From the studio that brought you Coraline and ParaNorman, Laika Studios is bringing their new film to the big screen: Missing Link. In Missing Link, a not-so-professional myth buster by the name of Sir. Lionel Frost, who is voiced by Hugh Jackman, is on a mission to find the famous Bigfoot. Upon discovering the 8-foot-tall creature who is referred to as Mr. Link, voiced by Zach Galifianakis, Sir Lionel Frost not only realizes that he indeed real and the legendary tale was not a hoax, but he also realizes that there is more to Mr. Link than what meets the eye.
Together, Sir. Lionel Frost and Mr. Link embark on a long journey across the globe to find the lost relatives of Mr. Link, and joining them along the ride is feisty adventurist Adelina Fortnight voiced by Zoe Saldana. Together, they are determined to find the descendants of Mr. Link, to find who feels misplaced in the world and craves a sense of communal belonging.
Written and directed by Chris Butler, who also wrote and directed ParaNorman and worked on the 2009 dark fantasy film Coraline, and co-produced by Arianne Sutner who worked with Butler on the 2014 Academy Award nominated film Kubo and the Two Strings, Missing Link is a subtle yet significant contrast from previous films produced by Laika Studios.
“It’s definitely our most colorful movie to date,” Chris said. The vibrant and bold colors incorporated in each scene are something that Chris honed in on and integrate as much of it as he could throughout the making of the film. Overall, colors play a big role in the enhancement of visuals and there is an array of colors, tones and textures in Missing Link, from the scenery of the different countries visited by Sir. Lionel Frost and Mr. Link to the outfits of the characters.
Blackfilm.com had the opportunity to visit Laika Studios this month where the production crew was able to give us an exclusive look at how the magic is made.
Deborah Cook is the costume designer for every Laika film including Missing Link and the powerhouse behind building the outfits seen in films like Coraline, which won her a Costume Designers Guild Award in 2017 and a Visual Effects Society nomination, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride and The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
There is an extensive amount of research that goes in to the process of choosing what each character will wear. Factors like location, physical build and even the character’s personality can influence their attire and how its ultimately sewn together. It is essential for the fabrics to look good on camera so they must mesh well together.
For Missing Link, Deborah and Chris collaborated on identifying the concepts, shapes and textures that he wanted for the costumes. Both drew inspiration from in-house and artwork that focused on strong silhouettes, patterns and weaving to set the pace for how they would create a costume for each character.
“We looked at how Yak fur grows as the inspiration for how we were going to try to explore the fur of Mr. Link and what would work with scaling the materials that would best illustrate this,” said Deborah. She used William Morris Wallpaper which is a turn of the century wallpaper textile design as a reference for the patterns that are not only embed in to the fabric of the characters’ clothing but also the fur of Mr. Link.
Deborah noted that the style of costumes for characters like Sir. Lionel Frost and Adelina Fortnight are reminiscent of the Victorian Era. “We’ve given her a fuchsia colored dress instead of a Victorian gray or city blue or charcoal to illustrate that she’s very fashion forward. The fuchsia pink and the color of Lionel’s [suit] are very much based around the synthetic dyes of the era that were just being developed… So, these colors are very much coming in to play and considered risqué”.
Inside of each costume are weighted materials that help to keep them grounded.
Deborah explained, “We created our own weighted line that we have a patent pending for while we were working on Kubo and the Two Strings, a combination of powered pigments and glues that are put together so that we could distribute the weight accordingly, otherwise they would not have much gravity on such a small scale.”
In animation movies, characters are initially built as a puppet on a smaller “scale” which is the ratio of the animations size to the size of the puppet. Once made, Director Chris Butler detailed how the advancement of technology has impacted the process of scaling when filming, “The impressive thing to me about this movie is the scope of it. We’ve got so many locations. Traditionally in stock-motion, the stories that you told were a little bit more limited in this scope and that’s because you had to be. You were limited by the size of your puppet and the size of your set, and with this modern digital technology being used you can kind of push down those walls a little bit and have digital set extensions and extras. So, it’s opened the world up a bit.”
There is a lot that goes in to designing a scaled puppet. John Craney, Laika’s Puppet Fabrication Supervisor, was one of the 86 design sculptors to work on the puppets for Missing Link. The Puppet department occupies about 20,000 square feet of Laika Studios and includes about 100 people from different backgrounds with various skills that all contribute to development of each puppet.
Puppets are made with armatures which are thin but sturdy lines of aluminum that are ultimately the bones of the character. They allow for the character to walk, sit and move just like us. Once that’s put together, the “skin” for the puppets are sculpted around the armatures, allowing them to look more realistic rather than just an empty stick figure.
