How do they make coraline

After all, it's based on a book by best-selling author Neil Gaiman — a writer with a large, devoted fan base to match his immense talent. Surprisingly, no studio in town would go anywhere near the project when he and Selick pitched it. Gaiman told Entertainment Weekly that some of them were scared off by stop-motion animation, which they deemed non-commercial in an era where computer-animated features were dominant. Others thought boys wouldn't go see it because the story had a female lead character, rather than a male.

There was similar concern that girls wouldn't go see it because it was slightly scary. After a lot of rejections, they finally convinced Focus Features to say yes. Because it partially takes place in a fantasy world, stop-motion animation was a perfect fit for Coraline. The process made it look different from other animated movies. Hard as it may be to believe in retrospect, not everyone was on board with the approach.

Producer Bill Mechanic told The Mercury News that he initially assumed the film would be made in live-action. Only upon being convinced of stop-motion's possibilities did he agree this was the right way. It's almost impossible to adapt a book for the big screen without making some changes. Sometimes things need to be deleted or condensed for time considerations.

Other times, new elements have to be added because translating the book literally just wouldn't work onscreen. Coraline was an example of the latter. While writing his adaptation, Henry Selick kept hitting a wall. He knew that Coraline has a lot of interesting things happen to her, but there was very little way for her to process them so that the audience would fully understand what she was thinking and feeling.

He therefore added a character who wasn't in the book. Wybie, the grandson of the landlady, was created so that Caroline would have someone else to talk to, rather than talking to herself.

They Might Be Giants is a rock band known for catchy melodies and extremely quirky lyrics. To that end, TMBG was hired to write ten songs for the soundtrack. The plan didn't work out. Coraline was different from many stop-motion animated films, in that it was the first of its kind to be shot in 3D.

The Nightmare Before Christmas had been post-converted, but Selick wanted to make his movie native to the format. This created a lot of additional challenges. Specifically, he wanted to use 3D to create an effect similar to the one audiences felt in The Wizard of Oz , when the film dramatically shifts from black-and-white to color.

For scenes set in the Other World, things were further apart to create more depth and subsequently emphasize the 3D effect. Making the costumes for stop-motion animated characters is far more complicated than it looks. It's not just about sewing tiny articles of clothing to put on the figures. 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. 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.

We watch her from afar as she explores the gardens and beyond until, startled by a cat, she runs headlong into an unfamiliar and threatening landscape. She turns, confronts the cat angrily and we, as the audience, are introduced to Coraline. Figure Figure 6. The opening shot of Coraline : the family arrives at the Pink Palace Apartments. This opening, which lasts approximately two and a half minutes, is a filmic introduction to place and character that walks the audience through the plot a move to the country , a location creepy, lonely house with a strange Russian acrobat on the roof , a heroine who is a curious, independent girl one who sets out exploring alone and a cat with uncertain motives we watch it watching Coraline.

We travel through abandoned Victorian ornamental gardens and into an autumnal landscape that is as beautiful as it is bleak, and it almost comes as a surprise to think of all these elements as puppets in miniature-scaled sets because the visual storytelling style is so familiar. Much of what creates this intimate understanding of the narrative is the effortless, gravity-defying way in which the camera moves.

There are no locked off and static shots here; the camera glides as if floating through space, taking the viewer through the air with it — a technique which echoes the familiar conventions of contemporary commercial live-action filmmaking. Equipment, such as cranes, jibs and Steadicams gives live-action directors a broader range of camera motion to use in visual storytelling, and one of the remarkable things about Coraline is the way in which the film draws from the vocabulary of live-action cinema to make puppet animation that looks markedly different from previous generations of stop-motion films, where the camera was often still and moving shots were mostly limited to linear tracks and pans.

This chapter explores how the stop-motion camera paired with digital technology to reinvent the stop-motion animated feature with a broader storytelling vocabulary of animated camera motion. Coraline marked a particular point in a near two-decade-long [2] watershed in technical developments in US mainstream stop-motion production.

A few years later, Coraline used both of these techniques extensively and, additionally, was designed and filmed for screening in stereoscopic 3D. A decade on from Coraline , each one of these technologies with the possible exception of 3D cinematography is easily available to independent filmmakers and students outside of specialized studio expertise and budgets.

You know you just go to a camera shop and get a prosumer camera and you can shoot a stop-motion feature. The digital workflow is now an indivisible part of the stop-motion process. The painstaking, hand-winched camera track movements of the twentieth century have been replaced by the precision of repeatable motion-controlled camera rigs, and shooting with 35mm celluloid film has been unceremoniously discarded for the immediacy offered by digital cameras.

