VFXWorld — January 2017
Explore the VFX of LAIKA’s ‘Kubo and the Two Strings’

Marking more than two decades since a stop-motion animated feature has been nominated for an Oscar for visual effects (1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas), LAIKA’s Kubo and the Two Strings has been full of surprises.

Stop-motion animation is an established discipline: single frame by single frame — with 24 frames per second — animators subtly and painstakingly manipulate tangible objects on a working stage. Each frame is photographed twice in order to create a final stereoscopic 3D image. Then the thousands of photographed frames are edited and projected together sequentially, bringing the characters and environments to life: movie magic created by hand.

But at LAIKA, that is simply one aspect of the studio’s unique hybridization technique that has been perfected across its previous films, including Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls. The visual effects team is at work on every frame as well, sometimes for environment expansion or crowd enhancement, and sometimes for intangible additions.

Led by visual effects supervisor Steve Emerson, the intermingling of live sets and VFX extensions reaches new heights with Kubo and the Two Strings. A classic hero’s quest of David Lean proportions, the action-filled epic film’s course was charted for a fantastical version of ancient Japan, inspired mostly by the Edo period of the early 1600s to the late 1800s. As LAIKA chief and Kubo and the Two Strings director and producer Travis Knight comments, “LAIKA does what live-action films do, but in miniature and with inanimate puppets!” (Read full story…)