Got a bit of time on your hands? Stop motion animation might be just the thing for you. Requiring infinite patience and a rock steady hand, it has brought us giant peaches, sword-wielding skeletons (and Skellingtons), hulking AT-AT snow walkers, and one mean-looking Terminator.

But it’ll take a while to do. As a general rule, just one second of film consists of 24 frames. While making Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, team Aardman managed to shoot just 30 frames a day. (No wonder it took five years to complete.)

Director Paul King (of The Mighty Boosh and newly-released Bunny and the Bull) has the right idea, blending outrageously colourful stop motion with live action to create a hybrid beast of ballistic creativity. Here, he tells us what we need to know...

It Takes Forever (But It’s Better Than CGI)

The Cliché: Stop Motion is frequently considered old-fashioned and out-dated, once a necessary mode of bringing to life things that were too big, complicated or expensive to forge in real life. Industrial Light & Magic all but abandoned stop motion in favour of CGI. Despite the industry shift, fans seem to prefer it.

Seen In... Mary Poppins, The Empire Strikes Back

Paul King: “I much prefer the effects in Mary Poppins. I think it’s nice when people can see what’s going on; I like to know how it’s made. With CGI, you do kind of go, ‘Yeah it’s incredible, it looks beautiful, but whatever’, immediately dissing thousands of people with amazing computer skills.

"It’s more fun to see how it’s all stuck together. It’s us against the world. That’s what was good about Boosh; it didn’t really have high level effects, but people seemed to take it to their hearts. It’s not just on competence.”

Next: A whole New World