The Pirates! in an Adventure With Scientists: The Making of the Sony/Aardman Movie

by Brian Sibley

To tie in with the DVD release of The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists, this exclusive, fully illustrated guide takes us behind the scenes to discover how 2012's hottest film was made. Packed with previously unseen visual material, including storyboards and designs for sets and key characters, this highly collectible full-colour book charts the journey from paper to screen: a five-year process for a crew of just 320 people - requiring 3.000 storyboard images, 19,456 square metres of foam board and 893 different mouths for the Pirate Captain alone. Also included are rare interviews with the directors, producers and key members of the production team, giving insight into the creative and technical challenges of a project of this size and ambition. The Making of The Pirates! is a must-have for the many fans of the film, and for anyone interested in the methods, passions and eccentricities of Aardman, this most quintessentially British animation studio.

Genres: Art

144 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 2012

About the author

Brian Sibley is an English writer, broadcaster, and award-winning dramatist.

The author of over 100 hours of radio drama and hundreds of documentaries and features for the BBC, he is best known for his acclaimed 1981 radio adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, co-written with Michael Bakewell, as well as dramatizations of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, and Richard Adams’s Watership Down.

Sibley has also written numerous original plays for radio, presented popular BBC programmes including Kaleidoscope and Talking Pictures, and produced documentaries on figures ranging from Lewis Carroll and Ray Bradbury to Julie Andrews and Walt Disney.

His contributions to broadcasting have earned him accolades such as the Sony Radio Award and the BBC Audio Drama Award for Best Adaptation.

In print, Sibley is the author of many acclaimed film “making of” books, including Harry Potter: Film Wizardry, The Lord of the Rings: The Making of the Movie Trilogy, and Peter Jackson: A Filmmaker’s Journey, as well as companion volumes for The Hobbit films, The Golden Compass, and Disney classics. His literary works range from Shadowlands to children’s books like The Frightful Food Feud and Osric the Extraordinary Owl, with stories appearing in official Winnie-the-Pooh collections.

A noted Disney historian, Sibley has contributed essays to The Walt Disney Film Archives and recorded DVD commentaries for classic films. He is the editor of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Númenor, winner of the Tolkien Society’s Best Book award in 2023.

Sibley has served as President and Chair of The Lewis Carroll Society and is an honorary member of The Magic Circle, the Tolkien Society, and The Children’s Books History Society.

Reviews

[Parka · Rating 5 out of 5]

(More pictures on my blog)

Apparently, The Making of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is the official title of this Aardman and Sony Pictures Animation film, and The Pirates! Band of Misfits was the title for the American and Australian release.

This 144-page hardcover authored by Brian Sibley looks at the production process in detail and is filled with great set photos, commentary and art. There are lots of interesting stories, such as getting Hugh Grant to read the line "And?" over 40 times, or looking for miniature eyelids on the floor because some animator dropped it.

The lively and whimsical character designs are from Jonny Duddle. There are sketches, coloured illustrations, sculpts and the finished puppets. The names are real funny. Pirate Captain, Pirate King, Black Bellamy, Cutlass Liz, Peg Leg Hastings and my favourite The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate. There are 112 puppets compared to 20 for The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The logistics of making a stop-motion film like this is incredible and mind-numbing. Several puppets have to be created for each character so that different scenes can be shot at the same time.

The book also covers the making of the set, props, and puppets. Photos of the actual model of the pirate ship and Blood Island is a sight to behold. You also get to see how the puppet armature and what's hidden underneath Queen Victoria's dress — lots of metal. Many of the costumes are actually made of silicone instead of cloth.

This companion is equally as entertaining as the film.

Highly recommended.

[JoeK · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely book. If you liked the movie you'll love looking at the still images of the sets and the puppets. I can only complain that is should have been twice as long with a lot more pictures, and taller so that the pictures could be bigger.

The text did its job, but I felt there could have been more detail. The descriptions of how things were done were fairly basic and would work for as a script for a documentary about the making, just as easily. As mentioned before, this could have been a lot longer.

Note also, that whoever captioned the images got the one on page 17 wrong. That's the Pirate Captain's crew all right, but he isn't in the shot at all.

[Tim Decker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great and entertaining read on the approach to Stop motion production

[Thia Reads A Lot]

Review coming soon!