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MillimeterDigital Puppeteers
Feb 25, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Pete Kozachik and Brian Van’t Hul on Coraline.
Coraline is the first stop-motion animation shot stereoscopically with a dual digital camera rig. Director Henry Selick recruited an experienced stop-motion crew in order to create a handcrafted effect for the film.
All images © 2008 LAIKA. All rights reserved.
Stop-motion animation and stereoscopy aren't techniques that audiences have ever seen combined before — that is, until Coraline, the latest feature from Director Henry Selick of Nightmare Before Christmas fame. Produced at Laika Entertainment and released by Focus Features, Coraline is the first stop-motion feature shot stereoscopically with a dual digital camera rig, and it screens in theaters equipped with RealD digital projection systems. For Selick, who adapted author Neil Gaiman's Hugo Award-winning novella for the screen, animating Coraline in stereo presented challenges he'd never faced before.
“Shooting 3D stereo takes some getting used to on many levels,” Selick says. “Aesthetically, what are your choices? How do you not wear out your welcome by doing it too much? Of course, you have a left eye and a right eye, so it's double the amount of information if you're compositing a background or adding some effect like steam. You have to offset it to match what you've shot. We knew we weren't masters of this medium, so we held back a lot.”
Visual Effects Supervisor Brian Van’t Hul’s team had to do considerable paint work in order to remove seams from the puppets’ faces where their eyes and mouths had been filled in separately. This seam removal was developed by Laika Entertainment using a combination of Silhouette and Apple Shake.
Selick enlisted an expert stop-motion crew — including DP Pete Kozachik and Visual Effects Supervisor Brian Van't Hul, both of whom he'd worked with on Nightmare and his second feature, James and the Giant Peach. Kozachik, an Oscar nominee for the visual effects in Nightmare, signed onto Coraline in 2005, fresh from photographing Tim Burton's stop-motion feature The Corpse Bride. Van't Hul, who won a visual-effects Oscar for Peter Jackson's King Kong, eagerly reunited with Kozachik and Selick.
“Henry wanted a film that didn't have effects that screamed ‘CG,’” Van't Hul says. “He wanted Coraline to feel handcrafted.”
Kozachik recalls initially being skeptical that they could pull this off in stereo. “My first response was, ‘It's like Smell-O-Vision. We'll have to dumb down the look of Coraline to make the trick work,’” he says. “But I quickly changed my tune upon visiting Lenny Lipton's company RealD. Lenny showed that the technology was not like it was for Bwana Devil back in the day. We went to his place and saw that this was something we could use as a tool, like color or contrast or camera motion. We camera guys not only have to embrace it, but get smart about it so we can toot the horn every which way and not just blow the high notes.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.