Posted on September 9, 2014 at 8:00 am
I’m delighted to share some of the behind-the-scenes artistry that went into LAIKA Studios’ “The Boxtrolls.” You can see some of what I found so enchanting on my visit to the studio last spring.
Posted on July 26, 2014 at 10:04 pm
Day 2 of Comic-Con included: an interview with “Sharknado” and “Sharknado 2” screenwriter Thunder Levin, a buggy lunch with Boxtrolls, press events with the directors and casts of four films, and appearing on the Rotten Tomatoes panel, where each attendee was given a paddle with a ripe tomato on one side and a rotten tomato on the other. Members of the audience got up to make one-minute pitches on behalf or against the conventional wisdom (and the legendary RT tomato-meter). In true Comic-Con fashion, we spent much too much time talking about the Transformers, the best two comments of the night were made by kids, and a ninja from “Mortal Kombat” made an impassioned — if not ultimately persuasive — case in favor of “The Notebook.”
The 75th anniversary of Batman is a very big deal here, of course, with a great display of costumes and props from the Batman movies and appearances from the stars of the 60’s television series, Adam West and Burt Ward, to promote the release of the series on DVD. Even Starbucks got into the spirit.
Posted on July 19, 2014 at 8:00 am
One of my favorite stops on our tour of LAIKA Studios to see the sets for “The Boxtrolls” was our visit with Georgina Hayns, Creative Supervisor for Puppet Fabrication. Is that the coolest job title ever or what?
She described the world of the film as “fantasy Dickensian.” They began with silhouettes of the era, then a maquette (model) style guide, then animation. The characters all have skeleton armatures inside, with ball and socket, hinge, and swivel joints, just like a human. And other parts are in motion as well. ” Snatch has a big belly and it has to move.” All the characters have to be able to shift shape and weight as they walk, dance, or reach.
For faces, they begin with clay and the characters with limited emotions can be done mechanically (with animators using their fingers to adjust the mouths, cheeks, and eyes). But for the main characters and those showing a range of expressions they have a “library” of replacement faces numbering from hundreds to thousands.
She said that when she first saw the images of the Box Troll characters, she was initially excited to think about all of the mechanics they could hide inside those spacious boxes. But then it turns out that their heads, legs, and arms retract, “so all our space is gone” and they had to find some other way to build in all of the functionality they needed. “Every aspect of the figures has to be lockdown or animatable.”
To create the look of the costumes, they took inspiration from the gorgeously imaginative Ballet Russe. The Red Hats are the bad guys. For the embroidery, they used a sewing machine set to the tiny 1/5 scale. “In a close-up, you have to see the detail,” she told us. “We’re all about cheating the eye.”
For the ballroom sequence, they were inspired by “Gone With the Wind.” They said, “Let’s do hoops!” To create the effect they needed, “the frill is wired.”
The magnificent coiffures in the ballroom scene were made from hemp. “We go to town on our basket-weaving for the hair.”
An army of specialists work on the puppets, including engineers, seamstresses, jewelers, miniature hair people, and armature experts. Some of them have surprising backgrounds. “We have a ceramicist doing hair and a philosophy major doing armatures.” There are 185 puppets, with the most for the two main characters: 12-65 Snatches and 25 Eggs. It took about six months to make the first one for each of them. “And they break a lot, so we have puppet ER.”
Posted on July 16, 2014 at 8:00 am
More from my enchanting visit to LAIKA Studios to see the sets and meet the filmmakers for “The Boxtrolls,” the upcoming stop-motion film:
The story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y8E7xJ6MXU&list=UUv6Q5GVAMEQe15E4Tz5X3VwA family event movie from the creators of “Coraline” and “ParaNorman” that introduces audiences to a new breed of family – The Boxtrolls, a community of quirky, mischievous creatures who have lovingly raised an orphaned human boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright) in the amazing cavernous home they’ve built beneath the streets of Cheesebridge. When the town’s villain, Archibald Snatcher (Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley), comes up with a plot to get rid of the Boxtrolls, Eggs decides to venture above ground, “into the light,” where he meets and teams up with fabulously feisty Winnie (Elle Fanning). Together, they devise a daring plan to save Eggs’ family.
Some stats:
• An animator typically took 1 week to complete 3.7 seconds worth of footage, which is just under 90 individual frames
• There are 14 different fabrics in Lord Portley-Rind’s white hat
• The movie’s smallest costumes were for Eggs as a baby: the sweater, measuring 3.5” from cuff to cuff across the length of both arms and chest, and the baby socks measuring 5/8” long
• The stop-motion flames “burning” in the furnace of the Mecha-Drill are courtesy of a working iPad displaying a loop video inside the “mouth” of the device
• More than 20,000 props were handmade for the movie
• 55 different sculpts of prop cheeses were created for “THE BOXTROLLS”
• The movie’s smallest prop was a tiny sewing thread and needle
Cheese is very important in this story. One thing I noticed as we looked at the sets was a number of signs with puns about cheese names:
Chevre au lait
Fun and Fancy Brie
Churn of the Century
Here Be Munsters (This one is a reference to the book that inspired the film, Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow
And one more: Great Rinds Stink Alike
Be sure to check out the terrific comments from some of my friends who were also on the visit to LAIKA, Enza Ketchum and Sandie Angulo Chen.
Posted on July 9, 2014 at 12:00 pm
I’m excited to be able to share a secret I’ve been keeping since April. I got to cross a big item off my bucket list when I was invited to visit LAIKA Studios and get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of their upcoming film, “The Boxtrolls.” LAIKA is the stop-motion animation studio that produced two of my favorite films, “Coraline” and “Paranorman.” A small group of bloggers spent the day at their Portland, Oregon studio, speaking to the people who were putting the finishing touches on the film, which will open in September.
The title characters are creatures who wear cardboard boxes and live under a city that is a sort of mash-up of Victorian/Edwardian London with some elements of continental Europe and Asia. A little boy named Eggs lives with them and in the film he discovers the human world for the first time.
We met with LAIKA CEO Travis Knight, who is also an animator, as he was working on the last and longest scene in the film. It was 1100 frames, or just 45 seconds of film time. Stop-motion is painstaking and slow, with just two or four frames shot on a regular SLR camera before everything on the set is slightly moved for the next shot. He was working from a “shot sheet” that was broken down phonetically. “It’s not about patience. It is about the ability to focus intensively, like chess or a math problem,” Knight said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5CU8Y1xnY&list=PLE5A001DF0D0120BDThis was one of 50 different sets in different rooms, each working two or four frames at a time. “You cast animators like actors,” he told us. Some specialize in distinctive physical movements, some in emotion, physics, or action.
“We don’t want a house style but there are strands of DNA” in the stories they choose. “We come back to the kinds of things I loved as a kid, like the Disney classics, with an artful balance of darkness and light, plus motion and dynamism.” They look for stories with “substance to affect people’s lives aesthetically and visually, bold distinctive stories with something meaningful to say. Something of substance to say to help families connect.” The thematic core of this film is “what makes a family, what defines a family.”
Everyone we met was passionately committed to stop-motion, the oldest form of filmmaking. “There is something about stop motion that is really magical,” Knight said, reeling off his inspirations and heroes. “Ray Harryhausen, Rankin/Bass – that old-school movie magic, like stage magicians bringing illusions to life, or Georges Melies taking technology and expanding it. We don’t quite believe that it is us who did it. Somehow they spring to life in our hands.”
