New featurette for The Pirates! Band Of Misfits

Sony has released a new behind-the-scenes featurette to promote upcoming swashbuckler The Pirates! Band Of Misfits , and it does a good job of showing just what a labour of love is involved in making a stop-motion feature.

As illustrated by a helpful cue-card carrying monkey, a camera on a typical movie shoots around an hour of footage per day with only four minutes ending up in the final cut. Work on The Pirates! however was restricted to 1-4 seconds of footage per camera, per week, with nearly all of it ending up in the movie. That’s what we call painstaking.

Take a look at the featurette below…

Hugh Grant sums up the studio’s remarkable achievements best by wondering at the difficulty of making the individual figures move on screen, let alone have them act out slapstick hilarity with impeccable comic timing.

We’re great fans of most of Aardman’s output, and from the looks of things, The Pirates! might just be their most entertaining offering to date. We’ll know for sure when the film opens here on 28 March 2012.