Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/65907
■ ■ ■ ■ AI•Computation Andrew Morley embarked on a mission of creating a visual effects studio and supervising the visual effects for Aardman Animations' stop-motion feature The Pirates! Band of Misfits Based on the book by Gideon Defoe, Th e Pirates! Band of Misfi ts is a comedy-adventure fi lm animated using stop-motion techniques and enhanced with CG visual effects at Aardman Studios. Directed by Aardman cofounder Peter Lord, Pirates! is the fi rst stop- motion feature by the studio since the 2005 Wallace & Gromit: Th e Curse of the Were- Rabbit, and the fi rst to use Aardman's new in-house visual effects department. The cast of 60 animated characters includes the Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant), Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek), Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven), and a Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson). Led by Andrew Morley, the visual effects department created CG backgrounds, boats, water, and other effects, and applied digital makeup as needed to touch up the tiny stop-motion models. Morley has moved around the world of computer graphics and visual effects for fi lms literally, and fi guratively. His career has taken him from Industrial Light & Mag- ic where he was a technical director on Jurassic Park III, to the Moving Picture Com- pany where he was a technical supervisor on Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and visual effects supervisor on Batman Begins. Then he moved to Singapore to supervise Lucasfi lm's digital artist group, which produced visual effects for console games and such feature fi lms as Transformers. From there, he moved back to London where he supervised effects on Hellboy II for LipSync Post and was a CG supervisor on Avatar at Framestore. Along the way, he also worked on high-end commercials. In 2009, he formed his own boutique studio, FuzzyLogic FX in London's Soho district, and began working for Aardman Animations as a visual effects supervisor for Aardman's stop-motion feature Th e Pirates! Band of Misfi ts. Contributing editor Barbara Robertson caught up with him shortly before the fi lm's release. At what point in the process of making Pirates! did you come on board at Aardman? Th ey were shooting test shots. Ben Lock, the visual eff ects producer, had been there a year earlier and started the process of planning the visual eff ects in terms of number of people, time, and all the standard production things, and some of the visual eff ects people had started on a pipeline. When I started, Ben and I, between us, built the [visual eff ects] department. Apart from some proprietary tools we developed, it was a fairly standard department tech- nically. Th e challenge was setting up a visual eff ects department at the same time we were doing a fi lm. Also, fi nding people and hiring staff to work in Bristol, which is about 160 miles from London where there are lots of people and lots of companies. It was particularly tricky toward the end of the project when we needed to get freelancers for a short period of time. 36 April/May 2012