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You are here: Home / Archives for Laika

Behind the Scenes of The Movie Boxtrolls

August 6, 2014 by Momstart 2 Comments

Going behind the scenes of any movie is so fun. Just being on the set and watching what the actors have to do. I’ve been on the set of many different movies, I’ve been in the sound booth watching actors and even participating in a voice over, and yet nothing compares to being on the set of a movie the scale of Boxtrolls.

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The Boxtrolls, a community of quirky, mischievous creatures who have lovingly raised an orphaned human boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead-Wright) in the amazing cavernous home they’ve built beneath the streets of Cheesebridge. When the town’s villain, Archibald Snatcher (Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley), comes up with a plot to get rid of the Boxtrolls, Eggs decides to venture above ground, “into the light,” where he meets and teams up with fabulously feisty Winnie (Elle Fanning). Together, they devise a daring plan to save Eggs’ family.

chsguild.halls_n_stairs.photo.jleonhardt.0008The BoxTrolls is a stop-motion movie that took quite a bit of man hours to film as each scene has so much detail in it. From the gigantic sets to the tiny characters you’ll find a lot of creativity. Many of the items were hand made while some of them were made on a 3D printer. It seemed to me that the imagination is limitless at Laika.

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Part of the behind the scenes we got to see how the printing was done. I’ll get more into that when I write more about the art behind the Boxtrolls in a few weeks so be on the look out for that. For now I just want to try to describe to you how large the sets were. Here is a photo with our contributor Beeb. She also attended the behind the scenes tour at Laika studios in Oregon.

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One thing they do is they create sets that can be taken apart, because someone has to get into the set to move the characters for each picture. Many of the team members had worked together before on previous projects. They know each other well and have learned to tap into each other’s creative talents and technical abilities. Despite the intense and detail oriented work, the studio has a good atmosphere and it was obvious that the people there loved what they were doing.

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I wish more than anything that I was able to take photos of the behind the scenes of the Boxtrolls.

Social With The Boxtrolls!

Twitter Hashtag: #TheBoxtrolls

Twitter Handle: @TheBoxtrolls

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theboxtrolls

Instagram: @TheBoxtrolls

Filed Under: Movie review Tagged With: boxtrolls, Laika, movie

Boxtrolls Interview with LAIKA Filmmakers: Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable

July 22, 2014 by Momstart Leave a Comment

While I was at my super top secret set visit of the Boxtrolls I had the chance to interview Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable the directors of Boxtrolls. They are both so very passionate about the film and what they get to do over there at LAIKA. I mean they created The Boxtrolls, a community of quirky, mischievous creatures who have lovingly raised an orphaned human boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead-Wright) in the amazing cavernous home they’ve built beneath the streets of Cheesebridge. And they did a FANTASTIC job.  So here are a few things that I learned during that lunch!

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The story actually came from a book called “Here Be Monsters”. I had no idea there was a book about Boxtrolls. Laika acquired almost 10 years ago when the company first began. The book is over 500 pages long and it took them quite a while to chisel it down and decide on how they wanted to tell the story. In the end they ended up with something that is nothing like the book at all, but it did spark the ideas!

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It takes quite a bit of time to finish a stop motion movie. An animator typically took 1 week to complete 3.7 seconds worth of footage, which is just under 90 individual frames. Divide that by 87 minutes of run time (87 minutes of run time Times 60 seconds = 5220 seconds) = about 1400 weeks. Good thing they have more than one person able to work on the footage at one time right?

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A few interesting facts we learned about the costumes for the puppets was that there are 14 different fabrics in Lord Portley-Rind’s white hat and that the movie’s smallest costumes were for Eggs as a baby: the sweater, measuring 3.5” from cuff to cuff across the length of both arms and chest, and the baby socks measuring 5/8” long. Imagine that? The scale of this movie was so small and the details in it were amazing. Really, the details were amazingly intricate.

Boxtrolls is different from all their other movies. This one isn’t going to be as intense but it’s still going to tell a great story.

Filed Under: interview, Movie review Tagged With: Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable, boxtrolls, interview, Laika, movie

CEO of LAIKA Interview with Travis Knight: The Boxtrolls #TheBoxTrolls

July 9, 2014 by Momstart 1 Comment

A few months ago I had the pleasure of going behind the scenes of the new movie Boxtrolls. Boxtrolls will be in theaters September 26th 2014. Boxtrolls is an adorable family event movie from the creators of “Coraline” and “ParaNorman” that introduces audiences to a new breed of family – The Boxtrolls, a community of quirky, mischievous creatures who have lovingly raised an orphaned human boy named Eggs (voiced by Isaac Hempstead Wright) in the amazing cavernous home they’ve built beneath the streets of Cheesebridge. When the town’s villain, Archibald Snatcher (Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley), comes up with a plot to get rid of the Boxtrolls, Eggs decides to venture above ground, “into the light,” where he meets and teams up with fabulously feisty Winnie (Elle Fanning). Together, they devise a daring plan to save Eggs’ family.

the boxtrolls movie poster

I was able to interview Travis Knight and we talked about the making of The Boxtrolls movie. When we were on the set Travis Knight was in the middle of filming one of the final segments.  He is not only the CEO of Laika but he still loves to keep his hands in the game with the animation itself. Here are a few of the questions from our interview with him. 

