Witnessing the Wonders of ‘Wildwood’ at LAIKA Studios

The temperature was perfect for a July afternoon in Portland, Oregon; home of Wildwood. Yet, despite the fact that it wasn’t too hot, I still found myself somewhat sweating. It wasn’t due to the sun or the mild heat. It was because, while I had never visited Portland before, I remained both excited and nervous to be visiting a studio I had only ever dreamt about seeing for quite some time.

LAIKA Studios.

In an unassuming industrial complex in Hillsboro, Oregon, not far from the trail or the Portland sights that inspired their next feature, Wildwood, resides LAIKA Studios. The famed makers of such modern-day classics as Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings have been among the few studios keeping handcrafted stop-motion animation films alive. While most folks have always admired the beauty and the hard work that goes into every single one of their five (soon to be six) features, it’s safe to say the biggest “Wow” factor the studio has to offer has actually been in their astounding ability to infuse such gorgeous works of art with even more beautiful, sophisticated (and occasionally somber) storytelling. LAIKA’s films have always explored the greater depths and complexities of humanity — life, death, joy, memory, trauma, elitism, and more — through miraculously sculpted puppets and epic miniature scenery in ways many actual live-action films rarely accomplish as well.

Because of this, my admiration and affection for all of the artists and filmmakers there has grown in leaps and bounds since first seeing Coraline in theaters in 2009. Nine years later, I would begin my journey as an entertainment journalist. However, it wasn’t until this past year that I would finally get the opportunity to venture into the extraordinary and highly secretive studios of LAIKA. At last, the time had come to thank the incredible filmmakers there for their phenomenal contributions to cinema in-person, and learn what it takes to craft a film as complex and visually unparalleled as Wildwood. Hence the sweating.

Here’s everything we learned while visiting the set of Wildwood at LAIKA Studios earlier this year:

We began the day entering through a lobby filled with artifacts from their previous works adorning the walls and shelves. It was surreal to be in the presence of actual maquettes and concept art that were used in the making of their most famous works. Up until then, my only exposure to these pieces of filmmaking history had been seeing the finished products on a theater screen. The lobby was also, understandably, the only place where guests were allowed to take photos, as the rest of the studio featured massive and fragile sets being actively used for productions. Nevertheless, it was already a breathtaking introduction to the journey.

A Warm Welcome and Footage from Wildwood

We were escorted into a theater where we received a fond introduction from Sam Wilson (no, not Captain America, you Marvel nerds!), producer of Wildwood. At last, after weeks of anticipation, we would be (per Wilson) among the first to see about twenty minutes of footage from the film, as well as a new trailer featuring footage that would eventually be incorporated into the film’s broader marketing campaign. Everything we saw on screen was wonderful, and we were able to get a sense of the rich story and the mature themes at the heart of Wildwood. The movie, as intended by director Travis Knight, is ultimately about how love can heal and love can hurt. It’s also a coming-of-age tale about a protagonist that scoffs at the idea of magic, in her rush to grow up.

The clips we were shown introduced us to the film’s protagonists, Prue McKeel and Curtis Mehlberg, as well as the film’s antagonist Alexandra, a complex character who holds dominion over the woods. Prue and Curtis are played by actors Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Jacob Tremblay, who we would have the opportunity to speak with later that day (look out for separate coverage on our roundtable with them later this week). The footage gave us a taste of the artistry behind the characters and the film’s extraordinary visual identity, but we were still missing the full picture. Thankfully, as the day progressed, we would learn how each department’s extraordinary talents contributed to bringing Wildwood to life.

REAL COSTUMES FOR ANIMATED CHARACTERS

The first artist we met on our journey was costume designer Deborah Cook. Cook has worked in stop-motion animation for years, with credits including Corpse Bride, before beginning her journey with LAIKA on ParaNorman in 2012. She has since remained with the studio, with Wildwood being her fifth project with them.

Perhaps most surprising was learning that Cook is LAIKA’s sole costume designer. While a larger team handles fabrication, the actual costume designs come from Cook herself. “It’s just me that does the designs, although we have a bigger team that actually does the fabrication… so I research and ideate costume designs that provide an infrastructure to anchor our characters’ identities, their personalities, and visualize their emotional arcs. This propels costume changes that support the story pillars as well. So as our characters continue their journey, and as the story changes and they grow and shift with it, we change their costumes to amplify that.”

