A lot of Frame x Frame, a new exhibition at the BFI Southbank about and funded by LAIKA Studios, is about the moment between shots – what we don’t see on screen when the puppets or mechanics move, whether that’s the mechanisms under the surface or the various rigs kept just out of view of the camera (or erased in post-production). It’s part of the BFI’s Stop Motion season, which doesn’t just feature LAIKA but a wealth of masters of the form: Ray Harryhausen, Jan Švankmajer, The Brothers Quay and Nick Park being just a few of the names mentioned.
Dan Pascall, LAIKA’s Event & Production Marketing Senior Manager, broke Frame x Frame down as a showcase of the many departments feeding into their approach to stop motion: “It’s [about] what happens before [the puppet moves]. The animators moving the puppet – there’s 10 to 15 to 20 people that have had the prop or the puppet before it gets to the animator to make it work. So, it was really about showcasing that process as well and what goes on further upstream and what it takes. Everything’s planned, everything’s fabricated, and it’s gone in a second on the screen.”
Those scores of people being made visible gets at the appeal of one of the small things I’ve enjoyed when watching LAIKA’s films: the inclusion of little behind-the-scenes time-lapses during the end credits, dedicated to the making of a particular sequence. Part of the joy of watching stop motion is the knowledge of its very making – perhaps not a sense of artifice, but, in Henry Selick’s words in a recent interview for Sight & Sound, the recognition that the film in front of you was “touched by a real person”, the acknowledgement of the invisible hands moving things millimetre by millimetre, that “nothing is by accident”, as said on one of the exhibition’s displays.
The exhibition space itself is cute and compact, its entrance styled after the otherworldly living garden in Coraline – a theme that bleeds a little into the rest of the gallery space as it carries on a small-scale replication of the scene featuring the praying mantis tractor. At the back of the room, a small corner with a video display teasing the studio’s next film Wildwood.
The rest is divided by film; a series of large cases displaying puppets, early maquette tests (basically, preliminary puppet builds), props at varying scales, key art and pieces of the set. The whole space is designed to show off the various levels of construction, fabrication and development of stop-motion. As Pascall puts it: “So much of what we do it’s assumed [that] it’s done in the computer, [but] it’s closer to a live-action film. They are real, tactile puppets. They’re real sets. They’re real shadows, real lighting. Every material that we pull out, we test under lighting conditions on the stage. So, it’s really about getting that across, that this is a physical, tactile thing.”
There’s a surprising amount of material – right down to different tests for costume fabrics and textures for sets on display in pullout drawers – fit into the space. It’s well-organised too, giving each film a focus which highlights a part of LAIKA’s process for animation. Coraline’s segment is a sort of introductory segment to highlight the number of teams and processes involved. It talks through everything from rapid prototype and early tests to costume design as well as the specific design ideas driving Coraline itself, a highlight for me being a drawer that showed puppets depicting the various stages of transformation of the film’s spooky parallel universe monster with buttons for eyes: “Other Mother”.
Meanwhile, the area for ParaNorman shows off puppet builds, breaking down the inanimate performers into their various parts – the most memorable of which was Norm himself, basically exploded into his basic parts, showing the armature skeleton underneath – this is where the exhibition literally got more under the surface into the processes that, by their words, are “felt but not seen”. The Boxtrolls area further highlights the studio’s model shop, while Missing Link’s segment examines set building, both in terms of the modular sets the studio uses as well as the choices made in styling the film’s landscape.
Missing Link may not be the best film from the studio (that would be Coraline, and it’s not close) but its segment is a fun walkthrough of how the studio builds sets to complement their blocking. It’s also, like much of the other segments, about material, with studies of different cacti, rocks and boulders and tests of wildflowers taking up just as much space as the characters. That focus on material was a key takeaway, highlighting that stop motion isn’t just significant for the fact that it’s puppets being moved one photo at a time, but also that there’s a requirement for the building of physical sets, and the considerations that go into such.
One area, revolving around Kubo and the Two Strings, went into a different toolkit, as it broke down the studio’s use of VFX and digital animation and how it works in concert with stop motion. The Kubo & the Two Strings segment leads with a description of the digital technologies used; it also notes their use of scanning puppets for 3D models used in some crowd scenes, the general use seeming to be to aid with an expansion of scale. Pascall explains, “Visual effects have always been obviously a part of every single movie, starting from Coraline. And it’s evolved as we’ve gone on, show by show, as the studio has.” As noted in this segment of the exhibition, Pascall underlines that “it allows us to expand our worlds. And obviously, when we first were given the script for Kubo, it was very apparent that the world had expanded quite significantly.” He adds, “There’s so many huge wide vistas. We’re building practical characters, practical puppets, practical sets, so all of a sudden, our giant studio in Oregon feels like a shoebox.”
