The Filmmakers of LAIKA on Handcrafting ‘Wildwood’

Over the past week, we’ve given you a behind-the-scenes look at Wildwood, the next masterpiece from LAIKA Studios. We previously spent time with Chris Butler, Peyton Elizabeth Lee, and Jacob Tremblay, discussing the voices they gave to the film’s characters. And we took you on a tour through the hallowed halls of the studio’s top-secret complex in Hillsboro, Oregon. While we were able to speak with many of the gifted department leads during that tour, we were also given the special privilege of sitting down with each of them for roundtable discussions alongside other members of the press, allowing us to dive even deeper into their astonishing work.

As we saw during our tour of LAIKA, the work involved in bringing a stop-motion film to life is incredibly complex. It requires a dedicated crew spanning multiple departments and an immense amount of creative problem-solving to overcome challenges without easy solutions. Thankfully, with the incredible department leads at LAIKA and the dedication of their teams, the results speak for themselves.

During our walkthrough of the Wildwood sets, we had the opportunity to meet Costume Designer Deborah Cook, Head of Character and Practical FX Oliver Jones, Director of Rapid Prototyping Brian McLean, Production Designer Nelson Lowry, and Head of Animation Brad Schiff. But sitting down with each of them gave us the chance to learn even more about their respective crafts, their histories at LAIKA, and the extraordinary challenges they faced in bringing Wildwood to life.

Here’s what they had to say:

LAIKA has always done an impressive job blending realism with the fantastical, with movies like Coraline and ParaNorman balancing the look and the mundane nature of the regular world with the fantastical look and feel of the supernatural occurrences. Wildwood carries on this tradition with Portland being the starting point for the film, before characters are transported to the fantastical world of Wildwood. So it was only natural that the team was asked about whether the more realistic aspects of their films were more challenging to put together, or the fantastical elements.

For Schiff, it was definitely the fantastical. “They’re the most exciting,” he stated. “But they leave you wondering like, how am I gonna do this?… But that’s also the coolest stuff. Those are the fun problems to solve. There’s the initial like, ‘oh my gosh, how are we going to do that?’ But those are the fun. That’s the collaboration that we get to have with one another, all of us. That we get to figure out how we’re going to build this thing or accomplish this particular thing. All the way from the giant skeleton to The General; a life-size bird. It seems easy, but it was so hard; a scene of aerial maneuvers with our protagonist on top of a giant eagle.”

That said, Lowry had a different perspective, suggesting that from a production design point of view, the realistic aspects were more challenging for him. “That’s a great subtle question, by the way,” Lowry stated. “Because it really made me think. And I think for me, I dread the realism a bit more. Because you know what realism looks like. You know what a street looks like. And to stylize it, and the look of the film, and make it still feel natural… it still has to. You have to get that story across. [Brad] can be more playful with fantasy environments… [For the fantastical elements] I just went all out because I could. I had artistic license, so I think I enjoy that part of it more.”

As they all hinted at during the tour, the collaboration process is completely necessary for a film like Wildwood to connect with audiences so seamlessly. The group was asked about what that process looked like from end to end.

”Well, in general, you build the bodies first, and [Oliver’s] team builds the bodies,” began McLean. “Our team builds the heads. So we literally have to constantly communicate. The neck is this metaphorical connection between those, but it goes as deep as facial animation. Opening a jaw, oftentimes could collide with a collar or the hair and how the hair could blow. The replacement animation technique can be pretty constrictive sometimes and restrictive, so you have to plan and communicate and talk and find creative solutions for constantly moving things around.”

”In costumes, I’ve worked right through different fabrication departments,” stated Cook. “So I know how to make the costumes, and what the impact can be if the collar is too high, or if the character can’t turn their neck, or how much it can make a shot a lot longer if you have to [move puppets] around with bits of costume… So I build that in ahead of time in the costumes with this awareness… I work years ahead of everyone else, and I finished working on the costume designs for Wildwood in 2021. And it’s a bit of an anomaly as to how we normally work because it was through COVID years, so I was working at home on my own. We had another movie that we were almost about to start with that we’d ran a long way with, and then, because of the COVID interruption, we just started working on Wildwood right away. So it was a different way of working… [Generally] I finish up before anyone else… In previous movies, I would work partially in development and partially overseeing the builds of the costumes. But now we have a lot more directors working with us, and I work up front on researching and designing costumes pretty early on. So while we’ve been shooting Wildwood, I’ve worked on quite a number of movies already to get those up to a certain point. And then it gets handed off to a much bigger production machine that happens in a different way.”

”When Deborah’s done with her work,” began Jones. “There’s a slight overlap in terms of when she’s designing it, but it’s much more front-ended. We take those designs into fabrication. Then I’m working with the fabrication teams to realize Deborah’s and the character designers’ designs. Then once we’ve created one or two puppets, we might be in fabrication for 18 months, and shooting will overlap. So as soon as we’ve more or less finished that first puppet production, the shooting takes it out of our hands. They want to start shooting that first shot, and then we start delivering. And so there’s the overlap there. And then I will continue to work in an advisory role for the shooting stages, especially up front making sure that we’re keeping on style. So we’re making sure that the jackets, the hair, the silicones, and everything is maintained all the way through the shooting process. So there’s this handoff stage, and then a little bit of upkeep after that. Before then, we all turn to the next show.”

