been there since working on Chicken Run,or even longer than that."

Filipow had been sculpting and drawing for years, but one university course in London on sculpting for film propelled her to become a junior model-maker at Aardman.

Filipow said the team builds the sculptures from scratch, starting with a metal skeleton that makes each one moveable. The puppets or models are sculpted, sewed, painted, moulded and everything in between.

"In a nutshell, I play with dolls all day, which is kind of fun," she said.

Once the dolls are made, the animators pose them and take 12 photos for every second of footage.

Early Man is finished and currently in theatres, Filipow and Aardman Animations are now working on a Shaun the Sheep sequel.

But with her first film in theatres, she finds herself in awe when she watches it. "I totally get caught up in it," Filipow said. "I know that I made [some of the models], but it also feels so surreal to see something on the big screen.

"It's amazing to watch."