FACE TO FACE WITH LAIKA

Life never gets any easier for Brian McLean, director of Rapid Prototype at Laika, who oversees the mass production of faces used in replacement animation, to create the illusion that the stop-motion puppets can talk and emote a variety of emotions. “Definitely the amount of work that we do has exponentially increased from film to film. We build on top of what the previous film had and that becomes our new ground floor. 20,000 faces were printed for Coraline and now we’re up to 106,000 on Missing Link. But there’s much more that’s unquantifiable, such as the performance demands or improvements that audience members don’t necessarily notice.”

The approach towards replacement animation has evolved for the studio based in Hillsboro, Oregon. “On we were basing the use of replacement animation similar to how it had been done on where Jack Skellington had 800 hand-sculpted faces, and those were figured out at the beginning, we got to that milestone for almost every single shot in the film.”