Around the room were all sorts of costume boards signifying the specific outfits worn by the characters in the film. Unlike costumes created entirely within a computer, though, everything we saw was tangible — cut, sewn, colored and dyed to the specifications of each character puppet. It was remarkable to see, from the trademark look of Prue, with her navy peacoat and orange scarf, to the red, Colonial-style outfits of the film’s Coyote Army.

“There’s earlier versions of these costume designs that go through various different kind of processes while we’re working out what the characters will actually be wearing,” Cook stated. “So I work with the director, going backwards and forwards with lots of real world reference, trying to find things that really kind of tell us something about the characters. We’re trying to form them, make them believable, give them some historical resonance as well as the relatability. I work in breaking down the script and work out a character profile for a base that I can work from. From that script, and from the director’s notes and conversation.”

Cook was asked about the process of dyeing the costumes and adding vibrant colors to them. “We used dye sublimation… Less so hand dyeing, though some hand dyeing. But that’s really just kind of basic things,” she stated. “For things like this that need to be repetitive, we need to be able to make duplicates that are really identical. So it’s built into that, so that whole thing will be just applied at the same time. There’s like over 30 [puppets] for each of these characters, and you need to believe it’s the same character throughout the movie, but it’s many puppets.”

Cook went into further details about the scale of creating duplicate costumes for each character and their doubles. “We also make replacement parts: sleeves, cuffs, bigger scales… Over the course of all of our movies, we’ve been able to gather techniques and change them. The techniques change. Newer ones become available. Now we can actually build things like this jacket, where… this one little panel here can be duplicated in exactly the same color with exactly the same stripes for 30, 40, 50 [puppets] or more.”

Cook’s fantastical costumes ranged from elaborate, multilayered dresses to almost primal, wilderness-inspired clothing, depending on the characters and their respective factions. She attributed much of her inspiration to the story, the original Wildwood novel and Knight’s vision for the film. “Our director wanted these to be kind of fairy tale-esque and have that level of detail in them. But also, how we use those [story and novel elements] as a jumping-off point to bring our own kind of flavor into that as well.”

While there was still much to deconstruct about Cook and her incredible work and process, there was more we needed to find out first about the actual characters that were being sculpted to wear the garments she was designing. And so we carried on to the next team lead: Oliver Jones, Head of Character and Practical FX at LAIKA.

The Process of Preparing Puppets

We were led into Jones’ workshop, where we were greeted by a number of incredible puppets and ball-and-socket skeletons used to bring the characters of Wildwood to life. The scale of these puppets ranged from tiny to enormous, as Jones and his team had to craft each character in proportion to the others they would interact with throughout the film. For instance, a standard human character might have to interact with an incredibly tiny mouse puppet in one scene, then a massive, mythical bird the size of a small airplane in the next.

From the very moment we met him, Jones emphasized that the process of creating a character is a massive collaboration between multiple departments. This was something Cook emphasized as well, and something that would become a repeated concept throughout our visits with the other departments. For his work specifically, Jones collaborated closely with Knight, Cook, LAIKA’s fabricators, and the “Faces” department (which we would visit shortly after). “We all have to kind of come together to make these characters work and make people believe that they’re real people on the screen,” he stated.

He began elaborating on the process of constructing the actual puppets. “[A puppet] starts off basically as a maquette; a 3D rendition of the puppet. This gives us our silhouette, our size, and our volumes. That, coupled with the character paint, are the two main pieces of information that we need as builders. Then we can start breaking those down with the storyboards, and with direction from our animation supervisor. Then we start building the puppet sculpt.”

From there, Jones described working with the fabrication team to build an armature for the puppet; essentially the puppet’s skeleton. “This is made out of steel balls and sockets, hinges, screws, and this essentially hasn’t really changed since King Kong. But we’ve been able to really elevate the techniques and really make the best tool possible to get lifelike performance.”

What many don’t know about the filmmakers at LAIKA is that, in addition to storytellers and animators, they’re inventors and revolutionaries in the field of stop motion. Each project has pushed LAIKA’s artists and technicians to develop and refine technologies that allow their puppets to achieve increasingly realistic motion and emotion. Some such inventions include two mechanisms Jones showed us: “Jetpacks” and “Breathers.”

