Saturday, September 27, 2014
Premiere: The Making of The Boxtrolls' Awesome Steampunk Contraption
WIRED: One of the coolest things about Laika’s upcoming flick The Boxtrolls is the Mecha-Drill. It’s hard to explain why it’s so amazing without spoiling part of the movie, but the short version is it’s a huge steampunk contraption piloted by the film’s Big Bad, Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kingsley). It also was, as Laika president Travis Knight told WIRED, “the biggest puppet we’ve ever made.”
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10 comments:
This puppet is beyond awesome. The fact that so much detail is maintained in a human size puppet is wonderful. The best take away from this is definitely "The Mecha-Drill is a puppet; it’s a prop; it’s a set.” I feel as though this is a great way to go about most designs. It's very similar to viewing all pieces of a production as another character. If you view it as more than just another piece of scenery or a costume, then you give a new voice to the piece as well as the characters that interact with it.
This is amazing! I didn’t realize that for an animated movie some studios use puppets and sets and such, as opposed to traditional drawings. It makes sense but I guess I’d never thought about it. This Mecha-Drill is a beautiful piece of puppetry, technology and art. I think it’s awesome that they chose to build it from the ground up instead of drawing it, and in the clips that we see in the video you can tell that the technique really pays off. I absolutely love animation, and this steam punk aesthetic is super neat. I wish that the article and video went more in depth about the making of the puppet. I’d love to know how long it took for them to design and build it, how many prototypes they went through, what the structure of the puppet itself is, how difficult or easy it is for them to work with it on set, etc…
This puppet just makes one more reason why Laika is so awesome. I love stop motion technology and its amazing to see how much painstaking detail goes into the making of one scene, prop, or puppet. It's also amazing how many people and departments come together to create one puppet. Granted, Mecha-drill is the largest puppet that Laika has ever made, but even with their normal sized puppets, so many areas of expertise come together to create a final product. Because so much physical work goes into each item and movement, the movie has such a different presence on screen than a digitally animated movie.
WOW! The detail they captured in even the smallest parts of this beast is phenomenal. I would love to see how long it takes them to update all of the little gears and pistons between frames, it must be excruciating but the result is phenomenal. I love puppets like this, and while I wish it was being used in a live action setting, it is really cool to see such detailed work go in to stop motion. Laika is doing unbelievable work with their movies and keeping stop motion alive as an art form, I can't wait to see this one.
I really love Laika's mission of keeping traditional stop-motion techniques alive while also working to innovate animation technology. I think that the artistic director, Curt Enderle, pretty much nails it when he describes the Mecha-Drill by saying "it's... so cool." This is a perfect example of how the work that Laika is doing is really unlike any other studio right now. It is incredible to think that when you're watching this amazing puppet on the screen, it is something that actually, physically, exists in the world. It is not just CGI, it is an object that riggers, model builders, painters, and art directors worked on to painstakingly build. All of those little gears, and cogs, and pistons really move in real life and that makes it like nothing else I've ever seen before. I've been excited about this movie for a while but now I really cannot wait to see it.
Puppet making and stop-motion never ceases to amaze me. Laika did an amazing job creating this puppet so that it fit the world of The Boxtrolls. It's incredible how so much detail and process went into making this contraption come alive for the movie screen and for the world of the movie. I wish the video had gone more into detail about the process of how it was made or any of the complications they had with it. If it was the biggest puppet they had ever made, I'm sure they had some trouble getting used to maneuvering it around the set or even making so that it was stable while adjusting it. Laika did an amazing job creating this puppet so that it fit the world of the box trolls.
This is incredible! I had no idea that it was a computer-mechanized puppet, and that it still manages to look and move like a stop-motion puppet is incredible. I am blown away by the scale of the collaboration that went into making it; every department, every person had skills that contributed to the epic final piece. Laika has done an amazing job creating this, and being able to see the process that goes into making something like that is incredible. I wish we could see more about what makes stop-motion like this possible, and the methods they use to create something like this.
This is so cool! I love that they made something so huge and didn't decide B.S. it with computer generation. The skills it must take to not only design, but to then construct and operate such a piece of machinery as a puppet is immense. I haven't seen the film, but the fact that this piece is crucial to the plot, probably means it is on screen often, meaning it's moving a lot! The massive scale of this (even if it is only the size of a person), means that there is so much more of it to move than any other character figure, and I think that things like this are what make stop-motion films magical.
I can't even handle how cool this is. I am continually mind boggled by the care and devotion that goes into stop motion animation, and this just brings it to a whole new place. The level of intricacy it takes to have all of those gears and moving parts move smoothly in stop motion is truly a feat of mastery. The combination of experts from different fields really made this piece transcend typical animation into something even more remarkable. It just goes to show the extraordinary work that can be created when you can draw on skills from across the industry. I can't wait to see the movie and see how this artwork plays out!
This is so rad! At first glance I thought this was all animated so my first thought was, what do you mean how do they make it, it's animated?? Then I realized it was a stop-motion film and became incredibly awed by the sheer scale and complexity of the prop/puppet/set/thing. I love where the imagination went with a unit such as this, and I think that the overall collaboration between the different departments in the film really helped make this gargantuan piece as life-like and detailed as it was. Job well done.
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