How they will look and move on camera must also be considered. Coraline 's costume designer, Deborah Cook, said Coraline's famous raincoat required wires and weights underneath it, so that it would look realistic onscreen. Other articles needed similar construction. So you need to make it super heavy on the bottom of the hems so it looks right for the scale. It's got to be nerve-wracking being an author and watching as someone translates one of your books into a movie.
You have to hope that they remain true to your intentions. If they have to change things, you hope that those alterations don't destroy what you crafted. Neil Gaiman was largely very happy with Henry Selick's film version of Coraline , except for the ending, which he hated. The writer told Entetainment Weekly that he didn't care for a moment in the finale in which Coraline is dragged around by a metal hand, and then Wybie rides in on his bike and smashes the hand with a rock.
Ranft passed away in a tragic auto accident in Selick paid tribute to his pal with a scene in Coraline. The family moves into the Pink Palace with the help of the Ranft Brothers moving company. The characters were designed to look like Joe and his brother Jerome, who also had ties to Pixar. It was a way of honoring a man who contributed so much to animated movies. A common misconception is that recording voices for animated features is fast, easy work.
In reality, it takes years to make one, and actors are often called back in to re-record if scenes are changed or added in the process. When a young performer like Dakota Fanning is involved, that can create a real problem. Fanning began giving voice to Coraline when she was only ten years old.
The tedious nature of stop-motion animation ensured that production stretched on several years, and she was required to periodically come back in to say new lines. As she moved into adolescence, though, her voice naturally began to change , growing a bit deeper.
Fanning had to make herself speak in a higher-pitched voice in an effort to emulate her younger self. Although she's a very recognizable actress, only her voice is featured in Coraline. Not appearing on camera doesn't mean that she didn't give a physical performance, though. The challenge was making the real Mother different from the Other Mother. To differentiate between them, Hatcher gave herself different postures when recording her dialogue. When voicing Mother, she slouched so that her voice would sound more tired.
For Other Mother, the actress stood bolt upright, so the character would sound stiff and mannered. This technique aided her performance, establishing more of a difference between the two iterations of Coraline's mom.
The latter studio had a massive run of success during his tenure, cranking out blockbusters like Titanic and Independence Day. In other words, he is a very influential person in the motion picture business. As a producer of Coraline , Mechanic exercised his clout in a particular manner. When he discovered that the character of Charlie Jones was going to wear a University of Michigan sweatshirt in the film, he put his foot down.
Because he's a proud graduate of Michigan State University — U of M's long-time rival — Mechanic insisted that the shirt be changed to one from his alma mater. Unsurprisingly, he got his way. Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French are not exactly household names in America, although both are major stars in England. This being the case, it isn't entirely surprising that Henry Selick didn't know who they were when Neil Gaiman insisted they be cast as, respectively, Miss Forcible and Miss Spink.
After the first day of recording voices, Selick agreed that they were perfect, except for one thing — he wanted them to switch parts, with Saunders playing Spink and French taking on Forcible. One of the most important scenes in Coraline wouldn't have made it into the final product if the producers had gotten their way.
It's the scene in which the title character and her mother go shopping for school clothes. According to the DVD commentary, the producers thought it wasn't needed, and that taking Coraline away from the Pink Palace would be detrimental to the film.
Henry Selick fought to keep it. Although it was already established that Coraline and her mom could have a thorny relationship at times, this sequence really drove the idea home. It also ensured the girl ventured into the Other World feeling especially frustrated with Mother. Selick got his way, as the producers eventually realized he was right. There's a scene in Coraline that pushes the boundaries of what can be included in a PG-rated movie. The advent of shooting animation with digital cameras brought no lamentations from the industry about the loss of film as a shooting medium.
Corpse Bride cinematographer Pete Kozachik who later worked on Coraline was asked by the production company Motion Picture Co if he wanted to add film grain. I could see why they would want it to look more like the shots around it. It still feels like a movie and not a fancy video. This adoption of digital cameras was the most significant shift in the production of stop-motion animation film, but the path towards digital production techniques had begun over a decade before, with the use of motion control on The Nightmare before Christmas.
Motion control was embraced by the film industry in the late s, and had a profound effect on both the visual styles and performances of all modern stop-motion features. Motion control rigs can even move the camera completely out of the way between shooting frames, allowing an animator to access the puppet. Once they have set the pose and cleared the set, the camera can return precisely to a pre-assigned position to take the next frame.
On a performance level, motion control for stop-motion animation allows for more ambitious, multilayered and complex camera work by automating the process, allowing the animator to focus entirely on the puppet performances instead of advancing an additional slew of technical camera and lighting actions as they progress each frame.
