Conversation Pieces is a series of four stop motion shorts created by Aardman's Peter Lord and David Sproxton for Channel 4 between 1981 and 1983. Each film uses unscripted dialogue taken from real life as its soundtrack. The series has its genesis in the two shorts that Lord and Sproxton contributed to the BBC's Animated Conversations, a series with the same format. The shorts were seen by Channel 4's commissioning editor, Paul Madden, who decided to commission a similar series for his channel. The four films vary in tone. On Probation and Sales Pitch are both straightforward reconstructions of what the real-life conversations may have looked like, with very little humour intended. By contrast Early Bird and Palmy Days, like Aardman's later short Creature Comforts, create comedy by placing their soundtracks into a new context - for example, Palmy Days takes a dull teatime conversation and puts it into the mouths of castaways on a desert island.