Films can be made anywhere, but on a list of places to which you would not expect someone to have a studio, near the top of my list would be Hillsborough, Oregon.  And I say that as an Oregon native. Yet nothing makes me happier, and nothing could make more sense for Laika. Owned by Phil Knight, with the absorption of Will Vinton Studios (best known for the California Raisin campaign), it’s a very Oregon production house, and that community (so close to Portland) has long toiled in this field. Their current project is also their biggest: an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline as directed by Henry Selick. Selick’s claims to fame include directing A Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. He’s one of the giants in the field, and it’s great to see such work after years of CGI.

The plot of the film revolves around Coraline moving to Ashland, Oregon with her family (and much of the sets are modeled on the real Ashland… Oregon, represent!) and finding a portal to another world populated with dopplegangers of everyone Coraline knows, but have buttons for eyes. Of course, the world is both exceptionally pleasing, but off, and there’s a nasty secret to the world.

After driving in, we found ourselves at their modern studio, which like all studios is constructed for space, and has that smell familiar to anyone who’s ever spent some time around sets of any sort. We were then given a tour of one of the model-making areas by puppet fabricator supervisor Georgina Hayns. “When we’ve got an approved drawing, and we’ve gotten our sculptors in, we move to a maquette, a 3-D blueprint, and a basic costume, so Henry (Selick) can talk to us about performance, and we can figure out what we might for the costume. Once we’ve got this, we have to make that into a useable puppet. And then we go back to Henry to find out how he wants to animate it for the performance.

“With (the film) Coraline, this is the first time we’ve used two different kinds of heads in stop motion. Really, there’s three different techniques. There’s clay animation, there’s replacement animation, where each facial expression is replaced, and then there’s mechanical animation, where it’s ball and socket. On this show we’re using replacement, which Henry’s done a lot of, and we’re using facial mechanic, so which we use is one of the first decisions made about the characters, and certain characters lead to certain mechanisms. So one character Spink, she’s always quite happy, so it’s easier to use facial mechanics on her. Coraline has to do everything, because she’s the main character, so it’s a replacement head. Each head that has mechanical animation, we put as much as we can into those heads, but what you get with Coraline, with a replacement face, you separate much of the head. We’ve separated out the brows, so we can get even more expression. If we had to do it all with one face plate, we’d have thousands and thousands for one character, but with all the different pieces there’s less plates.

“The plates create lines on the faces, but that’s erased digitally in post. Then we have to look at the body. Those are made with a wire frame. All of the puppets are made up of ball and socket joints, or hinge joints. We know the hands are going to be fragile, so we make spares. And we can swap it in shots. Once the internal structure is worked out, we have to separate them into different parts. The faces are going to be hard, but the bodies are soft, and there’s padding that goes underneath the costume on the armature. So we have to work out what sort of material is on each, and then we mold each part separately - we break it down. We use a lot of silicone. It has a great surface and looks like skin on a miniature scale. We found all the most interesting things that look good on a miniature scale. We work with the animator to get the most information out of them. Most of the puppets make it through the show, but we do a number of repairs. Foam latex puppets disintegrate (like the ones Henry used on Nightmare), where these are in much better shape.

“The vocabulary of expression is worked out once you have the script. Then you have the voice-overs signed off on, and then it’s broken down into face shapes. The animator will ask ‘can I have an angry face’ and we do get people to act out the scenes, and we also film the people doing voice-overs, so we can go back to that. Character detail is based on needs, it’s all character based, some have more replacement faces, but others are just mechanical. The replacement faces are for the characters seen the most, though. We’re getting all the characters lifelike hair. Coraline was one of the first characters we worked on, and we knew she’d be hanging upside down, and her hair would get blown, so we have an upside down wig, and you have to have wires in the hair without them showing. We also coat the wires to hide them. We check the rehearsals, and if we see anything, we paint it out. We also have to worry about changing the face plates without messing up the hair. We also use a little bit of mo-hair. It’s really important to get the scale right. If the hair is too big it gives it away.

