Thirty -three animators give life to ‘Pirates!’, The new Aardman production

"Pirates!" It is the last great production of Aardman, the studies that revolutionized the Stop-Motion with ‘Chicken Run’ and ‘Wallace and Gromit’. Now they bet on this technique enriching it with graphics and computerized animation.

In a real craft work in which a team of 320 professionals has worked, Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation are about to release the latest production of Aardman studies: Pirates!.

With the vocal interpretation of Hugh Grant, David Tennant, Imelda Staunton, Martin Freeman and Jeremy Piven (in the original version) and directed by Peter Lord, with the production of Peter Lord, David Sproxton and Julie Lockhart, Pirates! It is the most ambitious project until the date of Aardman. The script is from Gideon Defoe based on his book, The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists.

"I loved the stories of pirates when I was little - particularly the island of the Treasury," says the two -time Oscar Peter Lord, one of the founders of Aardman and director and producer of the new animated feature film. “Surely in reality it was not very pleasant to have them close, but those stories made them something glamorous, challenging and full of color, pirate stories delight in tropical seas, blue sky, cannons and costumes. It is a magically irresistible world. So when we find this story about a handful of implacably optimistic pirates, I felt that we were telling a story of classical tradition but carrying it a step higher, ”he said

History achieves it thanks to his characters: a handful of misventuished pirates that form the most incompetent crew that a captain could aspire.

Pirates! He began during a brainstorming in which the thinking heads of the Aardman studio gathered to discuss possible ideas for their next movie. At 40 years since its foundation by Lord and David Sproxton, the animation study has excited us, surprised and made laughing and smiling thanks to their ingenious films (among them Creature Comforts, Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit), Television series (like the popular Shaun the Sheep), musical videos (such as the memorable Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel), in addition to advertisements.

On this occasion they have faced their first animated film Table A Table and 3D, according to Lord a perfect medium for the visual aesthetics of the study. "Let's think, for example, we have filled it with curious, attractive and delicious objects - they are jokes that also serve to express their personality. Now in 3D you feel that you have that space, which you are immersed in that world, and that is a wonderful sensation. Or let's talk about a plane of action - when the ship makes its way between the waves you can really feel the impact," he says.

An ambitious production

Pirates! It was held with the technique of Stop Motion frame by frame, which has become the distinctive seal of Aardman deserving four Oscar awards. It is also his most ambitious film so far in this format. "In many ways, we animated the same way that it has been done in the last fifty years, but now we are combining it with special effects and computer animation since, if there is something that you cannot stop in the frame frame by frame, it is the sea," said Lord. “When we take our beautiful and solid pirate ship animated by puppets and locate it in a computer generated by computer, we have put it where you can rock, roll and splash, enjoy a great freedom, a wide space and a lot Places with great crowds.

As the author of the novel on which the film is based, perhaps there was no better choice to define the script. However, Defoe had no experience with frame animation to frame before writing its adaptation- which was a challenge for filmmakers. "If I had any frame of reference, I would never have written it in the way I did," says the screenwriter. "It turns out that the great and exciting battles in the sea and the mass scenes are a nightmare for this form of animation. Fortunately, it never meant a limitation. Nobody said:‘ It cannot be done ’it was always‘ we will already get how to do it ’. The format“ frame by frame ”has a charm that has no other technique - when something is physically present, marks a total difference and the characters really come to life.

"It is different from any other film in which we have used this technique," says Julie Lockhart, film producer. "It is so complex that our first assumption was that we would make it an computer. Society in real palaces, even Altamar.

Working in an animated film frame by frame is completely different from working on a real action. Where the real action is limited by access to real actors, a film by picture can play your main character dozens of times. "We have had up to 35 or 40 animators working at the same time. We had so many pirate captains that we could shoot up to 20 scenes simultaneously in different parts of the study," explains Lord. Of course, what this means is that while in the real action the director can only focus on the scene that is rolling, with the frame to frame by the director the director can concentrate on dozens of scenes in production at the same time. "Jeff (Newitt, the co-director), Jay (Grace, the senior animation supervisor) and we were running from one place to another, giving notes, instruction and advice to all these units at the same time," continues Lord.
Before the production, the characters and sets had to be designed and built seriously. Characters designer Johnny Duddle and Production Director Norman Garwood got to work.

