Dragon Stop Motion Blog » Feature Films

The Studio behind Coraline turns to Dragon Stop Motion

jamie — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:53:16 +0000

LAIKA, the studio behind the stop motion, 3D feature film Coraline, is currently busy on many stop motion projects including a new 3D feature film. While we cannot divulge information about the film, we can tell you they are using Dragon Stop Motion for all of their shooting in both their House and Entertainment divisions.

LAIKA has the distinction as an animation company that its CEO is also a world class animator. Travis Knight was the lead animator on Coraline, tackling the toughest shots and always bringing a depth and emotion to his performances.

Travis Knight-

“Dragon is a extraordinary achievement in design and function, an elegant blend of creativity and technology. LAIKA uses Dragon on both our commercial and feature film stages as the core piece of our production technology. It is a program that is at once simple and sophisticated: accessible and intuitive for the most troglodytic artist, yet sufficiently deep and robust for the most grizzled, technophilic veteran. With its ingenious interface, reliable performance, and exhaustive set of features, Dragon is as essential to modern stop-motion production as an X-Acto blade and a power drill. It makes other frame-grabbing tools seem as antiquated as a surface gauge. I can’t imagine animating with anything else.”

Thank you Travis for that amazing quote—we hope we continue to live up to those expectations.

Breakthru Films takes flight with Dragon’s IOTA 3D System

jamie — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 03:53:45 +0000

If the name Breakthru Films rings a stop motion bell for you – you may remember their Academy Award winning short: Peter and The Wolf. For their newest stop motion adventure, they equiped their stages with Dragon Stop Motion. The Flying Machine (in 3D) celebrates Chopin’s 200th birthday with an epic journey that takes flight on a magical piano. The film is set to premiere in Beijing, London and Warsaw. You will be hearing more from us about this ambitious project soon.

The Flying Machine was shot using our IOTA 3D Sliders and IOTA Controllers. The Breakthru team started production with other commercially available 3D sliders. Unfortunately these were not production ready in terms of strength and repeatability, so they turned to IOTA . Here is what the Breakthru camera team had to say about using our IOTA 3D System.

Excerpt:
“We had the opportunity to try other 3D solutions before we began to use Dragon Stop Motion’s IOTA system. To explain, we used Dragon Stop Motion software from the beginning of shooting–before the release of the IOTA 3D system. We were drawn to Dragon’s multiple exposures, which could easily adapt to work in stereo. Dragon Stop Motion worked with 3D sliders from other companies, although these sliders were far from ideal.

How does the IOTA 3D slider perform? The first thing worth noting is the surprisingly lightweight, compact design, which, despite its small size is able to work in any position and at any angle. Even with heavy cameras and lenses, the IOTA slider keeps perfect accuracy. This is great to see, given our experience with other sliders. Another noteworthy feature is the high temperature resistance.

The IOTA 3D slider is fully integrated with Dragon, so it’s controlled by the software. This solution allows us to achieve high flexibility, unattainable with other systems. Setting any starting position or reversing stereo channels is rarely needed but we really appreciate the options.

We particularly appreciate Dragon’s ability to preview in 3D. The opportunity to evaluate stereo directly in Dragon, without exporting to compositing programs, truly accelerates our work flow. It’s not just that Dragon gives you a 3D preview, it gives you professional 3D controls such as parallax adjustment for both channels and calipers for measuring the degree of the parallax. Such nuances as the ability to assign floating 3D window only add to our enthusiasm for the IOTA / Dragon system. With Dragon 3D, all of the tools a stereographer needs are at hand.

Dragon gives us the ability to assign three stereo interoculars. This enables us to achieve multiple IO’s in a single pass. It is especially useful for tests or even bracketing your interocular. This feature in 3D sliders will be appreciated particularly by those who want to have stereo adapted to varying display sizes.

The IOTA is unquestionably the best 3D slider we have used…”

Animaking Shooting Feature “Worms” in Brazil

jamie — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 05:43:18 +0000

On the beautiful island of Florianopolis, a stop motion feature film is in progress. Produced in part by Fox Films, production company Animaking is filming “Worms” with Dragon Stop Motion software. We are very excited to be a part of this production.

We will be back soon to tell you more. For now here is an excerpt from their blog:

“Worms” is the newest project of ANIMAKING, a feature stop-motion animation made for all ages, focusing on children spectators.

The story is about Junior, a “worm boy” aged 11 who is getting to his pre-adolescent phase and lives an amazing adventure with his friends. Inspired on the homonymous short film, winner of Anima Mundi’s Infant Jury Award of 2006 in both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo contests, as well as the JVC Tokyo Video Festival’s Excellence Award in 2007, the movie is pioneer in Brazil to use stop-motion technique in a feature film.