Coraline made extensive use of the technology, and the spectacular opening sequence of the film is an example of the type of roving, mobile camera work that is simply not possible with manual or analogue techniques. Digital technology slowly began to solve the technical challenges inherent in shooting stop-motion animation. One of its most important advantages was the ability to review an animated sequence as it was shot. Before the introduction of video and digital capture, the playback of filmed animation during shooting was impossible because the film had to be developed as a negative filmstrip, if not additionally printed as a positive filmstrip, to be viewed.
The mechanism was manual and required repositioning when taking a shot, the operator sliding the lens across the camera body and back over the film strip to expose the frame. The gauge, like the racking, required constant attention while filming, as it needed to be removed from the frame after each use so as not to appear in the final shot. This was the three-dimensional equivalent of a traditional 2D animator using a light box to trace a new drawing over an existing one.
The process of referring to a previous image while viewing the current image is called onion skinning and allows for precise registration and consistency between drawings. The transfer of that concept to stop-motion animations through frame grabber technology had a profound effect on the production and style of animation. It was the crucial technological advancement that has since determined key elements of the visual qualities of stop motion; the complexity, quality and sheer volume of contemporary stop-motion animation is made possible by the simple digital act of overlaying semi-transparent images over each other to compare frames before committing to capturing a frame.
Animators who worked with film cameras and could not review their work had to rely on timing charts, surface gauges and the muscle memory of experience to make their puppets move. The work of the film animator is an embodied experience of tactile skill, and the rippling fur of King Kong in or the clipped deathly movements of the skeletons in the fight scene in Jason and the Argonauts Don Chaffey, are all the more remarkable for being animated by their creators almost blindfolded.
Using a digital camera as an animation tool brought the immediate technical advantages of instant playback of footage, previewing frames before shooting and increased manoeuvrability around the set. The progression towards full onion skinning review tools was incremental over the decades.
Video feeds allowed the 35mm film cameras used on The Nightmare before Christmas to have a supplementary frame grabber that could store a couple of frames for reference, but the animators could still choose to use old-fashioned surface gauges to keep track of their puppets.
Coraline went digital but used specialist industrial cameras, with an in-house LAIKA frame grabber for previewing. The SLRs allowed for things that were unheard of back when we used those pound [35mm] Mitchell cameras. With those, you really had to consider how much the camera weighed, how you were going to support it, and how the animator would get their head around it.
Suddenly, when the cameras were tiny, we were more on par with what live-action could do. If live-action film had to mimic how stop-motion used to be shot, the camera would be the size of a Volkswagen. The sort of changes brought about by digital processes are not just related to the reproducible digital image; every aspect of the filming workflow changed with smaller, more agile cameras and immediate image review.
Changes in production processes are not simply systems made more efficient or practices modernized; they also affect the way creative works are conceived and produced.
For stop motion, the animation becomes smoother with visual review tools, and the camera moves become more complex because of motion control. This led to a shift in the way stop motion was considered as a filmmaking form and a pursuit for a type of equivalence with live-action cinema.
Even as early as The Nightmare before Christmas , industry magazines feature interviews with crew members positively comparing their work to live-action filmmaking. Eric Leighton, supervising animator on Nightmare , describes how the camera and animation work towards a live-action aesthetic:.
One of the things that we are pushing the barrier with is a lot of motion-controlled camera moves, so that means big sweeping camera moves going through the scenes the characters act out, particularly during songs.
Their enthusiasm is easy to understand, as prior to motion control the camera movement in stop-motion animation was mostly shot from a locked off camera position.
Camera moves could only be achieved using hand-winched geared camera heads or other types of mechanical tracks. For instance, all of the camera shots in the famous skeleton fight scene animated by Ray Harryhausen in Jason and the Argonauts are static.
It was a real point of difference for later animated films to move the camera using motion control technology, as Henry Selick said of The Nightmare before Christmas :. The tradition in stop-motion is the locked off camera but we were moving over sets, through windows, around characters. The camera was alive. We were moving cameras on better than eighty or ninety percent of the shots.
In much the same way that Turnock identified ILM as a driving force in digital aesthetics, the creative crews that have worked together on contemporary stop-motion shoots have also formulated particular aesthetic goals and aspirations in animation, many around the idea of fluid animated movement and flowing camera moves.
The films discussed in this chapter were made by different production companies, but many crew members worked on more than one of them. The small community of stop-motion technicians and animators featured in trade and enthusiast magazines like Stop Motion Magazine and Cinefex routinely refer to improvements and advances across several of the productions they were involved in. This is a significant marker in the development of a specific cultural direction for stop-motion animation.