Jones explained that LAIKA, unlike many stop-motion productions, animates “on ones,” meaning a new image is captured for every frame rather than allowing the same pose to persist across multiple frames. This gives their films a much smoother quality than what was initially seen in the early days of stop-motion, which in turn, requires them to use devices like “jetpacks” and “breathers” to capture the most imperceivable motions from their characters. The “jetpack” (so named because it looks like a jetpack on the puppets) allows the animation team to move each puppet backwards and forwards in increments so small they cannot be perceived on the frames. The “breather,” which the studio began using on Missing Link, is a device with a key that attaches to a puppet, allowing the animators to turn the key to move the chest of a puppet in and out, making it look like the character is actually breathing.

“Three characters on Missing Link got breathers. Whereas 90% of the characters on Wildwood had breathers. So when we’ve found something that really works, we make sure we extrapolate that across the whole show.”

The same can be said about how the LAIKA team would engineer the expressions for their puppets. While the physical motions of characters are one thing, striving for true verisimilitude from its characters requires genuine emotional expressions. Much like live-action actors, LAIKA’s characters have to communicate emotion through the subtlest facial movements. That’s where Brian McLean, Director of Rapid Prototyping at LAIKA, and his team come in. And so we headed next to McLean’s workshop for an inside look at rapid prototyping.

Emotional Breakthroughs

It’s a little-known fact that McLean and his team pioneered rapid prototyping for stop-motion animation; the process of 3D printing to fabricate replaceable puppet faces to create the most dynamic expressions imaginable for LAIKA’s feature characters. Think of it as an advanced version of replacing different heads on action figures to capture different expressions. Coraline was the first feature animated film to utilize rapid prototyping, and it has been something the studio has utilized for every film since.

“So the idea back on Coraline was: could we take the computer and could we animate faces in the computer, get a beautiful performance, and then instead of rendering that animation, we would take the geometry of a face and we would send it to one of these 3D printers that would turn it into a physical object. That technique was groundbreaking at the time, and it really pushed performances to a whole new level for stop motion animation. And we have not taken our feet off the gas for really pushing this technology,” stated McLean. “The rapid prototyping team is about 60 to 70 people. About half of those are computer artists that are sitting at a computer desk. They are modeling, they’re CG animating, texture painting, rigging faces. And then those faces get sent to a 3D printer… Audiences never get to see the complexity of what goes on underneath a character’s face, but it’s all there to give the stop-motion animator the ultimate control when they’re out on set.”

Animators take a puppet, snap on a new face (etched with a code on the back to represent which frame it’s for) using magnets that are rigged between the puppet’s body and face, and manipulate the mouth and eyes for every frame using an X-ACTO blade. “This is what animators are doing,” he stated. “They are taking an extremely sharp Exacto blade, and they are stabbing the eye, and they’re moving around the eyeball and the eyelid. And they’re doing this to get eye lines. They’re doing this to get blinks. They’re doing this to get squints. This curvature of this little thin plastic eyelid. Believe it or not, we dial in the curvature of that for months. We’re doing all sorts of different tests, both in the computer and practically, to get that curvature just right, based on the character’s face and based on the character’s design.”

The interesting thing about where LAIKA is now in rapid prototyping versus in the early days of the studio is that they never reuse faces. McLean and team work hard to ensure every facial expression is unique, because more than technology, storytelling and character growth matter most to the filmmakers. “No director wants to be told that they’re having to use the same smile at the end of the movie as they use in the beginning of the movie, because every character goes on an emotional journey,” he stated. “A character arc. So it was it was a real challenge. As much as this was providing an amazing bespoke performance back [during the early days of LAIKA from Coraline to The Boxtrolls], we always felt like that we were limited and we weren’t able to deliver what the director really wanted, which was the ability to have the character always going through a new emotion.” In short, the technology is not just being used for efficiency or aesthetics, but to push the boundaries of actual emotional storytelling and character development going forward.

“We don’t do this because it’s faster. We don’t do it because it’s cheaper. We don’t do it because it takes less people… I’ve been doing this for a long time, and people want to understand why we 3D print faces… everything is actually more expensive, and more time-consuming. The only reason we do it is because of what it provides our facial animation and our character performances. And the more advanced stories you want to tell, the more complicated emotions you want characters to be able to beautifully perform on screen. The more you kind of have to lean into this technology or this technique.”

For Wildwood alone, McLean’s team created approximately 140,000 faces. “For Missing Link, we had a Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of 3D printed faces in a stop motion animated movie. I don’t know if anyone is competing in that, but we nailed it… and we obviously beat that record for Wildwood.”

