The Fingerprints Are The Work

If you (ahem) are of a certain age, you will be familiar with the animated films and shorts Wallace and Gromit.

The next time you watch a Wallace and Gromit film, freeze it on a single frame and look closely at the characters’ faces and you will see ridges and whorls. It’s the unmistakable pattern of a human thumb pressed into clay.

Those are not defects. Those are the most deliberate thing in the entire film.

Nick Park is the animator behind Wallace and Gromit. He and the team at Aardman Animations have won awards by the armful for films that are built one frame at a time. The process is excruciatingly slow because somewhere between twelve and twenty-four photos are required to produce a single second of finished film. This means that a feature film is a mountain of small physical acts, each one performed by a person leaning over a table and moving a figure a fraction of an inch with their hands.

And when you push clay with your thumb, it leaves an impression on the clay.

So, every character in every Aardman film carries the fingerprints of the animator’s hands. If you look closely at any frame, you can see them.

Now, the obvious instinct is to sand those out. Fingerprints look like evidence of carelessness. They look like imperfection. Any studio aiming for perfection would smooth them away.

But Aardman went the other direction. Nick Park even gave the quality a name: thumbiness.

He has said he likes seeing his animators’ fingerprints in the clay, and that he would often push his animators to be rougher, because he did not want the films to look too smooth or too slick. He wanted the audience reminded that behind every frame was craft - a human in the loop.

As Aardman scaled from shorts to features, computer assistance and digital tools arrived. Then, 3D printing. Suddenly, perfection was a real possibility, but Park insisted that the fingerprints stay. He believed audiences appreciated human effort and human imperfection, and the visible fingerprints are what tell you these characters are real.

Funny enough, when Wallace and Gromit were later rebuilt as computer-animated figures for a series of video games, the developers deliberately recreated the trademark fingerprints on the digital models. They had a medium capable of perfect surfaces, yet they spent time and money simulating flaws, because without the flaws the characters stopped feeling like themselves.

Now, let's be careful here, because there is a simplistic version of this lesson and a much more nuanced, mature one.

The simplistic version is that imperfection is charming, so relax your standards. That is not remotely what happened. The films are obsessive and take years.

The fingerprints didn’t survive because nobody was paying attention, they survived a process of extraordinary rigor because one person kept defending them on purpose. Park wasn't lowering the bar, he was protecting the humanness of the work from a process that would have sanded off the soul of the work.

Every one of us is tempted to remove the evidence that a person was here, in the work, laboring away. The draft comes back and it is better, and it is also somehow less yours. The rough edges you were proud of is gone. The odd analogy that only made sense because of something that happened to you in 2011 has been replaced with something cleaner and more sterile.

The memo sounds like a memo. The strategy sounds like a strategy. Nothing is wrong with it, but there’s nothing particularly right about it either.

The question for all of us is whether we know which marks in our work are actually ours, and whether we are willing to defend them the moment a new tool or manager offers to smooth them away. You can’t protect what you have never bothered to identify.

And this scales past your own work if you lead people. Every time you take a piece of your team’s work and plane off the idiosyncrasy in a review, you are teaching them that sterile perfection is the goal, not soul-filled resonance. Do this for long enough and you will have a body of work that nobody can sign their name to, produced by people who have stopped bringing anything worth signing.

What you see as polish, they experience as identity-washing.

So, here are a few things to consider:

First, name a fingerprint in your own work. What is something specific that signals that you you have made the thing yourself? What are the marks of your own authenticity, uniqueness, precision, empathy?

Second, where is smoothing happening? Where are the best parts of you - your intuition, judgment, taste, drive - being sanded off?

Third, and this is the hard one, are you sanding down the work of others? Is there any place in which you are removing the fingerprints in order to make something more “perfect”, but in the process are removing its soul?

Perfection was always available to Nick Park and Aardman. But what couldn’t be manufactured is the evidence that a person had been there.

Remember: the fingerprints are not the mistake in the work.

The fingerprints are the work.

Have a great week!