McLean then chimed in about printing faces. “For RP (rapid prototyping), we’re the department that’s building the face and then animating the face. [Oliver’s team is] building the puppet and then handing it to the stage animation team to animate. Because of that, it means that we’re starting when the earliest character designs land. We’re starting to figure out how we’re going to turn those into a replacement animated puppet. But then we continue that work all the way through when the last shot is done because we are literally delivering a unique asset for almost every single frame in the movie. So we’re right there along with the stage animators, making sure they have what they need.”

Schiff discussed the challenges and hurdles of being in stop-motion animation. “Missing Link had 1,800 shots in the film. This one had 2,900, and 900 of them were a second or less. It’s shot like a live-action film and edited like a live-action film. But it takes just as long to set up a 12-frame shot as it does 120-frame shot, except the animator will finish it in two days. So it’s just a lot of setup time, and I think we hadn’t experienced anything like that before. Every animator was working on two or three or four things at the same time. Like Christian, who worked on the battle scene, had four units that he was going to all the time because he would finish this one and he needed something ready to roll on to the next one. So, I think it was a challenge overseeing that stuff and getting those things ready. And just getting your head around all of these short shots because not every shot has a beginning and a middle and an end. So much of these shots were just middle, and that’s kind of a hard thing for an animator to get their head around.”

The art of stop-motion requires a lot of patience and flexibility. Even with years of careful planning, there are plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. So in response to times when they’ve had to overcome challenges, Lowry chimed in about his experiences. “The movie is very iterative,” he stated. “It moves kind of slowly. So there’s not a lot of opportunity for those [issues] to happen. But because the camera was moving so much, and we were working from storyboards, and storyboard artists just make up whatever they want (and Travis was very married to the boards) we couldn’t always make things make physical sense. So we had to do a lot of cheating and trying out stuff. Like there’s a scene where a character’s on one side of the battlefield, and we see the person on the other. Now, if it was in real life, that person would be smaller than a pixel. So, how do you show them without making the scale not weird? We mock things up and put it in the camera and try all different things. But we failed quite a bit at times with those endeavors because they were so unconventional. But you just work through it. Just keep doing it until you get it. I’ve been doing it a long time. I feel like I know what I’m doing, but when the challenges are that raw, you just make mistakes, and you learn from them.”

One of the challenges that presents itself continuously in stop-motion is the ability to streamline processes from the top down. This often requires the filmmakers to problem-solve and invent new solutions to processes they’ve worked on since Coraline in 2009. Examples include keys that allow puppets to look like they’re breathing in subtle ways, and rapid prototyping faces. So when asked about what the process of inventing and innovating new ways of working was like, Jones answered, “It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Most of the responses that we have are either coming from the story or animators. The animators are responding to the standard of animation that is requested from them, and so they are driving the tools. And so that feedback loop about what they need and what they require is really important to us as creators. Then there’s the story element. So you got a flying eagle, or something like that, where you’re going to have to come and solve it, because it’s got to get onto screen. We really pride ourselves on not saying ‘no’ and rising to the challenge. So with every LAIKA movie (and I think Wildwood surpasses all of them in terms of the amount of invention that we’ve seen over the course of the last few years) the amount of new techniques that we’ve brought into the process is pretty mind-blowing.”

”Things we learn in one movie grow and become something else in the next movie,” continued Cook. “We’re able to accumulate techniques and ways of doing things that fuel invention. Stories do fire invention, but just having that continuity of this company being a permanent situation as well, I think is a real gift, and we’re very fortunate to be in that situation. Other animation companies might do one movie or two movies, and then it just disperses to all those people and all that knowledge and creativity and talent disperses. And we’re able to hang on to that here.”

McLean helped conclude the sentiment, contributing, “It really comes down to two things… It’s the performance that’s needed, and then it’s the design. There’s no secret that there’s a pretty simple way to design a puppet for stop-motion animation: Tall, skinny, not a lot of baggy clothes, no hair, lollipop head. Those types of designs are really easy to make, and every design that LAIKA has ever put forth is a real challenge. No one’s ever tried to make this big hairy avocado before, or a super-naturalistic character like Prue, or a flying eagle in stop-motion. Because it’s hard. Because it requires invention. If you’re trying to make this thing look amazing and then perform at the standards we want, it’s inevitable that you have to tear the thing apart and just come up with a whole new way of building something. And also, most places don’t have the appetite for that. They don’t have the budgets, or they don’t want to spend the time. It doesn’t matter. We’ll change it. We don’t need to make it look like that. Let’s make it a featherless eagle. Travis is so focused on how we let this medium tell the stories that we want to tell and not have there be any barriers… You guys got the tour around it today. This amazing Santa’s workshop filled with tinkerers and inventors and craftspeople and amazing artists that have the tools, the experience, and the pure grit to try to figure it out. And the support — that’s the most important thing; the support that the studio gives us. Because innovation doesn’t come easy. There are so many failed experiments that we don’t show you guys because they failed. We only show you the cool things that succeeded, but the fact that they’re willing to support that is what makes this place so special.”

Special is correct. There is no other studio in the industry that does what LAIKA does quite the way they do. The studio began as a unique company with an equally unique film in Coraline, and it has only continued to evolve with each successive project. From ParaNorman to this year’s Wildwood and whatever comes next, we simply cannot wait to see how the team at LAIKA Studios continues to reinvent what’s possible through animation and filmmaking.

All we know is that with talent like Cook, Schiff, Lowry, McLean, Jones, and their respective teams leading the way, it’s going to be spectacular.