For Wildwood, the team also achieved another breakthrough: realistically rendered tears. Using voxel printing and other 3D-printing techniques, McLean’s team created transparent pieces capable of appearing to well up in a character’s eyes and trickle down their face. “It’s kind of hard to see, but these are clear printed [tears] that are welling up in the corner of her eyes and then dripping down her face,” McLean said showing us one of the faces.

McLean shared that it takes about an hour and a half to print out a single proof face for a character. “It takes about an hour and a half to print one proof face,” he stated. “But you can do a whole row of about 12 proof faces, and it still takes an hour and 31 minutes because it’s that whole printer pass. And each face can be different. Each face can be unique. You don’t have to produce the same one over and over again.”

McLean compared the process to an inkjet printer. Because the printer head must complete the same pass regardless of how many objects occupy the printing tray, producing a row of roughly 12 proof faces takes only marginally longer than producing one. Rather than laying ink onto a flat sheet of paper, however, LAIKA’s printers gradually deposit layers of liquid resin, building a three-dimensional face one microscopic layer at a time.

Hearing McLean explain the process was fascinating, but seeing these faces up close made the extraordinary level of detail even more apparent. Every eyelid, expression and microscopic adjustment exists in service of making audiences forget they’re watching puppets at all. That said, realistic puppets need realistic environments to interact with in order for audiences to become immersed in the story of Wildwood. So we moved forward to discuss the process behind production design and set construction with LAIKA Production Designer, Nelson Lowry.

Replicating Portland

Wildwood is not only a sweeping and emotional fantasy epic, but also a love letter to Portland. The story takes place in Portland’s Forest Park, while Prue and her family live in the city’s St. Johns neighborhood, rooting the fantasy in very real locations. To ensure the film was a true tribute, Lowry and his team had to painstakingly recreate the quirky city in LAIKA’s signature style.

“We have Portland, mostly Saint John, certainly downtown,” he began. “Then you have the Impassible Wilderness… There’s lots of Easter eggs in this set. Of course, we have St. John’s Twin Cinemas, based on a real location. Here it’s called the Knight Theater now. A nod to Travis Knight, the director, of course. You can see in front there’s a marquee with a ParaNorman poster and a nod to Kubo and the Two Strings.”

Lowry’s tour was actually incredibly unique in that he gave us time to just study and take a look at the incredible sets he put together for Portland. As part of my trip, in my excitement for the film, I had taken my own tour of the city to view the real life inspirations for the locations he and his team crafted, and can safely say every detail is almost identical to its actual counterpart.

He discussed his joy for the craft of stop-motion and production design, infusing his passion for both in every project he works on for LAIKA. “One of the great joys for me in doing stop motion, which I’ve done for a long time, is the sort of high tech, low tech [approach],” he stated. “It’s just kind of fun to watch a movie that has like. Some of the most cutting-edge digital visuals… but then there’s chicken wire. That appeals to me a lot. We really lean into that because this is more like live action than people realize. We’re building physical assets, stages, and lighting them. So the way that light touches things and falls on things is something we tested a lot. We worked with the vector photography… I don’t think we could have done Wildwood previous to this because we’ve all learned so much together, and we’ve learned a lot of tricks to make this look really good.”

We went from his replica of Downtown Portland to Lowry’s set of the Impassible Woods, inspired by Portland’s own Forest Park. “This [set] is really an homage to the beauty and nature of Portland and Forest Park. We’re very lucky to have the largest city park in city limits here. It’s 26 miles long, and three miles wide. But so it’s a long ribbon that goes through,” he stated. “I love walking in the woods. I live right below Forest Park. I walk every morning through there. So being able to recreate it? I’ve never worked on a film that takes place where I live, and that was great!”

Lowry’s pride in his hometown was felt in every inch of the set he constructed. We had the privilege of experiencing Portland firsthand during our visit, but Lowry and the LAIKA team are giving audiences around the world an opportunity to experience the city’s charm and quirks through Wildwood’s meticulously constructed sets.

Lowry took us through three other jaw-dropping sets. The next was a cavernous hideout that acts in the film as a home base for Alexandra and her Coyote Warren (her army of coyotes). It was detailed with so many elaborate miniatures, and covered in ivy, which her character can control. We also walked through the sets of Pittock Mansion, another Portland landmark translated into the film. And last but not least, an epic battlefield where the film’s climactic final act takes place. Though the sets were naturally built at scale to accommodate the film’s puppets, they were nevertheless still massive, taking up whole soundstages. Many were even engineered to support crew members walking across them, allowing the filmmakers to physically access the puppets and make the microscopic adjustments required between frames.

