BAF 2012 ParaNorman and LAIKA studios.

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Paranorman is the latest stop motion animation from LAIKA Studios. During a talk at Bradford animation film festival (BAF) LAIKA's Mark Shapiro Explained the making of this feature.

Each puppet is handcrafted, starting with a metal mechanical wire frame armature that allows the characters to move. The body is then sculpted out of clay, with the faces being the most difficult part to create. There were two processes to the heads; the heads that are mechanical, and the exchangeable faces added later. 

"Norman’s head is made up of 78 individually engineered and designed pieces, including an eye rig, which is a little mechanical functioning eyeball and eyelids. At any point in time you see three of those, basically his ears and his face, but it’s all designed to give the animators as much performance as possible." – (Brian McLean, B. 2012).- Director of rapid prototype at LAIKA. 

Replacement animation involves the process where twenty four different mouths, would make one second of animation, as the film is filmed at twenty four frames per second. Thousands of faces are created using a powder printer and Colored using a color Z-Core 3D printer. This baked the colour identically into each face, allowing extra details such as freckles into the faces, giving each character a unique look. These faces are then set in super glue. Norman, for example, required over eight thousand facial expressions.

The environment was a very different process. Designed to look like illustrations that could be found in a children’s book, 

“Paranorman never uses straight lines. This means the houses walls are slightly bent, lamposts are skewered, and even Norman’s bike is uneven. Nothing is parallel. This created a very hand-crafted feel to the film, which allowed all our care, devotion, and love for stop motion to be visible in the film.” – (Shapiro, M. 2012).

It is clear that the team in LIAKA studios doesn’t work with stop motion because it’s the easiest way to work, or because they think it makes the film more enjoyable. It’s because they enjoy the process, they all share a very strong passion for stop motion and hand crafting the characters and sets. The dedication and adoration is clearly seen in the movie, but is more greatly appreciated when the behind the scenes features reveals just how much work and time is put in to every tiny detail, and the enormous fun the crew have on such an ambitious project.

“It’s extraordinarily rewarding. There’s this kind of love and care that’s gone into every single little piece of prop, or piece of lighting, that all adds up to this fantastic whole. You take something, that is an inanimate object, and by the end of this process you have something that has truly come alive. For me, that’s the closest thing to magic that I can imagine.” – (Knight, T. and Fell, S. 2012).

Bibliography 

Mclean, B (2012) ParaNorman, Powered by 3D Printing - Popular Mechanics [ONLINE] (Updated 16^th August 2012) Available at: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/digital/visual-effects/paranorman-powered-by-3d-printing-11744926 (Accessed on 29th November 2012 )

Shapiro, M. (2012) The Making of Paranorman. Bradford Animation Film Festival. Panel Talk.

Knight,T and Fell, S. Hand Making Paranorman Featurette. [ONLINE] (Updated 10 August 2012) Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSxSEpYyt6I (Accessed on November 2012)