Academy Award-nominated animated feature following the attempts of a pirate captain to outdo his rivals, featuring the vocal talents of Hugh Grant, David Tennant and Salma Hayek. Pirate Captain (voice of Grant) is determined to win the coveted 'Pirate of the Year' award. He is aware, however, that he will face stiff competition from other buccaneers including Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Hayek). But the Captain has other issues as well. Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) is determined to capture him and hold him to account for his pirating, while the weight of history hangs over his encounter with a young man named Charles Darwin (Tennant).

Feature-length movie from Aardman Animations following Shaun (voice of Justin Fletcher) and his flock of sheep. After their mischievous behaviour gets their farmer in a spot of bother Shaun and his friends go on a big adventure to the city to save him. While there they get up to all sorts of shenanigans. Will everyone get back to the farm in one piece?

For over 40 years, Aardman has entertained and charmed the world, creating memorable stories and timeless animated characters that have gone on to become household names - including Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Morph. But how did two teenagers experimenting with animation on an old kitchen table go on to create a world-class studio that conquered Hollywood? This is an intimate, revealing and funny behind-the-scenes story of Aardman, told in their own words by co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton and featuring Nick Park. The colourful account follows Peter and David's extraordinary journey from their humble beginnings as penniless students, teaching themselves the craft of animation, and recounts the key moments that defined their careers and shaped Aardman into the British success story it is today. THIS STORY INCLUDES: KEY MOMENTS THAT SHAPED AARDMAN - their first professional commissions, developing iconic TV commercials, creating the most-played music video of all time and delivering a pitch to Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg. HOLLYWOOD GLAMOUR - What's it like to work with big stars like Mel Gibson, Hugh Grant and Eddie Redmayne, and what goes on behind the scenes at the Oscars (R)? HIGHS AND LOWS - Winning awards and recognition worldwide for their work, and dealing with the heartbreak of shutting down a production. INSIGHTS into how two men who freely admit they are not at all business-minded managed to build a multi-million pound business. CONTRIBUTIONS from Eddie Redmayne, Timothy Spall, Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Grant. Foreword by Matt Groening.

A manual of constructional details which shows how successful results in acoustic design can be achieved by correct use of building materials, products and components. Details are drawn to scale and carry informative labelling and supplementary text. This updated and revised edition of an established reference book, in an improved format and layout, will be a welcome addition to current reference works on acoustic design.

Christians often struggle with prayer because it has become a one-way conversation with the ceiling. It doesn't have to be this way In this revised and updated edition of the classic bestseller, Peter Lord offers an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide to developing a rich prayer life--moving believers from one-way communication to God to two-way communication with God. He answers such questions as
Can I hear God's voice today?
How can I discern the difference between God's voice and Satan's voice?
How can I find God's will and direction for my life?
and many more
God still speaks today, and when believers pursue a dynamic personal relationship with him, they will learn to recognize and cherish his voice.

A manual of constructional details which shows how successful results in acoustic design can be achieved by correct use of building materials, products and components. Details are drawn to scale and carry informative labelling and supplementary text. This updated and revised edition of an established reference book, in an improved format and layout, will be a welcome addition to current reference works on acoustic design.

Aardman Animations are, unquestionably, one of the biggest success stories in animated films: their masterpieces include Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep, as well as much-loved characters such as Morph. Cracking Animation is entertaining, inspiring and essential reading for all Aardman enthusiasts, students of animation or anyone who wants to try making an animated film. This revised edition includes two new chapters. Chapter 7 looks in depth at the development and teamwork involved in a major animated film or television production, using The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! as an exemplar, and Chapter 8 presents exclusive behind-the-scenes insights into the making of Aardman's most recent feature film, Shaun the Sheep the Movie. Packed with practical, fully illustrated and step-by-step descriptions of all the elements involved, this is quite simply the best publication on stop-motion animation.

