Jonny Duddle

Pirates! At the Oscars!

I spent four years working on Aardman's stop motion 'Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists!', or 'Pirates! band of Misfits!' for those of you in the USofA, and have been meaning to post some of my character designs for aaaages. And then yesterday I found out that the movie has been nominated for this year's Oscar Academy Awards, click here, and that seemed like a very good prompt indeed.

I started (on what was a very small team) in February 2008. I was having a tough time, following the death of my dad in a motorbike accident, and being asked to contribute to an Aardman project was a dream come true. My dad and I watched a lot of Aardman stuff a lot together, and both of us loved the humour, craftsmanship and attention to detail. I was shaking in my boots when I travelled down to Bristol to show the directors, Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt, my portfolio. The first thing I was asked to work on was a 'Very Big Pirate'. I think this was more of a test, to see whether my style would fit. This is the design I came up with...

And then a brilliant sculptor, Bloxy, came up with this...

I worked a few days each week during the first half of 2008, sometimes at home, sometimes at Aardman's Bristol studio, sketching and working on character designs. For most of this time, there were two character designers, me and a wonderful french artist called Zebe. Here's some early stuff...

In June 2008, I was asked to knock out some colour studies of the principal characters, to send to Sony Pictures, who funded the movie. These were done pretty quickly, over a few days...

 

For the next three years, I worked on and off for a few days each week, producing more detailed designs and turnarounds, for periods as the only character designer, after Zebe went off to work on 'Arthur Christmas'.

As well as character design, I spent quite a lot of time working in the set department, designing figurative elements in the backgrounds, from statues and figureheads to stuffed animal heads. This was really good fun!

There is a 'making of...' book available, which features quite a lot of my drawings. There are a few mistakes in the credits. A couple of the images above are credited to Michael Salter. I think the mistake came about because Mike came up with original design, and then I did a colour pass and a turnaround to tie it in with the other characters. Designing all the characters was a big team effort, with input from concept artists, story artists, sculptors and, of course, the directors, Peter and Jeff, so I'm sure it was difficult getting all the credits in the book bang on target. Here's an example of Mike's original design, re-drawn by me, and later becoming a colour study (above)...

And also, there are a lot of images credited to me that have colour, but I only ever did a black and white drawing!

For anyone interested in animation, and particularly stop-motion, the book is fantastic, and gives a great overview of the movie's development.

Working on 'Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!' was a wonderful job. I've never enjoyed doing concept art as much as I did on this movie. I'm hoping Aardman will have me back one day to work on something else... Or a sequel perhaps....