We’ve been smashing the coverage of the Peter Lord directed movie, The Pirates: In an Adventure with Scientists simply because it looks so amazing. I got to go down to Aardman Animation Studios (of which Peter is one of the founders) late last year to see what it was like and caught a glimpse of the scale of this amazing movie. If you missed it, click here and you can catch up on our coverage.
While there, we got to chat with Peter Lord to ask him how it all came together and what audiences can expect when it’s released next Friday 28th March. The movie took four and a half years from the script being started to the movie actually coming out! We find out what it’s like working on one project for that length of time, how they go about making the movie and how only 2 minutes of it end up on the cutting room floor.
We spoke to him when there was one week of shooting left so time was short for all the last little bits that needed to get done.
For all our coverage of Pirates! click here.
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How did this story get picked up to be made into an Aardman movie?
We have development meetings and the table will be covered in books. We were thinking about it for a TV series and I picked it up during the course of the meeting and it was just so funny, exceptionally funny. And I really thought ‘That’s the funniest thing I’ve read for many years’ – just laugh-out-loud funny. And I thought it would be great. So we approached Sony and they came here and we had a pitch session. We’d worked it out a bit and said to them we plan to do a Pirates movie! They said ‘are you sure?! Hasn’t that been done’ and I said ‘this will be different’. And they saw the treatment, and they bought it.
Do you know when you start that this is going to be a five year project?
Yes, the fact is five years is the industry standard in animation. Chicken Run was, Curse of the Were-Rabbit was, but then so are Dreamworks films, Pixar films. We’re a strange breed, we don’t mind that sort of thing. And the first two years are quite gentle, quite quiet cos there’s an awful lot of script work, design and things like that. It starts with a team of 2, then a team of 25 and then when we go into production it shoots through the roof with all the set building and puppets and all that sort of stuff.
This is very ambitious this movie for us in scale but it’s been fun to do, fun to find out what you can do…. anecdotally, there are crowd scenes and in stop motion animation you normally avoid that because you’ve got to build the crowds and then animate them. I can’t tell you how complicated that is. Each puppet carries a considerable cost and you can’t make too many of them, we’ve got hundreds of them! You can’t keep going forever so for crowd scenes, you tend to avoid it. In Curse of the Were-Rabbit, there’s the garden of fate and there’s 20 people (20 people is a crowd for us) but in this, we’ve been able to populate the Pirate world and the scientist world and that’s been fun to do . Because this has all been shot digitally, that’s a very liberating thing because it’s much easier to make the world bigger with set extensions. At some point you’ll see Blood Island which is a beautiful set, a big big set but still, behind that set, you need the rest of the island so you put that on digitally afterwards and it’s a very liberating thing.
The Pirates ship was added to the sea digitally, did you ever think about putting it on the water?
We discussed many things and ways of doing it. There are other ways, and there is a stop frame way of doing it. It’s absurdly labour intensive and doesn’t look very good. I love that ship on the sea! It’s exciting and inspiring I think.
When you make the Aardman movies, do you make them for children, adults or for yourself?
I think the only answer is just think of yourself. We’re not idiots (actually, maybe…). You have to be aware, more than aware of the audience but you don’t make it for them, you make it for yourself. That’s all you can do, honestly. I think around here, every decision of all the millions of decisions made are almost all, what pleases us. I say us, I mean me, the animator, the art director, lighting, camera etc. We’re all adults so we all do what we believe in because it’s the only honest thing you can do I think.
For example, Gideon (Defoe – Author) writes a lot of words and I was always pushing for some action for some physical action as well which is part of my role to remind him that we can’t just be talking the whole time, we have to see things moving. Is that for kids? Partly and it’s for variety of texture. We’ve got some quite intimate chamber orchestra scenes with just two people talking intimately and then some big sprawling, noisy outdoor scenes and then some frantic action scenes just for a variety of texture.
In traditional movie making, you can shoot a scene which may then end up on the cutting room floor but with stop animation, you could spent days, weeks or months doing the animation! Does much end up not being used?
There’s a little bit, yes. That’s the million dollar question right there because that’s a big part of our lives, that you can’t shoot coverage. There’s also a strong disinclination to do a take 2. You don’t want to if you can avoid it. We do storyboards and we do a strange thing which you’ll probably never see called pre-visualisation which is actually bit like a CG version of the film without much performance and then we do live action rehearsals. With those tools, you try never to do take 2. You get so well prepared that when you go to the studio floor and shoot it, it’s what you want. I believe there’s probably a couple of minutes lying on the cutting room floor so not very much but that’s still a lot of animation still and every time you cut, you’ve got to be strong and forget the animator’s sad face.
Do you film in order that the movie is made?
Quite close to the storyboards. One of the strengths of stop-animation…. you’ve got a set, and your character is on it. If you look one way down the room, we have one set and look the other end of the room and that’s another set. So we’ve got a tavern, a big scene in a tavern and it’s two sets, one looking one way and one the other way. And that meant two animators could do the whole scene from start to finish between them. That is a great luxury as that’s two heads only. Some scenes are done by one animator from start to finish so you get great continuity of thought and understanding and performance. In the world of CG, they pick shots from all over the bloody shop and because and they have endless sets, infinite sets because they don’t exist so you get a scene which is done by forty people. I think that’s a strength of what we do to get that focus, with just a couple of brains at work rather than a million brains at work.
Do you record the voices first?
Yes. Always. It’s funny actually because we put so much into that, into recording and choosing the right take – so much time. And then animating exactly to it, so exact, by the fraction of a syllable, and I don’t just mean the sync. The sync is the least of it, it’s the brain, not the lips but the eyes, the eyebrows and the thinking so that you know exactly what the character is thinking at exactly that fractional moment. Then you’re aware that it goes to Bulgaria or somewhere and gets translated. We work so carefully if we get the sync wrong by a fraction of a section we’re dismayed! (laughs).
So it’s all based on performance, starting with vocal performance which we then translate in to visual performance. We had Hugh Grant’s PA down the other day and she said that we’ve caught so many of his mannerisms. We didn’t refer to him on video at all but you can hear it in the voice. When you listen closely you can hear what’s emphasised, where the eyebrows flare up, where he sits back and where he sets his jaw and you can hear these things but then the character performs like him but doesn’t look like him.
How easy was it to cast the voices? Do you approach the actors or do they come to you?
We always go to them, I don’t want to sound complacent but it’s always quite easy. People like to do it and I think they have confidence working in an Aardman film. We spent a long time listening to voices, a long time and choosing and everyone was up for it as far as I know. That’s the only glamorous part of our lives (laughs!).
How long ago did they do the voice recording?
All of them must have started best part of two years I’d imagine. Hugh, because he has so many lines has been coming back steadily every few months over two years doing more stuff. Because the script does evolve, keeps involving actually. Some people like Ashley Jensen or Brendan Gleeson, we’ve had two sessions or only one with Ashley actually. It varies. Big parts, you go back continually over quite a long period.
Do the actors get to see their character while doing the recording?
Yes, they do. We show them it in storyboard form. We seldom get them together. Sometimes we do, we have Hugh Grant and Imelda Staunton and Hugh Grant and David Tennant together so it does happen but often not because it’s a practical thing. You get a big change once they’ve seen themselves performing. Until then,. it’s kind of abstract like doing a radio play and then they see it’s a visual element to it.
