‘The Pirates!’ proves glacial pace of stop-motion animation
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.”
