And because Jack was so thin, it wasn’t as much mass up top. “And he figured out a way to make the entire foot out of metal and came up with a new way to do an ankle that could support him. He was, you know, solid and strong, but he’s brilliant,” said Selick. He built his own copies of King Kong armatures. “Some of the designs had really small feet and spindly bodies, not typical at all for stop-motion, and we had to make them move with as few restrictions as possible.” The tiny feet and ankles were always a point of discussion once everyone saw Burton’s original designs. “The main challenge with the puppets on this film was to make them animator friendly,” St. When I design armatures, I act out the moves myself and actually put the thing into poses before I hand it over to the fabricators and sculptors.” They are useful things that have to work well and be able to withstand a great deal of abuse and wrenching around. Amand and his protégé, Blair Clark, created armatures that would define the main character designs in addition to designing and building the humongous armature that gave Oogie Boogie his range of motion. The armature is the most critical part of a high-quality stop-motion puppet and adds to smooth animation achievement. The animation can be jerky, and the action will pop in and out of the frames without a well-designed and thought-out armature. All puppets had to be tied down (through a hole drilled in the set’s ground plane) for every footfall. However, Jack had such thin legs and small feet that the animators had to fasten him to the ground plane on the stages to stand firm and not topple over. It creates a stiff structure that holds its shape and adds stability to the puppets on the set. The armature is a simple metal superstructure, or skeleton, inside the puppet that allows the animators to pose the puppet frame to frame. It was not difficult for Heinrichs to create a new sculpture of Jack incorporating the notes he got from the team making the armatures. There are several surviving Polaroids that Burton drew on, indicating for the artists where changes were needed. Burton reviewed each sculpture, either in person or by viewing Polaroids, and gave notes. New clay sculptures created for each character went through an approval process. Yes, Jack’s feet were even smaller then what ultimately made it into the movie. The fabricators had concerns about Jack and complained that it was impossible to make ball-and-socket joint pieces for the original sculpture design’s tiny feet and ankles. Heinrichs, who had an original Jack sculpture from his days with Burton at Disney, created Jack’s new sculpture based on discussions with the puppet fabricators. Visual consultant Rick Heinrichs, whose sensibility towards adapting Burton’s original designs was established early in their friendship, made full-size clay models of Jack, Zero, Sally, Santa Claus, and Oogie Boogie. The creation of dimensional, articulating puppet characters for any stop-motion film begins with sculpting the characters. The team also needed duplicates so the same character could be animated simultaneously by different animators on different sets to meet the production schedule. At least a dozen Jack puppets, six of Sally, eight Oogie Boogies, and numerous others were created because of the wear and tear they go through during the animation process. The armatures included seventy-four individual characters and duplicates of the main characters. Regardless of how many times I’ve viewed the movie, the craftsmanship of puppet design and construction helped enable the animation, which collectively continues to pull me into the story.ĭuring the production of The Nightmare Before Christmas, more than 227 characters with elaborate articulating metal armature wireframes were custom designed, machined, and assembled at the Skellington Productions facility. How could that puppet be animated or even stand on a set without falling over? Yet, I watched the film and marveled at how fluidly the characters moved across the screen. Just look at the main character Jack Skellington with his slender legs and tiny feet. I was curious about how they made the film’s puppets and wondered what the filmmaker’s thinking was behind their design choices. I felt that way when I first saw the early dailies for Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) while working on the project.
#Stop motion animation heads on display movie#
Because of those moments, many of us will go back and see a movie a second, third, or more times in the theater. Those gee-whiz moments that we all experience when we go to the movies and see something that makes us smile or wonder how the filmmakers created a particular look or effect. As a movie fan, I am often fascinated as much by how something is made or how an effect is achieved on screen as I am about the finished film itself.
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