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How long have you been on this particular set and sequence?

Knight: This is kind of a one-off. It’s a big shot. It’s towards the end of the film. I rehearsed it. We shoot every shot at least twice on twos and on fours. A second of film has 24 frames, so if you shoot something on twos, that means you’re taking 12 images. Essentially every other frame. And if you shoot something on fours, you do the math. So we rehearse these things as roughly as we can either on twos or on fours just to get the basic choreography of the shot, and then we go and sit with the directors in editorial and talk through the performance. Are we hitting the marks, are we getting the emotion of the shot, is there anything we need to change. If we’re wildly off the mark, we’ll rehearse it again, but if it’s basically right with some adjustments, we’ll go shoot it for real. We shoot the whole thing at once, so we shoot every image of that 24-frame cycle. Which essentially means you really only get one shot at one of these things. We really very rarely do reshoots. It’s one of the frustrating things about stop-motion, but I think it’s also one of the wonderful things about stop-motion, that when you’re watching a shot or a film, it really is a performance art. You start at one place and you end at another, time is warped and everything; while this will take 45 seconds for the audience to watch, it’ll take me three weeks to shoot, but from start to finish, I was bringing that thing to life. There’s no going back and tweaking and changing and modifying, it’s like what you’re seeing is something that came out of my hands over that period of time. I think that gives this thing is core humanity, which is really tough to see in other mediums.

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Who do you see as the audience for your films?

Knight: I think that we target families, and of course that’s a fairly broad thing; that could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. I certainly think that with Coraline and with ParaNorman, we say “families” with slightly older kids. Because of the intensity of those films, they were probably not appropriate for the youngest members of the family. Boxtrolls is not that. I think it’s broader. It doesn’t have some of the same level of intensity that Coraline and ParaNorman did, but it’s still got its moments where we go into places that most animated films don’t. But yeah, the films we make are intended for families and all members of the family, so that covers the whole gamut. But I think that we really try to bring a level of sophistication to our storytelling and the way we execute on these films, which I think is a little bit unusual in animation. What it means is that we are not calculatingly populist in our approach to these things. We are not trying to take a story and water it down so it hits all four quadrants, we’re just trying to tell a really wonderful story in a visually beautiful way that appeals to families, so oftentimes that means we’re making choices that we think is the strongest choice for the film that has the potential of alienating some members of the audience. But in the end, as artists, as filmmakers, what we have to do is make the strongest film possible, and we think we’ve done that in a way that does appeal to a wide group of people.

Since I do a lot of things with Disney, I was really excited when the discussion of how people are assigned their roles for stop animation occurs.

QUESTION: I’m curious about the distinction. Obviously, on a live-action feature, everyone knows what they’re doing. How do you portion out your responsibilities as far as lead animator versus, I believe you have co-directors on this film? What are their responsibilities? It seems like you and the other animators have individual scenes or sequences that they’re responsible for, so how does that all tie together?

Knight: Yeah, so the way we work on our films is, I think, a little bit different than most other animation houses. A lot of times with shots, because of the pressures of production, you just end up throwing warm bodies at shots; you’ve just got to crank through it. And we did that to a degree on Coraline. In those sequences where we, for whatever reason, we had a single animator handle an entire scene, we found that those scenes had a kind of spark that some of the other work didn’t, and it makes sense. When you allow an animator to focus on a portion of the film and really understand the arc of the scene, what’s happening with the characters, they can make choices all along the way that reinforce the main points of the scene. They really get to know what’s happening. Versus throwing an animator on a shot somewhere within a scene, they just have to crank through and do the best job they can, but really not having a sense of where it connects within the overall structure. Taking the best parts of that, on ParaNorman we basically divvied it up giving animators entire chunks of the film, and we’ve continued that on Boxtrolls. I really think it helps to give unique personalities to these sequences and these characters. You really feel like it came from one mind and one set of hands.

So that’s generally how we try to schedule and structure the framework of it. Tony and Graham are directing it, I’m producing the film with David Ichioka, and I’ve got my hands in everything, I’m sure to everyone’s annoyance. I’m meeting with those guys all the time trying to figure out the best way to bring these things to life. This film was very difficult to get off the ground, but once we got into it, all kinds of innovations and new ideas came out of it, and I’m really, really pleased with the way it all came out.

Filed Under: interview, Movie review Tagged With: boxtrolls, interview, Laika, movie

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