During the sculpting process, puppets are covered with a silicone-like material that permits the puppets to have maximum mobility. “Some aspects we looked at and considerations we made with [Missing] Link were, for instance, we tried to make sure, dimensionally, performance is not compromised by any of these forms and shapes,” John mentioned.
The process is a tedious one that John says begins with a simple 2-D design.
“After sifting through the scripts and looking through the storyboards, 2-D designs are generated. In this case, these designs are generated by Chris Butler his self and his design team. Then, the 2-D [designs] go to a concept sculptor. In this case, a veteran concept sculpture named Kent Melton who has worked through many of the films, from Coraline to this movie,” He explained.
Once sculpted, the puppet is now a Design Maquette which John described as “a tool to communicate character and personality of the puppet.”
“It gives us a sense of scale and dimension. So, once this has the director’s approval, it goes through a few revisions then comes through the [puppet] department and we start to break this sculpt down and look at how we are going to turn this sculpt in to a performance tool, because that’s what it is. It’s a tool to create the illusion of life. We dig in to this design and think about what we need to do internally to enable that performance,” He explained.
While this may seem pretty straightforward, John notes that there are many factors that have to be taken in to consideration when creating these puppets.
“What’s the worst-case scenario when asked to fabricate a character? A large husky puppet covered in hair and fur and more than a foot tall. We’ve got Link here who ticks all of those boxes. So, right from the get go, It was an exciting challenge for the department especially on this character,” John said.
And a challenge it was. Creating a body for Link was not the easiest, as his shape and size is already bigger and more different than the typical puppet which ranges from about 6 to 10 inches at most. Throughout the process, his initial set of feet had to be altered a few times to be in proportion to his body and ensure that he could walk properly and not “clown-like”. Once the puppet is made, it is projected to look much bigger on the big screen.
The production process for Missing Link took about three to four years to complete and although the studio has finally finished filming, Chris Butler is not so quick to relax.
“I mean, the pressure is still on,” he says. “I think there is always something in these movies that we have never done before. Sometimes it is more noticeable. I think for me, on this movie, what we did what facial animation took it far beyond anywhere we’ve been before. We used to use a kit system where there are different mouth shapes and they’re put together in to the computer to make a lens of dialogue. For this movie, everything was bespoke. All the performances were animated specifically to the shot. So, that was definitely one innovation that isn’t necessarily apparent to everyone but for us it made a big difference in the quality of performance.”
Facial animation is not a new technique. In fact, it has been around for over 100 years. Facial animation is just that: the animation of a face. Mr. Link’s big, bright smile and Coraline’s sly smirk were both created through facial animation, also known as replacement animation.
Brian Mclean has worked has been working with Laika for more than 12 years and is now the Director of Prototype. He handles the facial structures and placements of the characters through replacement animation.
“What is unique about how we use replacement animation is we had this idea back on Coraline to take replacement animation and, instead of hand sculpting each individual facial replacement, we would be using 3-D printers to create 3-D models out of 3-D printed materials.”
For Missing Link, over 106,000 different facial expressions were printed, much more than what was used for Coraline which had about 20,000 facial expressions.
“We will literally be popping a face off, faces are held on by magnets, and then animators will have an entire box of different facial expressions and they’ll pick another [facial expression] and drop it back on. While [the animators] are animating faces, they’ll be taking an X-Acto Blade and they actually stab the eyeball and the lid and they’ll be animating the eyeball and the lid around,” Brian clarified. Subtle facial expression changes would call for something like this, where the left eyeball pupil may need to move a bit to the right or when a character needs to blink.
Brian detailed the long journey of trial and error endured through the years at Laika in terms of replacement animation, “Since Coraline, we have been on the pioneering edge of using 3-D printers for stock-motion animation and that has let us down some really interesting, technical paths.”
The first 3-D printer was used for Coraline in 2006 and as more movies were produced, newer technology was brought in to effectively help create produce them at a quicker pace. Brian notes, “Each film, we are very driven by the creative demands of a film and we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how we’re going to be able to support that creative demand through utilizing new technology.”
Missing Link producer Arianne Sutner believed that this change in how facial animation is done has improved how the characters are portrayed on the big screen.
“I think for this movie, its upon subsequent viewings and we’ve seen it a lot. You start to notice the quieter moments and the way our two characters look at each other or reaction shots. We’re really proud of the subtle stuff that we’re bringing to the screen.” Sutner said.
For more information about the film and Laika, visit Laika Studios. Missing Link is set to release in theaters nationwide on April 12, 2019. Watch the trailer below.