With the very extremely collaborative nature that it requires making an animated film, the creativity and the Garwood's vice helped to shape the DNA of the film.
Obviously one of Garwood's main sets was the pirate ship. "I started from the concept of making a ship that was two halves of different ships," says the production director. “The stern is from an old boat - the idea is that this was the original ship until they lost the bow in a terrible battle and needed a new Design as funny and extravagant as possible.

The pirate ship was made entirely by hand with a total of 44,569 parts. With a weight of 350 kilos, it measures 4 meters long and 4.5 high, so high, in fact, that to be possible their mobilization from one study to another had to cut a hole in one of the frames of the doors of the study to be coupled.

To design the characters, including Pirate Captain, Johnny Duddle began with initial sketches of Peter Lord. "The most important elements when designing the Pirate Captain were his coat and beard. We made designs with long and short coats, we tried different designs for the beard and we studied how it and the mustache would settle in the face," says Duddle.

The captain's beard required a tremendous amount of development. "The captain's beard is essential for the character," Lord alleges. "It is one of the first things that Gideon mentions about the character in his book. The beard turned out to be a huge design challenge - not to design the beard itself, but to design one that would work with a very mobile and expressive face," he says.

Another challenge was to run the beard with a mouth replacement system that Aardman implements for the first time in this film. In previous films, it depended on the animator shaped the mouth in the right way to create the illusion of speech. In Pirates! Aardman used a mouth replacement system. "It is a system that has only been available in recent years," explains Jeff Newitt, the film co-director. “We were able to sculpt all the mouth forms on a computer and physically print them on a 3D printer. We print hundreds of mouths for the character so that the character could talk to a wide range of expressions and speech- for the animator, the form was predetermined, it should only remove one mouth and put another one, instead of sculpting each frame again. It is really an ideal system because the animators can concentrate on the characters And their facial expression - they can opt for a broader range of movement since they are not worried to spoil the mouth -shaped plasticine, ”he adds.
In total, 7,000 mouths were created, 1,400 of them only for the captain.

As the process advanced, puppet designers should consider how to build them. For example, Anderson says, “Queen Victoria is, on the outside, a somewhat plump lady but, inside, she has a complicated armor. Every fold of her dress individually had to walking." And all this is without considering the design of Victoria's face. "It should seem quite strong, real and haughty, but sweet and cunning at the same time. We browse his lips to give him that disapproving appearance, but it is also the type of woman who knows how to make eyes to get out of his own."

With the character and the scenarios designed and built, the witness was passed to the animators. For Lord, the animators are not just artists who give movement to the models. "I think of them as actors," says Lord. "When they sit down to work there is nothing,- there is a voice and a puppet, and they must transform that at a time that truly alive. When you do it well- you cry that a moment or better yet, a whole series of moments, they come to life- the audience is totally convinced that this puppet is not only moving or speaking, but is thinking ... it is a great illusion and it is incredibly gratifying."

One of the main animators, Ian Whitlock, says that the homemade homemade sensation to frame to frame gives a very different quality than the one that provides the computer generated by computer. "With the computer you can do anything," explains the animator. "You can push the characters as far as you want. In fact, I feel that I must limit myself to get the right performance. With the puppet does not happen.

Another animator, Lee Wilton, adds, "The scenes that seem simpler are the most difficult to do. You can have a four -second taking of a character thinking, or looking slightly out of the screen. It seems easy but you must ensure that the audience interprets it in the same way you expect. Make it seems simple is very difficult."

Filming

The meticulous work of cheering a photogram to frame movie, was an even greater challenge due to the nature of the script. For example in one of the first scenes that runs in a bar, the entire crew of the Pirate Captain is presented to the other candidates for pirate of the year. All this meant that 15 or 16 pirates could be in the same camera shot at any time. To keep everything in order, Sadler gave each of the characters - even to the bar dependents who had no dialogue and were only in a scene - a little background. He recognizes that: “It helps me to remember what I should do. There is a table next to the window, where two of them enjoy an appoint What you do if you are encouraging so many characters, so it helps to give each one their own story.