Ironically, for stop-motion animation, a type of filmmaking wedded to handmade miniatures, tactile surfaces and the sequence of the celluloid frame, the same digital processes that threatened to make stop motion redundant as a special effect have propelled this very analogue style into the feature film mainstream.

I actually got physically ill with pneumonia and had to go to bed during that period. The change Tippett felt so bodily was a paradigm shift in visual effects and filmmaking aesthetics.

The visual approximations of analogue special effects, where the integration of puppet and live-action elements was always apparent by a mismatch of scale or texture or movement, were being replaced with new digital ideas that pursued the potential for invisible visual integration into a photorealistic cinematic vision. Stop motion appeared to be dying; it no longer had a place in visual effects, and as a stand-alone filmmaking technique, it was regarded as quaintly old-fashioned.

Even before the death knell of digital production, stop-motion animation was losing its place as a special effects technique. By the early s animators were exploring tactics to keep stop-motion effects in the mainstream cinema vocabulary by attempting to embed similar visual cues to that of live-action films by using a technique called Go Motion.

Go Motion, pioneered by ILM visual effects supervisors Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett, is a mechanical system of computer-controlled rods that vibrated the puppet while the camera shutter was open to introduce film-like motion blur into the stop-motion frame.

By the time Jurassic Park dominated the box office, commercial mainstream cinema wanted diegetic photorealism or the immersive digital worlds of Toy Story , not the aesthetic friction of stop-motion models and animated motion inside the live-action frame. Julie Turnock discusses the impact of Industrial Light and Magic ILM on the aesthetics of visual effects in Hollywood in the late s and early s, pointing out how influential ILM became in setting the visual agenda for the visual effects VFX industry as a whole.

ILM championed a set of visual conventions that coalesced into a dominant style that had photorealism at its core. The visual markers of this difference include disparate rates of motion, lack of motion blur and contrasts in scale and materials. This could have been the end of stop motion, as a specialized technique that solved a particular problem being simply replaced by newer more flexible technology, in much the same way three-strip Technicolor was displaced by colour film.

Rather, the change began to work in its favour, as the advent of digital effects not only brought a slew of production technologies that make creating stop motion easier and cheaper, but it also helped uncouple stop-motion animation from its dominant role in Hollywood as a special effect in live-action productions, opening a different path for stop motion in contemporary cinema.

Since Coraline , stop motion has re-established its place in the mainstream as a stand-alone animated filmmaking technique and is having something of a renaissance with filmmakers and audiences. Few people would have put money on old-fashioned stop-motion animation surviving this far into the digital age.

This hybrid style brought together an analogue form the tactility of sets, puppets and miniatures with the advantages of digital production faster, instant and repeatable. Travis Knight credits the production development on Coraline as a turning point for the form:.

I thought at the time that Coraline really did represent a systemic shift in what we did with the medium. When we decided to bring technology into the mix, it opened up a whole new world for us that allowed us to do really interesting things with an old art form. 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.

The following year, it was nominated for Best Animated Feature — alongside another stop-motion film, Fantastic Mr. So, Coraline was a success, but not at the level of a Pixar or DreamWorks' offerings. Still, the film helped demonstrate that Laika was a viable animation house. So trying to find partners for distribution and everything else was a big challenge.

In the same interview, he reiterated what Gaiman had also mentioned, which is that Coraline had faced resistance because it had a female main character. Maybe a fairy. Otherwise, no.

These are the rules in the business that we're playing in, and it was shocking to me to hear that feedback. What's shocking is that this gender imbalance is still pretty rampant in animated movies. Pixar didn't release its first female-driven film until 's Brave.

When Disney put out Tangled two years earlier, it was only after trying to retool the movie to appeal more to boys. Obviously, 's Frozen was a phenomenon, but it, too, was about princesses. That "conventional wisdom" has remained, at least among the big animation houses.

As for Laika, the company has continued to do stop-motion films and continued to make gorgeous, heartfelt stories. It's, frankly, disheartening that Laika still struggles to be heard amid the din of bigger, flashier animated offerings.

In a interview, Laika producer Arianne Sutner put it succinctly : "There are incredible [animation companies] out there, as you know — you're seeing these movies.

And they do what they do so well. But I think nobody else is doing exactly what we're doing so well.