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MillimeterDigital Puppeteers
Feb 25, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff
Pete Kozachik and Brian Van’t Hul on Coraline.
Coraline's other world was conceived to be more colorful and stereoscopic than her grayer real world, like Dorothy in Oz vs. Kansas. Depicting Coraline's two worlds required different versions of familiar rooms in her house. “We had about nine special sets of her kitchen that only worked from one camera angle because they were built in this squashed, forced perspective form,” Kozachik says.
This created some interesting challenges for Van't Hul, as when Coraline falls asleep in her other-world bedroom and later wakes up in her real-world bed — revealed during a single camera move. “We had to warp and distort plates to make two physically different sets line up,” Van't Hul says. “That required a lot of tracking and shooting things as separate passes that we could cut and paste.”
Van't Hul's team used Autodesk Maya and Science.D.Visions 3D Equalizer for tracking and Apple Shake for compositing. They also used those tools to track in practical elements such as dry ice, which suggests foggy atmospherics. “We had a team of compositors warping and bending those fog elements using Shake,” he says. “In stereo, you have to nail things spatially or it's a dead giveaway.”
In addition to doing extensive roto work to erase the animators' rods from the puppets, Van't Hul's team had to do seam removal on the puppet faces where the eyes and mouths had been replaced separately. Such paint work is difficult in 3D, says Van't Hul. “If something isn't painted the same with the right eye and the left, you get a weird shimmer,” he says. Laika developed a method for seam removal using a combination of Silhouette and Shake.
An all-CG approach was used only to previz complex sequences in Maya, which enabled Selick to cut dynamic sequences in low resolution. “We used the previz to line up the camera,” Van't Hul says. “It saved us a lot of time on set.”
“All the help that we get from digital tricks and fixes allows us to do better work. But it's not easier,” Selick says. “In the end, it's like the original King Kong. You're touching a puppet and then taking your hand away.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