For the displays scenes from Kubo & the Two Strings are broken down into storyboarding, prop and puppet design and composite, demonstrating how digital technologies affected each of these processes. One example looked at an early crowd scene, where the majority of the models are created digitally, scanned from puppets then composited into the final shot.
“As the environments grow, so do the shots and so do the size of the crowds”, says Pascall. He continues, “When you’ve got Kubo walking down the main street and you’ve got 50, 60 background characters, there would’ve been a time where we would’ve potentially tried to build 50 or 60 background characters, and as a result, we built fewer background characters impractically.” Pascall emphasised the collaboration between the departments and the VFX crew, noting that “anyone that has got a line of dialogue, a hero character obviously, or any hero action is an in-camera puppet. And then what VFX will do is, they’ll work with those departments that we mentioned before, and they’ll build a library of heads, hair types, body types, costumes. And they’ll be able to build larger crowds, so the animator can really focus on the five or six key character puppets in the foreground. And then the background will be taken over by VFX.”
There are sticking points, like one issue that Selick has returned to. In the Sight & Sound interview, the Coraline director spoke about imperfection and its place in stop motion, with reference to the visible face replacement seams on the puppets’ faces in Wendell & Wild, evidence of a “human touch”. He then says that it’s something he wanted to do in Coraline before the intervention of the studio’s owner Phil Knight (as in the owner of Nike, or Ben Affleck in Air), who apparently felt uncomfortable with the idea and pushed for touch-ups to remove them, which Selick calls “an unnecessary expense”.
Digital VFX is, obviously, not simply just a bad new thing and has many purposes in animation, even in stop-motion. It makes sense to find a way to incorporate new tools. Not to mention, in a sense, it’s also made by an artist’s hand. And Selick is no Luddite – far from it, having shown a willingness to work with new technologies with Coraline both in its own use of VFX, but especially its rather groundbreaking use of 3D printing for replacement limbs and faces for the puppets. Not only that, but the use of 3D projection in the presentation of the film itself – but he has a point. Its use can feel like a double-edged sword, because while it allows for more expansive scenery in Kubo & the Two Strings, the intervention of CG animation and digital VFX can definitely be felt, and in places, it still feels too smooth. It reminds me of a piece from the newsletter Animation Obsessive, which last September published a piece titled “The Art of Imperfection”, which speaks about the temptation of touch-ups allowed by animation work in the digital era, and how sometimes the rough edges add more character.
The article considers how the ability to perfect things through constant revision and iteration calls into question how a lot of the visual joys of animation also derive from its limitations. These are the blemishes that Selick also speaks of in his interview, saying “When you can’t tell the difference between stop motion and CG, why are you doing it? That’s the main thing: I still want to feel that this was touched by a real person. Jan Švankmajer’s ideas are so strong that the execution of the animation didn’t need to be perfect. It would have been hurt if it was too perfect”. From my perspective, these aren’t so much fears of digital animation taking over, as some concerns with how it’s used.
There are reassurances from Pascall regarding such limitations, as he spoke about how the VFX departments try to preserve a sense of tactility: “Any visual effects, character or set extension, is always based on a physical asset, whether that be a test piece, a test puppet or a test miniature mock-up set. They’ll shoot and they’ll scan. It’s never VFX just going off to build their own things. [So] they can also build in the same limitations that a physical puppet would have as well, so it feels of the world.” He continues to note the collaboration with other departments, saying “the puppet department and the art department and the art director still work very, very closely with visual effects, but it’s a tool that allows us to not be limited by our building space.” So on one hand, it’s about removing the limitations of set building space, on the other, there’s consideration of the limits of physical puppets – perhaps a double-edged sword.
A similar sentiment was reiterated at the premiere of Coraline’s 15th-anniversary restoration (in 3D!) at the BFI Southbank, in a post-film featurette detailed a process of “Rebuilding Coraline”, revisiting the character from a contemporary position, noting what has changed in the studio’s methodology in the time since. The behind-the-scenes video has lines from the artists which are rather candid about their own hesitations, but also note that it allows them to get even more granular in other places, stressing that the use of the technology isn’t about taking shortcuts.
This inspired some confidence, but digital effects’ place in stop-motion is something I’m still in two minds about. Regardless, the exhibition itself is full of lovely samples of the in-camera craft, even as it espouses the studio’s embrace of new technologies. Frame x Frame is well-curated, maximising the use of small space and showing off a pretty impressive array of detail and organising it well. The marketing aspect of it can be strongly felt, a natural result of LAIKA being the ones controlling their own narrative here. But it’s also an interesting peek behind the curtain as well as a consideration of how those processes are continually changing.
LAIKA: Frame x Frame runs until 1 October 2024 at BFI Southbank. Tickets are free but must be pre-booked.
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