The famous garden slug from Derby on the DVD release of the film Flushed Away.

What’s the connection between the Aardman animated film Flushed Away and a Garden slug in Derby?
Read on and you will find out....

This blog post is about something that happened back in 2006 but thought it would be of interest to local readers.

In 2003 I was experimenting with time-lapse photography using my Olympus 2020 digital camera, and in  August I noticed some large slugs in my garden and thought it might be interesting to do some timelapse of a garden slug moving around so I took a series of 150 photographs (until I got bored!) of this slug moving along the path in my back garden.

I took the photographs by hand every 5 to 12 seconds and very roughly followed the travel of the slug. I then made the sequence of frames into a short movie as an AVI file and uploaded it to my website.

Then out of the blue in November 2006 A company called Blue Collar Productions contacted me on behalf of Paramount Studios asking if they could use my original frames as a DVD extra on a forthcomming animated film release. It turned out that that the film in question was the DreamWorks/Aardman Animation film Flushed Away.

Flushed Away is a 2006 computer animated British film. It is a partnership between Aardman Animations of Wallace and Gromit fame, and DreamWorks Animation, and is Aardman's first completely computer-animated feature as opposed to the usual stop-motion.
The film stars the voice talents of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Andy Serkis, Bill Nighy, Ian McKellen, Shane Richie and Jean Reno. The story was by Sam Fell, Peter Lord, Dick Clement, and Ian La Frenais, and the screenplay was written by Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais, Christopher Lloyd, Joe Keenan, and William Davies.

The DVD for Flushed Away was released on 2 April 2007, For more info on this film see :
http://www.flushedaway.com/

If you own the Flushed Away DVD and want to see my Derby Slug perform these steps on the DVD
From the main menu select Special Features then select More>
then select Super Slug Stuff then click Slugcam.



How strange to think that a Slug in a garden in Derby is on this DVD film release, seen around the world.
Perhaps I should try and trace the descendents of that slug in my garden and tell it how its now famous throughout the world:). Im not sure how long a UK Slug lives for, perhaps the star himself is still alive now?