By this point, we knew how Wildwood’s characters were built, how they were dressed, how their expressions were created, and how the worlds around them were constructed. But one enormous question remained: How do you actually make all of it move?

For that, we needed to meet LAIKA’s Head of Animation, Brad Schiff.

Soaring with The General

Earlier in our visit, Jones had shown us a multitude of incredible handcrafted puppets created for Wildwood. Among them was one we previously mentioned: a massive golden eagle measuring almost five feet in length. This was The General, voiced by Academy Award winner Angela Bassett — the leader of Wildwood’s Avian Principality and a fierce warrior who commands the skies.

Jones had stated during our tour of his workshop that three different puppets of The General were created: two made for flight, and one that could fold its wings in. The version Jones showed us contained more than 3,000 individually movable feathers. The reason for that extraordinary complexity was simple: The General needed to fly. When it came time to visit Schiff, we finally learned how LAIKA made a five-foot, 3,000-feathered puppet soar through the clouds.

“One [of the flying General puppets] was on a hexapod, which was similar to what we did with the giant skeleton in Kubo,” he stated. “It looks like a flight simulator, and we put it on a gimbal for some really dynamic avian movement. Aerial action and acrobatics. She has over 3,000 feathers on her body. Some are folded in the back, so you can get movement. As she’s flying through the air, just to give the illusion of some wind resistance, the animator would control all of the back of the wings that were wired. The feathers are all laser etched silk with wire running through the tips of the wings, and then fold back around the neck.”

Schiff took us around The General puppet so we could see the individual pieces of the massive rig that was built for the flight sequences. “In order to feel the scale with Prue sitting on top,” he continued, “It made sense to have a little bit of movement going on with it. She’s got a wingspan of five feet long, so those wings are heavy. And so to animate it — the kind of animation we do at LAIKA — you have to really be able to get tiny, tiny increments moving. So to get that wing to stand up, you had to tension it really tightly. It’s really hard to get small, small increments. So the shoulders were motorized. Our animator was in control with a similar jog box to this, where you turn dials and you can control the flap of the wings forward and back. And then they would come in, and everything else would be done by hand, one frame at a time.”

But achieving believable movement doesn’t always mean adhering strictly to reality. One such example involved how Prue would work as a passenger on The General’s back. “For Prue, who’s riding on top, who also has to animate naturally… the wind is going through her hair and her clothes. And there’s no hair simulation or cloth simulation in stop motion. It all has to be animated by hand. So her hair is all wired. Her ponytail is able to move and it’s also wired. If she was really sitting on the outside of a bird or a plane or whatever it was, her hair would just be going crazy. So, we have to make creative decisions on how we want it to move. So we decided to slow it down to make it feel elegant, even though it’s not necessarily how hair would move.”

Watching the finished film, audiences may simply see a massive golden eagle soaring through the clouds with Prue on her back. But after walking through LAIKA, we now knew what it actually took to create that illusion: thousands of individually crafted feathers, wired hair and clothing, motorized shoulders, massive rigs, meticulously fabricated puppets and, ultimately, animators moving everything by hand one frame at a time. The result may look effortless on screen, but nothing about creating it actually is.

As the tour wound down, I found myself even more enamored with everything we had seen. As an audience member and fan, I had always known that bringing a LAIKA film to life was challenging and complex. Seeing that process firsthand, however, revealed a level of complexity far beyond anything I thought I understood.

The work and artistry we witnessed from everyone we met — from Cook, to Jones, McLean, Lowry, and Schiff — illustrated an extraordinary devotion to handcrafted filmmaking and mature, innovative storytelling. Thousands of individually movable feathers, 140,000 faces, miniature costumes, massive physical sets, and countless microscopic movements all exist for one purpose: to make audiences believe these characters and their worlds are alive.

Perhaps what inspired me most was seeing that everything I’ve always loved about cinema was still present in the gifted human hands of artists rebellious enough to continue doing things in a more challenging way. At LAIKA, technology isn’t being used to replace artistry, but to give their artists new tools to push it further. And with Wildwood, they’re pushing it further than ever before.

Thankfully, this was only the beginning of our incredible day at LAIKA.

Wildwood officially hits theaters October 23! But stay tuned to The Nerds of Color this week for our roundtable interviews with all of the artists from our tour, along with our conversations with Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay, and writer Chris Butler!