Beneath the surface of pictures lie the extensive networks of relationships and associations that tie us to them, sometimes in extraordinary ways. In pictures the past lives, and forms the basis of who we will become. The moments at which we come to understand something of ourselves and our place in the world are often anchored in images literary, musical and visual. Through fifteen pictures Peter Lord describes the evolution of his own sense of self, in childhood just after the Second World War, at art college in the 1960s, through the tension between incomers and local people in Wales in the 1970s and 80s, and finally through his exploration of the place they have had in the lives of the artists who created them, their patrons and publics. Writing about the meaning of pictures in their social and political context, Peter Lord was centrally involved in the establishment of the field in Wales in the 1980s, when the prevailing conventional wisdom regarded the nation as being largely devoid of a visual culture. Currently he holds posts researching and lecturing on visual culture at Swansea University.

This book is about Welsh pictures painted between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, and why they matter today. It mainly concerns how pictures are understood by the people who use them - patrons, museum curators, and the general public - rather than by the painters who paint them. It consists of a series of chapters on different aspects of painting, which are unified by a common theme. Individual chapters discuss an eighteenth-century painting, a nineteenth-century genre, a twentieth-century painter, how pictures are valued by museums and the art market, and how, since the 1980s, the Welsh art establishment has fought a reactionary battle against the New Art History movement. The chapters are unified by their concern with the question of how a tradition of art is created, and what effect a tradition has on how a nation sees itself - and is seen by others. The pictures and painters are discussed in the context of contemporary literature, and the social and political circumstances of their period. Comparisons are made with the experience of other cultures, notably the United States and Ireland.

'Over the last twenty five years, almost single-handedly, Peter Lord has transformed a collection of poorly understood evidence of art created in Wales, and lazy theoretical assumptions about it, into a discipline in its own right, equipped with analytical frameworks and supported by an accumulating body of knowledge.' -Andrew Green, Wales Arts Review (on The Tradition) The six sequential essays in this collection provide a narrative of a century and a half of Welsh painting, written with an emphasis on issues of social class and national identity. Through his earlier writing, Peter Lord has contributed to the establishment of an historical tradition of Welsh painting, but because it does not feature in the wider story of western art history as presently told, the work revealed continues to be perceived as marginal, existing in isolation from ideas and movements in other countries. These essays break new ground by discussing the concerns of Welsh painters not only in domestic terms but also in the context of the ways in which artists in other parts of Europe and in the United States reacted to the common underlying causes of those concerns. The author challenges the idea that the work of Welsh painters is relevant only to the evolution of their own communities and, through confident and detailed analysis, validates their pictures also in terms of the arts of other western cultures.

Visual culture has long been a vital component in the creation and dissemination of this prevalent national brand. The Art of Music describes the visualisation of Welsh music and musicians both in the context of the evolution of the self-image of the Welsh people, and of its influence on outside perceptions of Welshness within Britain and the wider world.

A lavishly illustrated volume presenting a comprehensive study by a renowned scholar of the rich heritage of Welsh images during the period 1500-1950, noting especially how Wales and Welsh nationhood are portrayed in these images. Over 450 colour images and over 200 black-and-white images. First published in 2000.

Napoleon's lightning conquest of Prussia, accomplished within a month in the autumn of 1806, was perhaps his most spectacularly successful campaign. The twin battles of Jena and Auerstadt, won on the same day, October 14th, by Napoleon himself and his most able Marshal, Davout, annihilated the Prussian army and on 25th October, exactly a month after invading Prussia, Napoleon entered Berlin and enforced a humiliating peace on his beaten enemy. In his classic account of the campaign, published exactly 100 years ago, F. Loraine Petre explains how Prussia's once vaunted military might ossified in the twenty years after Frederick the Great's death, leading to timidity and political paralysis. What Field-Marshal Roberts in his foreword calls 'a selfish and suicidal policy' of ignoring France as she picked off neighbouring Austria led to defeat and occupation, but ultimately to much needed reform and the re-birth of the Prussian army with its ultimate revenge on Napoleon at Leipzig and Waterloo.