The ship from Aardman Animations’ new pirate-themed movie – The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists – went on public view today at Bristol's M Shed museum. And for Cod Steaks, the city modelmaking firm, it is a particularly special creation.
The firm has been behind many of Aardman's famous productions – but this time the sheer scale of the project stretched its expertise to the limit.
The ship – 4.2 metre-long with a mast reaching 4.6 metres high – was completely hand-crafted by Cod Steaks and comprises 44,569 parts. It took 5,000 hours of development and ended up weighing 770 pounds.
M Shed visitors will be able to get up close and personal with the buxom figurehead – which lost its original head and had it replaced by the head of Neptune with some painted-on lipstick. Also on view is the captain's own garden on the poop deck, where he keeps his collection of cacti. Household items such as a cricket bat and broom collected by the pirates hold the ship together.
Pirates is Bristol-based Aardman’s first 3D stop-motion film and company founder Peter Lord's first as a director since Chicken Run, its most successful movie to date.
Cod Steaks managing director Sue Lipscombe, who set up the company in 1980, said: “We built most of the film sets as well as the pirate ship so virtually everything you see in Pirates, apart from the puppets, was made by us.” That includes a second vessel, Queen Victoria’s ‘steel’ ship which features 30,000 lentils individually glued onto the hull to make them look like rivets.
Sue founded Cod Steaks in 1980 as a model making company, evolving its skills over the years to serve the movie industry, building full sets, props, costumes and miniatures for feature films, commercials and music videos. It was, for example, responsible for creating the sets on Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit feature films.
She said: “We have worked with Aardman for more than 20 years on all their films and advertisements. Pirates took two years and we had to expand our team temporarily from 19 to 45 to complete the project on time. We are very pleased and proud of the result.”
Aardman spokesman Arthur Sheriff said: “Cod Steaks are a favourite of ours and brilliant at what they do – they are at the top of their game and we cannot be more complimentary about them.”
He ‘modestly’ predicts that Pirates will be in the UK box office top five for at least the next six weeks. It is also doing well in Europe and has just opened in Australia. The US will have to wait until the end of the month for its premiere. Previous Aardman movies have done well there but it is a difficult marketplace for films with such a British sense of humour – but hopes are high.
The stop-motion film-making process is painfully slow, resulting in as little as three seconds in a difficult week and as much as 20 seconds a week for some simpler scenes. This explains why it took five years from the moment Pirates was given the go-ahead to its release, even though Aardman had as many as 350 people working on the film at any one time.
The company is now waiting for the green light on further major productions – although it is too early to say whether there will be a Pirates sequel. However, work is under way on another of the Bristol company’s global successes, a new TV series of Shaun the Sheep which has been sold to 175 countries.
