I recently gave a flash talk at the WordPress VIP GM, in Tulum, Mexico, and as the title suggests, I used my five minutes to tell the story of how being a PHP-fluent WordPress freelancer ended up with me on the crew of a pirate movie.
If you’re in Bristol, you’ll know Aardman Animations – Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep, Morph (if you’re a certain age in the UK) and so on. I started working with them as a freelancer on the 2009 rebuild of their website in WordPress, which was quite a challenge with CSS, especially at that time! Later on I did some scaling work for the Timmy Time site, the spin-off for pre-schoolers. Standard stuff really.
Then one day I got an email from Aardman asking if I wanted to work on a pirate movie. Yep! Obviously I said yes. It was The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, made in conjunction with Sony Pictures, and known in the US as The Pirates! Band of Misfits, presumably because they thought nobody wants to go and see a film with the word “scientists” in the title. It’s the same film under two different names.
I got to visit the set, which was a stop-frame animation set-up in a building on a Bristol industrial estate, with around 40 different sets on the go, and incredibly talented model makers building them. Everything was shot against green screen and filled in with CGI later. Sony wanted the film in 3D, so every shot had to be taken twice, with the camera moved slightly to one side on a special jig.
So why did they need a PHP developer? They had commissioned a production management system, originally built for the Matrix trilogy and later used on Marvel films, which happened to be written in PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. Me and three other engineers were brought in to add features. Mine included:
- Storyboarding, so you could pull the storyboards into the film and add director’s notes. The edit suite would provide XML edit decision lists, and the storyboard features synced up with them at the end of each day’s editing.
- Mouthpiece management. There were 40 pirate captains, each with removable mouthpieces that were 3D printed (and later smoothed over with CGI), so I spent a long time building a system to track which mouthpieces needed to be made. In other words, beard management was also a thing, but I ran out of time to talk about that in any detail!
- A tool for annotating the puppets, so everyone knew which mouth shapes were needed in each scene.
I got a T-shirt out of it. “Briny Rogues” was the code name for the film before it was released. But was also chuffed to get my own IMDB entry!