Dave Sproxton is scuttling around darkened studios near the Bristol dockside urgently looking for a colleague. "Have you seen Kieran?" he calls out to shadowy figures hunched over stage sets in the former banana store. No reply, so he calls his own switchboard for help and then sits there quiet in the semi-light, seemingly lost in his own headquarters.
With his slight frame and self-effacing manner, it's tempting to see the co-founder of Aardman Animations as one of his company's cartoon characters.
Sproxton would be the suburban boy who arranges clay models on his parent's kitchen table one day and takes phone calls from Steven Spielberg the next.
He expected to be a town planner but found a childhood hobby mushroomed into a global business with 300 on the payroll and an annual turnover of £10m.
Aardman has taken off like the rocket in A Grand Day Out, the first Wallace & Gromit short film. The Wensleydale cheese-loving heroes brought acclaim in the UK but Aardman hit the big time with its first feature film, Chicken Run, marketed in the US by Spielberg's Dreamworks. The movie grossed £29m in the UK and $224m (£117m) worldwide. Now the British firm is engaged in the first Wallace & Gromit feature film as part of a continuing partnership with Dreamworks that provides cash as well as distribution.
Despite Oscars and other successes at Aardman, Sproxton remains a down-to-earth bloke who points out his firm's financial existence is still ultimately based on smart, but routine, advertising work.
Chicken and crackers
Winning the job of promoting Jacob's Cream Crackers in Britain or Wrigley's Hubba Bubba Max gum in the US must have been made easier by Chicken Run though? Sproxton - ever reticent - is unsure. "Yes, well, it did, ah, um. It certainly put us on the map," he says. "We were on the map pretty much already but it put us on the map in a different way.
"Curiously, it had a big negative impact also because a lot of agencies thought the entire studio was wrapped up doing feature films and was unavailable for commercial work.
"Now we do the commercial work here and do feature work 12 miles away at another self-contained unit. We had to work quite hard to persuade the ad industry that, actually guys, the place was still open for business and keep phoning us."
Squashed into a tiny windowless room at his strictly functional headquarters, Sproxton is happy to dispel any suggestions that the business is swilling with money. "There is the presumption that we made millions of pounds out of [Chicken Run]. But if you actually analyse the breakdown of distribution and box office you will see that actually we haven't ... We learned a great deal from it, a vast amount from taking on that endeavour in all sorts of areas - people skills, development - so the Wallace & Gromit film is now being made much more smoothly."
In his checked shirt and worn black jeans, it is easy to understand that Sproxton's idea of fun is a walk on Exmoor rather than cracking open bottles of champers at a glitzy movie party in LA.
"I'm not one for the trappings of success. I drive a one-year-old Citroën Xantia and I hate shopping. I did have a share in a glider - that is as far as it goes."
The animator did recently celebrate his 50th birthday with a sizable party but it was done in tandem with his soulmate and co-owner of Aardman, Pete Lord.
It has been this 40-year-old friendship - mirrored by Sproxton's romance of a similar vintage with personal partner Sue - around which Aardman has been built.
Lord was actually born in Bristol but the two sons of BBC staff - one in sales and the other in production - were raised in Walton-on-Thames and attended Woking grammar together.
They had found a mutual interest messing around with models on that kitchen table, cutting out figures from colour supplements, moving them around and photographing them in different positions.
"It's difficult to describe the joy I felt when I got them [the photographs] back from the labs," he explains.
It was not long before the two teenagers were working for the BBC themselves. "My father knew this producer from Vision On, which used quite a lot of what could be called advanced amateurs. The first drawn piece we did was this Aardman character, an idiotic superman, and they actually liked it. And we did 13 Aardman sequences for Vision On.
"We had a year off before going to university and during holidays we started drawing stuff and that became quite tedious so we moved on to Plasticine and clay stuff, which seemed more fun and spontaneous. The slot we aspired to was the Magic Roundabout, at a quarter to six just before the news. That's where we thought the zenith of stock animation was seen. That half-children, half-adult buffer before the news."
He was drawn further into this world at Durham University, where he studied geography and had a chance to experiment with theatre lighting. At home his creative side was encouraged by having access to his father's darkroom and by his mother, an art teacher. "I was probably the least talented of my siblings but something about light, the influence of light on shape and form to create different emotional feelings, I found fascinating."
Later, his friend Lord directed and animated characters while Sproxton also directed as well as doing the lighting and camera work.
Possibly the key event for Aardman - a spoof on "Hardman" but also Dutch for man of the earth - was bumping into the creative genius Nick Park. He had been working on A Grand Day Out for many years without getting it finished. Lord and Sproxton offered to help him complete this labour of love in return for harnessing Park's skills to other Aardman projects.
As the business grew Sproxton found himself being drawn further away from the creative side to taking care of a growing bureaucracy. He took on the managing director's role for a while but, as with many small businesses, struggled to balance the administrative demands with his desire to remain on the creative side.
Local connection
This pressure has since eased through employing a full-time MD and allowed Sproxton to become executive chairman.
He has also been called on by outside bodies wanting his skills and influence. Sproxton was chairman of the Bristol Old Vic theatre for a while, has recently been appointed as a regional voice on the UK Film Council board and still helps with various Bristol film festivals.
The local connection is important to him - and Aardman. Not being in London has, Sproxton feels, given the firm an edge, a curiosity value in the US and perhaps a reputation for being more quirky.
Being in the south-west was, in many ways, just a matter of chance, explains the Aardman boss. "We got this BBC contract and we were asked to create this character , which became Morph, for a show that was created in Bristol.
"My girlfriend lived in Bristol and Pete was born here and had contacts here but also came here to tag on to the apron strings of the BBC. For the first few years we were seriously skint."
Sproxton might still be happy to drive a relatively dull saloon car but has the success of the business never triggered thoughts of capitalising on a flotation, like the recent one at Dreamworks?
"In the mid-80s a number of ad agencies went public and kind of lost the plot because their creative energies were subsumed to shareholder value," he says.
"One section of DreamWorks - the animation section - has just gone public but the board power is still held as before so it won't have a massive influence on the creative side. But it could have eventually. Because we shoot commercials they provide the cashflow we need to invest in the creative side. They buy us time ... At the moment it [a float] is not on the cards."
If a stock market listing were to arrive, you could visualise Wallace & Gromit celebrating in the City with an extra helping of cheese crackers. Sproxton would probably opt for a quiet walk on the moors.
The CV
Born Liverpool, January 6, 1954
Educated Ashley Road junior school, Walton-on-Thames; Woking grammar; Durham University - geography degree
Employment Established Aardman with his friend Pete Lord in 1972; has worked there ever since
Status Partner, Sue; no children
Interests Walking, cycling and gliding
