Thursday, 9 April 2015

Bradford Animation Festival: Laika - Boxtrolls Behind The Scenes

Like I mentioned in my earlier post of the Boxtrolls, it is a great film that I feel successfully combines stop motion with CG animation to create a beautiful story that captivates us and transports us to a different world. However, whilst at Bradford Animation Festival, I was lucky enough to experience the making of Boxtrolls (I know right!). There is actually a LOT more work that goes into creating films like this than I expected.

For a start this film was 10 years in the making! That's just an insane amount of years to even begin to consider for a film. I know I'm going off on a tangent (sorry). So back to the time and effort that actually went into this film...

The animation was created using 24 fps and the studio was creating 2.5 - 3 seconds of animation per week. This alone shocked me, as it is a lot of work to be completing in a single week when there's so many different scenes being created at the same time, but I'm glad I found this out, as it has given me an insight into how hard it is to be an animator and how much work is expected of you and how much effort has to go into even the smallest amount of work. Not only is there a lot of effort put into films created this way but there's also a lot of creativity thrown in too.


But it's not just the animating element that you have to put so much effort into. In The Boxtrolls there were approximately 30 puppets made for each main character, and each puppet was hand made, from the armature to the wire hair on their heads. And for the majority of the puppets there were a number of detachable faces to go along with them in order to create the wonderful expressions created within the film.

I really enjoyed attending this talk, as it has given me a huge insight into one of the ways the animation industry works. It has opened my eyes to the amount of work and effort that needs to be put into an animation in order to make it successful and enjoyable to watch, which has inspired me to put as much effort into my own animations.

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