Selick, talking about the visual characteristics of Nightmare and Coraline , could see the relationship between a creative process that evolved over multiple productions with the same crew:. You build on what you know, so that there are no doubt some similarities between the two projects. I also have many of the original Nightmare team members working on Coraline.
The two productions may differ in overall design and aesthetics, but they shared a push towards a type of polished, frictionless movement that in many ways mimics the digital 3D animation that was threatening to replace them. As early as , filmmakers expressed concerns that stop motion struggles in comparison to live-action movie making, as Mark Cotta Vaz, writing about The Nightmare before Christmas in trade magazine Cinefex , reported:.
The idea that stop motion can have a shared cinematic language with live-action films has become deeply embedded in mainstream animated productions as a filmmaking aim. Coraline shared that ambition and continued the refinement of that production process.
From Coraline onwards, the industry-standard stop-motion tools have remained relatively stable in their development, and they all support the goal of live-action equivalence through digitally enabled processes embedded in both the equipment and production workflows. Although the production used an in-house LAIKA software system to shoot Coraline , it also used a pre-release version of the now-ubiquitous frame grabber software, Dragonframe , for some early tests. Those processes leverage all of the inherent advantages of digital cameras by utilizing live preview technology to shoot 4k footage, currently a cinema standard.
Frame preview is instant and total, and includes the ability to compare, delete, reverse or reorder frames during a shot or to use an underlying layer as a visual guide for motion or timing. Using these tools, stop-motion animation is more controllable, allowing movement of all the elements in the shoot cameras, puppets, props, lights and sets to be more finely tuned.
The tools that support digital imagery allow for sophisticated post-production manipulation so the creative scope of shots can be enhanced beyond that which can be captured on set, but most importantly, the digital frame is affordable, malleable and instant.
Hayns says the biggest challenge in making the puppets is that every part that the animator may want to control has to be made "animatable.
Each puppet is then cast in a silicone substance to create the skin, then painted and given hair -- which also must be animatable. Selick says Susan Multon, head of the hair department, has created for Coraline the best-looking hair ever seen in a stop-motion movie. Puppets also go through a painting stage, giving detail and definition to faces and even clothing. Applying paint to a puppet can be a very high-pressure task because the painter doesn't want to make a mistake after all the work that has gone in.
Up next is the construction department, managed by Lee "Bo" Henry, who shows off a highly detailed moving van and dolly constructed completely from scratch. Henry says it's incredibly rare that he or his crew use anything bought off the shelf, simply because the odds are against any commercial product having both the right look and scale.
Henry's department has several sub-departments: models and props, construction and carpentry, and painting. There also is a sculpting department that creates landscapes for the film. The largest set on this film is the orchard set, which is 60 feet long.
And, as with the puppets, everything must be animatable -- including the plants and grass, which needs to be able to look like it's being blown by the wind. On the fantastical garden set, dozens of colorful flowers need to bloom, and also must allow for Coraline and her Other Father to view the scene from above in a large "grasshopper" helicopter.
Selick says Henry's crew builds more live-action sets than any regular movie can afford, and there are considerations other movies don't have to make -- mainly making sets accessible to animators. Large sets such as the fantastical garden are built to break away and have openings underneath for animators to reach through and adjust the puppets.
Other sets have such simple devices as trapdoors and swing-away walls. It takes weeks to build sets -- some of which will only be seen for a few seconds in the final film. The creative needs of the film require the same attention to detail that the puppet fabricators apply to their jobs.
For example, the two worlds Coraline travels between are meant to be similar in form but to have completely different tones: The real world is flat and a bit more worn than the slightly glossier look of the Other World. And with 3-D an element in the movie, the Other World sets are constructed with more depth to make them feel more open and inviting than the comparatively cramped real world. Completed sets are turned over to lighting before the animators begin their work.
On one set, the film's lead cat animator, Sarah de Gaudemar, is animating a scene in which Coraline and The Cat walk through the Orchard to the edges of the Other World. She has a guide as to which position the characters' mouths need to be in to match the dialog in each frame, as well as a guide to key poses.
Selick says he encourages animators to work together, but most prefer to work solo. A few will shoot reference video, but not all -- and he's fine with that. It's not great animation. To create the 3-D effect, each shot is photographed using a digital camera that shoots a frame for one eye, then moves a very small, preprogrammed distance and shoots the other. The animator can check what's been shot on a computer monitor.
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