Four New Production Videos & New Clip For Aardman Animations’ ‘The Pirates! Band of Misfits’

(Written for BritScene)

Aardman Animations’ family adventure The Pirates! Band of Misfits has three new behind-the-scenes videos, a new clip and a B-roll video of British actor Martin Freeman in the recording studio, this week, including footage of the cast in their voice recording sessions and the film’s animation team showing how the characters go from paper to moving visuals on-screen.

As well as a new clip from the film, the three new ‘crew vlogs’ go behind the scenes on the production of the film. The first looks at director Peter Lord‘s voice recording sessions as he works with the actors line by line, actor by actor, showing footage of British actors Hugh Grant (Did You Hear About the Morgans?), Ashley Jensen (Gnomeo & Juliet) and Brian Blessed work on their lines, with a separate special B-roll clip showing Martin Freeman (TV’s Sherlock) in the recording studio.

The second video then introduces us to character designer Jonny Duddle who takes us through his concept art, focusing on the character of Charles Darwin, voiced by David Tennant (The Decoy Bride), and the third sees suprervisor rapid-prototyping Amanda Darby show us the thousands of plasticine parts and different shapes of mouths needed in order to get the figures look as if they’re actually talking.

Produced by Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit) and Sony Pictures Animation (Arthur Christmas), the film is based on the first two of Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! novels, The Pirates! in an Adventure With Scientists and The Pirates! in an Adventure With Whaling.

Directed by Peter Lord with co-director Jeff Newitt, the film follows The Pirate Captain (voiced by Grant) who is on an adventure to beat his rivals Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven – TV’s Entourage) and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek – Puss in Boots) in the Pirate of the Year Award, where along the way he must battle Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton – Arthur Christmas) and meet a young Charles Darwin (Tennant).

Also starring Brendan Gleeson (The Guard), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (The Thing), and Russell Tovey (TV’s UK Being Human), The Pirates! Band Of Misfits is set to be released on 27th April and you can see new clip and behind-the-scenes footage below, and Martin Freeman’s B-roll here:

Behind The Scenes Vlogs: