In a world flooded with AI slop, there’s no better cure-all than watching an artist walk you through their human, hand-made process.
Enter a new featurette for LAIKA’s new film Wildwood, an epic fantasy tale brought to life by gorgeously crafted stop-motion animation. Directed by Travis Knight (Masters of the Universe), Wildwood follows headstrong teenager Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) as she goes on a quest to save her abducted baby brother. Her journey takes her to the Impassable Wilderness, an enchanted forest outside Portland, Oregon filled with talking animals and bandits.
Every element of Wildwood is painstakingly brought to life by an army of artists and animators, including the many horses roaming the Impassable Wilderness. In the featurette above, lead armaturist Matt Cole walks us through the creation of the film’s stop-motion horses.
As an armaturist, Cole creates the skeletons within the stop-motion puppets, which will then be manipulated by animators.
“With Wildwood, we were tasked with building quadrupeds, and the animals have their own expression, their own musculature,” Cole explained. He grew up around horses, calling the experience “transformative,” which meant he felt extra pressure to get their movement right onscreen.
“We ended up making basically a Swiss watch inside of the puppet,” Cole said. “There are gears that drive movement. There’s specialized joints to be able to rotate. So we have to nail down both the look and the performance for the animators. Those are equally important.”
The featurette above shows each painstaking step of the process that brings Wildwood‘s horses to life, from designing the skeletons in CAD to testing their movement to their final onscreen appearance.
“Every single [LAIKA] film is pushing things further and further,” Cole said. “The horse was kind of the ultimate challenge, and this personally circular thing for me to revisit my childhood as an adult. That’s part of the magic of stop motion at LAIKA. We’re always looking for that way back.”
Wildwood hits theaters Oct. 23.
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