Longtime animator and CEO of Laika, Knight makes his directorial debut on Kubo and the Two Strings, obviously a first for him and yet another first for the production studio overall. Based on an original idea from Laika's character designer Shannon Tindle, the kernel of an idea that began as a stop-motion samurai film eventually grew into this epic, sweeping tale of magic and mythology, fostered by screenwriters Marc Haimes and Chris Butler, and shepherded by Travis Knight in the director's chair. Laika returns to the realm of original features with Kubo and the Two Strings. 100% of the shots come through their department, if only for basic cosmetic touches, color correction, and stereo balancing The VFX department averages 1,300 shots for stop-motion films.The waltz sequence had 60+ dancers with another 20 – 30 characters in the hall.All three films have been done at the 5:1 scale.Each second of animation was composed of 24 still frames. Each animator was responsible for four seconds of animation a week.The production period totaled 72 weeks.The production started with only two animators and maxed out at 30 simultaneous animators for only about a month before tapering back down.
Only 30 of the 330 of Laika’s in-house crew were animators.In keeping with our look at Laika's evolution, in part, through the numbers, here are some of the more striking statistics for The Boxtrolls: Perhaps the details of Laika's filmmaking journey were best summed up by producer David Ichioka, who walked us through The Boxtrolls by the numbers and recounted the extensive writing process that whittled Snow's book down to a manageable size. This was also the feature that granted me the opportunity t o pay a visit to Laika Studios in Oregon and get an up-close-and-personal look at the stop-motion picture in progress. This time, the source material was Alan Snow's "Here Be Monsters!" a sprawling tome of "magic, trolls, and other creatures," some of which included the title critters in Laika's adaptation. Laika's third feature film, The Boxtrolls, once again opted to adapt a previously existing work. And while the budget and the workforce for ParaNorman was similar to to that of Coraline, it was the advances in 3D-printing technology that really let the ambitious film-and the equally ambitious filmmakers-push the stop-motion envelope. The lightweight cameras with interchangeable lenses were perfectly suited for the production's five teams and 50 units, providing a great deal of flexibility. Two of those years were spent in the animation phase, a process which used more than 60 Canon 5d Mark II cameras to capture more than 400,000 frames of animation.
Production was once again housed in Laika's Oregon-based studio, now encompassing 151,000 square feet, and took three years from script to screen.
Laika studios movies full#
Though Coraline was their first full in-house production for the studio, ParaNorman was the first film that was based on an original story, one cooked up by co-director and writer Chris Butler. And though ParaNorman was the second stop-motion film to be shot in 3D-after the aforementioned Coraline-it was the first to use a 3D color printer for the puppets' faces, reducing the inconsistency of, and labor-intensive need for, hand-painted expressions. ParaNorman provided a number of firsts for Laika. But to ramp up the production process with the aid of modern technology, the puppets themselves were largely 3D-printed. Some of those people, like Althea Crome, who spent her time knitting puppet-sized clothes with needles the width of a human hair for Deborah Cook's costume department, or Georgina Haynes who supervised puppet fabrication, painstakingly crafted everything you'll see on film. The 140,000-square-foot warehouse was divided up into 50 lots, encompassing 150 stages/sets, which included a miniature Victorian mansion (in triplicate to allow for multiple scenes to be animated simultaneously) and a 40-by-60-foot long apple orchard.Īt any given time, 28 of the 35 employed animators were actively working, but the height of the production saw upwards of 450 people serving to bring all facets of Coraline to life. Now set up in Laika's home studio in Oregon, which would be home to the movie's three-year production journey to the screen, Coraline was shot in stereoscopic 3D, basically doubling the amount of shots needed with each snap taken from a slightly different angle this was a first for a stop-motion animated feature.
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