ANIMAKING, the largest stop-motion animation studio in Brazil today, has based its operation on the island of Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, and has invited GLAZ ENTRETENIMENTO to produce the movie in a partnership mode. GLOBO FILMES and FOX FILMS joined the project afterwards. The film is also a co-production between Brazil and Canada, as the Canadian WIZZ FILMS and MOKKO STUDIO are in charge of its post-production.

LINK: http://www.animaking.com.br

Coraline in 3D, The Dragon Stop Motion Connection

admin — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:53:22 +0000

From November 2006 to April 2007 I had the pleasure of working on the movie Coraline as the Supervising Art Director. During this time, the art department used an early version of Dragon Stop Motion to help with mock-ups of sets and to test some of the 3D (stereo) effects used in the movie. To be clear, the movie itself was shot with a special system developed by Laika.

Henry Selick wanted the art department to create customized forced perspective sets. He wanted the rooms in Coraline’s “Real” world to be have a flattened feel. He also loved the idea of capturing the look created by Coraline’s top Illustrators like Jonathan Klassen, Andy Schuhler and Tadehiro Uesugi. Henry wanted to play with the dimensions of the sets, pushing the envelope of what we could shoot.

Before I arrived, the first tests of heavily forced-perspective sets were made using computer mock-ups. These were then printed out and built in foam core. The tests were interesting but it was hard to tell what was going on or to really approve a final look this way. At this point none of the interior rooms in the movie had been built or signed off on.

Phil Brotherton (Art Director / partner in crime) and I decided to build in nearly full detail, finished rooms that Henry could inspect. They could also be sent to stage for Pete Kozachik’s camera department to shoot and test. These finished mock-ups would include versions of Coraline’s bedroom, her “other” bedroom, the kitchen and Dad’s study.

Our goal was to put sets in front of Henry so he could start fine-tuning some and throw out others completely. Basically get the ball rolling in a tangible way.

Instead of using computer mock-ups to calculate forced-perspective, we decided to go a more organic route.

Dad’s Study was built by eye. A still print of Tadehiro’s illustration of the room was tacked to the side of the table for everyone to reference. Every day, the artists from the art department would add walls and props. Bo Henry set up a camera so that we could check the build against the illustration.

The other rooms were made with the help of the line-up layer feature in Dragon. We would take a table, then set an angle for the floor. When the floor was set, we would set up a camera with live-view in the angle of the illustration for that room. Then we’d load the illustration into Dragon and overlay it on the live-view. We would lock down the tripod and the table. Morgan Hay would then start the process of cutting foam-core and building the set to match the illustration. This process was accurate while also allowing a human touch. When the foam-core build was complete, it became the template for the build.

Right before Christmas 2006, we presented Henry with five different finished builds. To our surprise, he liked them all, or at least something about them all. We spent the next few months fine-tuning those rooms. They appear in the movie much like our original “test” mock-ups.

Testing 3D rain and other effects with Dragon

During one of our meetings, I made the suggestion that we should try to shoot the rain you see outside the windows of Coraline’s house as an in-camera effect. Henry liked the idea but it wasn’t really my job as Art Director to suggest how effects shots should be done. I had sort of created a problem, so I wanted to help solve it.

One night Morgan Hay stayed late with me and we used Dragon to shoot a 3D stereo test of rain falling outside the window.

We used Dragon’s multi-exposure system, naming one exposure left and the other right. For the rain we used a fun trick involving a 45-degree glass outside the window facing down. Then, below the set, we used a multi-plane of layers of black strings over a black velvet bg. The strings had occasional white paint to emulate a blur of falling rain. We lit the strings with polarized light and moved the layers of string at different intervals to emulate perspective.

We borrowed a horizontal camera slider from Pete Kozachik that would allow us to set a left and right position for each frame. We used Dragon’s handy motion calculator to help us create a dolly-in for the shot.

After the shoot we used After Effects to prep the still sequences for the digital 3D projection system. In the morning we were watching a full blown rain test with camera move on the big screen with our 3D glasses.

Henry and Pete approved the test and soon Brian Van’t Hul was working with Andy Gent to design rain-rigs that could be run by motion control. I think Henry appreciated the rain gag. When I decided to leave Coraline and come back to my home in Ojai, He gave me a fun plaque with an allusion to the rain rigs.

We also used Dragon to test stereo effects shots of the world coming apart and other fun experiments including 3D wallpaper. I’ve included a still of animator, Amy Adamy shooting a 3D effects test for Coraline using a pre-release of Dragon Stop Motion.

“Hey Jamie, You’re not in the movie credits”. I was only there for five months while others stayed the long haul of years. They did throw me a credit on IMDB. I’m Just happy to have been able to work with such a fun and talented group of people.

-Jamie