MaineCollegeofArt

The Moonbeast from "Kubo and the Two Strings" was a nightmare! I mean, it was an awesome challenge, and super rewarding, but that thing was difficult to control. Each segment of the body had its own joint, and the whole thing was suspended from a crane rig... often moving one joint would cause something else to move farther up the chain. Eventually I figured out a good enough routine and order of operations that I could shoot maybe 20 frames a day...

I got really lucky... my first job out of Graduate school was as a Production Assistant on Coraline. What really helped me to get that gig was making my own films in school, and then getting those films out on the festival circuit. Many animation studios send representatives to festivals... I met a Laika recruiter at the Ottawa animation festival who liked my work. One of my professors also had contacts with the studio and I was able to send my film to them directly. After that first job, I suddenly found I knew people at pretty much every stop-mo studio out there! Its a very small community...

Its definitely advanced enough. When working on a big feature, there are typically a lot of BG elements that are handled by the computer... at Laika we tried to do as much as possible practically, but we definitely supplemented that with some CG.

Just baring my soul to world! PRetty standard...

Often its a question of scale... large crowd scenes for example require a lot of time to animate. Stage space is at a premium during the heat of production. We always animate the hero puppets and even a few key background puppets with stop-motion. Once they are shot, that stage space is usually needed for other hero shots. Letting the computer animators handle the backgrounds frees up the space.