The scene in the pub, one of the longest in the film: it required 18 months of filming. How can an animator concentrate for so long in a scene that in the end would only last a few minutes in the movie? Whitlock, who spends much of his time with Darwin and Mr. Bobo explains: “Animating is a way of interpreting through a puppet. It is very rewarding that must be softened at the end of a great movement so that everything is natural. "

At the end of the filming of the scenes they delivered the ends ending to the editor Justin Krish, who faces his first animated project with this film. "Editing animation is totally different from editing real action," he says. “In an animated film, much of the edition is done before rolling; we assemble the film for the first time with graphic scripts. We edit another couple of times, first with pre -visualization sequences and then we have shot it once; but the real job is done in the phase of the graphic script and that is why an editor in animation is much more involved in the development of the argument that an editor in a real action movie. For example, you can ask for a real action. You think it is necessary for the sequence and once you have it you can try it in a way that simply could not be done in real action. ” As a result, the editing room becomes the center where all the departments pass - from the drawings to the dialogue recorded to the study shots; Everything goes through the editor.

The visual effects of the film were supervised by the visual effects supervisor, Andrew Morley and the computer generated animation supervisor, Ted Chaplin. From the beginning it was evident that the picture animation would need to rely on visual effects to fill the spaces that could not be encouraged by hand. "Almost half of the shots were quite simple for us - adding sky and background," says Morley - but others led to much more complicated procedures, including the construction of much of Blood Island (where much of the excesses of the pirates takes place at the beginning of the film). "They built the port in the workshop, but we had to turn it into a complete island with a volcano in the distance," Morley explains. The visual effects team also encouraged several characters in the distant background.

Nor should we forget that the port includes water, a complicated issue for computer animation and a task simply impossible for the frame by frame. It is even more complicated since the artists of visual effects had to create a sea that was seen equal to that of the world handmade world that the filmmakers designed for the film. The challenge is that the world Aardman is real- there is physical objects, handmade and photographed with camera- but in turn clearly not belonging to the real world. "All programs are created today for photographic realism," says Morley. "They make the world look real and perfect" - and the rest of the film's world is not real or perfect. "We are going after something a little more handmade, more stylized. So we developed our own water simulation tool for the general and medium plans. For shorter plans, we could use existing programs, but we still decided not

"That was the most important thing - make that the computer generated corresponded to the Aardman world," Chaplin explains. “Everything, from the marine monsters to the largest ships- all that too large to build- we had to do it as if it had been created on the set and really were there. This film is made on a scale much greater than everything that Aardman has done before, and our work was to give the visual effects both affection and attention and the one they put on the sets and in the workshop. We do not want any spectator to lose that spectator Incredulity when watching the film, no matter how it is animated, ”said Chaplin.
This project worked 40 individual units in the study with 29 animators. Everything is prepared in the study to facilitate that animators can encourage as long as possible every day. This means that while an animator works in a plane in one unit, another plane is prepared in another unit: setting the set, adjusting the lights, riding the cameras - all this is approved before the director enters into action! The average animation for animators is 4 seconds of animation per week ... and the result is in view.

Pirates!, in figures

• A team of 525 people worked in the film, including 33 animators and 41 filming units distributed in 4 studies.
• The pirate ship was prepared entirely by hand and added 44,569 parts. He had more than 5,000 hours of development and at the end weighed 350 kilos. It measures 4x 4.5 meters.
• The film had 70 modeling and 250 puppets, of which there were 9 crew pirates, 23 background pirates, 18 background scientists and 55 special characters, a total of 112 different characters!
• The captain's beard has a special mechanism to encourage it. The mechanism suffered 5 different designs until it reached its final version.
• 7,000 different mouths were manufactured for the captain
• They worked on the 40 individual units in the study with 29 animators.

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