Meet some amazing animals (From Oxford Mail)

Meet some amazing animals

12:00pm Saturday 23rd August 2008

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Guests at Heythrop Park Hotel enjoying a stroll in the gardens will get a big surprise if they follow the footpath up the hill from the lake.

As they come over the rise, they suddenly see camels and dromedaries at pasture, then giraffes' heads might pop out above a stable building.

Even if you know what you are going to see, it's still difficult to believe it.

In the quintessentially English rolling hills of north Oxfordshire, exotic animals from all around the world are housed at the base of Amazing Animals, which supplies all manner of creatures to the media and events industries.

The walls of the Amazing Animals office are festooned with framed advertising posters from the past three decades featuring their animals. In the car advert section, mandrill baboons cavort over a Vauxhall, a leopard prowls around a Toyota, and a jaguar reclines on, well, a Jaguar.

Proprietor Jim Clubb said: "That's the only time they've used an actual jaguar in their advertising."

Jim and his wife Sally co-own the business they set up more than 30 years ago, and son Jamie has joined them.

Amazing Animals supplies a huge range of mammals, reptiles and fish for films, TV programmes and photographs.

Continual investment has not only broadened the range of animals available, but also seen the construction of a studio and several film sets based around the animals' pens.

They also run increasingly popular live events. There's the Creepy Crawly Show, the African Experience and the Caribbean Experience, for shows, parties and other events.

The rich and famous often avail themselves of these services. They have provided donkeys for one of Sting's children's birthday parties and zebras and giraffes for a Sir Elton John extravaganza.

Despite this, it's the ordinary animals that make up the bulk of the work.

"Sixty per cent of our work is done using dogs, cats and reptiles," said Mr Clubb. "Exotic animals are what we are known for, but we don't get asked for them every day."

Just like any other business, Amazing Animals has a number of different strands to the business to protect against market shifts. As an example, changes in the tax relief for film makers in the UK are driving the number of film productions down, so live events have increased in importance.

At the same time, competition among wealthy people to throw the most extravagant parties has increased bookings through party planners.

"One party we provided animals for some years back had a £10m budget, with Elton John as the cabaret," said Mr Clubb.

Future plans include a larger studio so that film-makers can do more on site.

"This is obviously easier for the film-makers to administer and it's easier on the animals too, as they don't have to be transported," he said The pens and other environments are high quality and visually appealing, so that they can double as films sets, too. Some of the enclosures were used for zoo scenes from ITV's A Touch of Frost and last year's BBC drama Jekyll.

But the look is important for Mr Clubb. He said: "Even if they weren't being used as sets, I'd still build them the same way, with Cotswold stone, because that's important to me - designing good-looking environments for the animals and us."

The family is amused when asked if computer graphics and animatronics affect their business.

Son Jamie said: "People thought that first animatronics would take our work away, and then CGI would do it, but they all want realism. And how do you get realistic animals? Base them on real ones."

The alien in the film version of Lost in Space, for example, was a computer generated image of one of an Amazing Animals ape.

In fact, the Clubbs say computer graphics mean that more films are being made with creatures that could not have been made, say, 20 years ago, so the opportunities are increasing.

Mr Clubb agreed: "A film like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe could have been made then, but not in the same way and not on the same scale. The motion capture for the polar bears in the Golden Compass was done with our animals, too."

But Amazing Animals is not staying still. Seminars are being developed for the industry and for media students.

This is part of an initiative to promote awareness within media industries as to what's possible when working with animals and technology and what's involved too.

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