This article was taken from the April 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Aardman is famous for its handmade clay creations, but Plasticine wouldn't do for the Bristol studio's latest film: "It was the Pirate Captain's luxuriant curly beard that knocked me off course," says Peter Lord, director of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! and co-founder of Aardman. "That couldn't be in plasticine, because every time you touched it, it would blur." Lord's solution? 3D printing. Aardman iced an envisionTEC additive layer printer to create more than 7,000 parts for the models. "You can take a mouth shape on the computer and twist it to the left or right
[digitally]," says Lord. "With Brendon Gleeson's character, the Pirate With Gout, we made the syllables roll out of his face."
Each character from Pirates! still begins as a hand-sculpted puppet. Its head is then 3D scanned, imported as a CAD file and split into various sections, such as the mouth. The film's 30 animators took the dialogue recorded by a cast that includes Hugh Grant and David Tennant, selected sequences or digital mouth shapes, then hit print.
Pirates! was shot in 3D and, says Lord, using tangible, 3D-printed models makes the film more convincing. "However fabulous CG is, you understand it's a construct of the computer. With what we do, you understand the word does exist -- it's in the studio."
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is released 28 March.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