“With the costumes, it’s really exciting going out there finding the fabrics. We print a lot of the fabrics and dye them for what we need. The painters then go in an age the costumes. Towards the end Coraline gets a bit roughed up, so we add more paint. We wire each part of the costumes - it’s actually a net, and that helps so we can make the seams look small but have strength. That’s the great thing about working on puppets is that it allows to indulge in details. Because all the small things show up in greater details. And we search out craftspeople. We found an artist who makes miniature sweaters, and takes them on tour. Everything’s handstiched on, they’ll be a back seam that you’ll never see. Most things have an easy way to come off. And of course we have to get into the puppet to tighten it, so they’ll be discrete holes. A jacket and a shirt would be two pieces, but if a character doesn’t take off their jacket, we can get away with putting a bib on underneath. We try to make it look like natural fabric moving. You don’t want to see the fabric boiling around.”

Then we met Bo Henry. Bo’s been on the scene for years and is the Set Construction Supervisor. “We build the set and all the props, plus all the painting. Essentially you take model building and put it on steroids. Because the puppets have to interact with things, you have make things for repeated use, and to have something break or chip in the middle of a shot is a pain in the… So, not only does it have to have a particular look, it has to meet a certain criteria as well. Even if it is an artificial plant, we’ve taken it back to make it more of the look of the movie. A lot of our inspiration comes from the drawings of Tadahiro (Uesugi) and created a look we use as a guideline. Everything is as need be. You get a sense of the quantity, since we often have to do multiple setups. Sets have to break away so the animator can get access, so they can do their craft. And the camera tries to maintain a live action sensibility, so the set has to break away for the camera. So that’s why we have so many segmented things. And the amount of time it takes to shoot things, we have to make duplications because of the time. One set up, we’ve been using for almost two years. We’ve only really got one set left to build, but we’ve built 200. And they vary in size from 2’x2’ to 60’x60’, but a lot of them have fallen into 8’ by 8’. If it’s a set that’s more complicated, it gets a bigger space value. At this point, we’re pretty much done, we’re a little over three-quarters of the way done, and we started shooting about a year and a half ago. There’s really a ramp up, getting everything going, so the production in the first six months isn’t like the rest of the production.

“Once we put the sets out, it takes at least a week or two to get used, and then there’s rehearsal time. And then the shooting process. It’s very deliberate, but stop motion is a very deliberate art. Scale is about 1/6^th. All the walls tend to be two feet high, but there’s different scale for different cases. What I do is take a storyboard, I’ll look at the boards and once the art department have created a set, I say ‘I need to break it here, I need to break it there,’ try to realize where the camera angles are. Sometimes I have to start on a set before I have a finished board, so I throw some nails up in the air and see where they point. But I try to keep the sets simple enough that they aren’t so precious that we can’t cut them away. Because the puppets get tied into the floor, so they have to be easy to drill in to, which means high quality particle boards and plywood. The biggest difference with 3-D is how I deal with backgrounds. The texture and shape of the background is important. Normally it’s about eight feet in this scale where I can use more painting techniques, before using more dimensional space. But it’s the little things that take stop motion to the highest level we can bring it to. It’s also built with magnets so we can move things quickly, but it’s literally months of work. It takes an incredible group of artists to put this together. It really represents how much work, how much detail, how repetitive this detail is. We will shoot separate elements and put them together. Digitally it’s a little tougher, but it’s all stop motion, it’s all frame by frame. I like to say, it’s only 14,000 pictures and then we’re done with it.”

We were then availed of Henry’s craftsmanship as we were ushered in to look at six of the sets. The Other World House exterior, the Ashland exterior, the  Bug Living Room, the Real World house, exterior, the Fantastic Garden and the Red Tulip garden party. One sequence was being shot, and the animator would go from the monitor to the set with great frequency, going from the last frame shot, to a live feed of where everything was. For a ten second sequence it took one week to shoot and an additional week to light. It’s a laborious process and very time consuming, as it takes 130 pictures to make five seconds of material. And everything has to be adjusted throughout.

We were given a better test of the film, and its 3-D capabilities when we were shown 20 minutes of selected footage. The highlight was a Busby Berkeley music number involving Kangaroo rats. We also got a sense of the plot, and the dangers that faced Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning), whose parents (voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman) are distracted by the move. She makes sorta friends with the neighbor kid, but finds a portal to the other world where Miss Spink (Dawn French) and Miss Forcible (Jennifer Saunders) put on one hell of a show. There’s also Mr. Bobisnki (Ian McShane), and he’s a weirdo neighbor. The footage had us hooked. Then we got Travis Knight, Henry Selick and producer Claire Jennings.

 

Look for Part 2 of my set visit tomorrow