‘The Pirates!’ proves glacial pace of stop-motion animation
Peter Lord
NEW YORK – In what business does a great week of work amount to six seconds of product?
In the rarefied world of stop-motion animation, where puppet figures are moved in tiny increments between individually photographed frames to create the illusion of movement, six seconds of animated footage is widely considered a solid week’s labor. And that’s why an 88-minute animated feature such as Aardman’s “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” can take more than five years to complete.
Aardman Animations, the revered British house that has given us such beloved Claymation figures as Wallace & Gromit and garnered four Academy Awards, has pioneered many of the painstaking, second-by-second techniques of manipulating miniature models into fluid animated films.
It’s co-founder and co-owner Peter Lord (who started the company in 1972 with partner David Sproxton) talked about the rigors of stop motion – or stop-frame – work during a press conference for the release of “The Pirates!”
And the hallmark word of such precise, demanding, snail-paced animation seems to be “patience.”
“It doesn’t seem like patience, particularly,” said Lord. “All of the animators that do their one or two seconds a day, they don’t seem overly patient. That’s because they’re trying to do something. Every day they’re trying to achieve something, and that keeps their energy level high. Because every day, slowly, they’re trying to get somewhere and achieve something, and that’s exciting.”
“Pirates” star Hugh Grant, also on hand for the press day, chuckled and asked director Lord about a persistent rumor attached to the grueling production.
“Is it true the story of the one man doing 10 seconds of the tavern scene who got married, had children, got divorced while he was just making that 10 seconds?”
A raucous and intricate scene in a Barnacle’s Face pirates pub – the longest in the film – in which several pirate characters were first introduced, took 18 months to shoot.
“It’s not quite that,” Lord explained with a laugh, “but he did start in the tavern at the beginning of the shoot and sort of emerged at the end, now married and with a child which he didn’t have when he went in there. He spent 18 months in the tavern. Sounds like heaven. And that wasn’t the whole scene. It was like half the scene. Other people shot the other half.”
“You told me that one good animator had done a great week’s work if he’s done four seconds,” Grant said.
“Six seconds,” Lord corrected. “And happy with that.”
- Dennis King