Steve Emerson, VFX supervisor on Laika's "Wildwood," details how the studio pulled off Travis Knight's stop-motion epic

Laika's "Wildwood" took more than five years of animation and visual effects work, with 2,776 shots requiring a precise blend of handmade puppets, miniature sets, and digital imagery. But for VFX production supervisor Steve Emerson, the decisive challenge of Travis Knight's fantasy epic was ensuring the technology served the stop-motion craft rather than […]

Emerson talked the Turin conference audience through a 265-week production that included 2,776 shots, 142,030 alternate faces and a nightmarish sequence called the "Sam Raimi Shot."

Laika's "Wildwood" took more than five years of stage animation and visual effects work, with 2,776 shots that required a careful mix of hand-made puppets, miniature sets and digital images. But for VFX production supervisor Steve Emerson, the defining challenge of Travis Knight's fantasy epic was making sure the technology served the stop-motion performances rather than overpowering them.

At the View conference in Turin on Tuesday, Emerson took the audience through the Portland-based studio's most complex productions, from recreating a local landmark to creating a nightmarish, seemingly sentient mass of ivy. RELATED STORIES Telly Awards Adds Microseries Race Track With Dozen New Categories (Exclusive) 'Sin Filtro' Producer JK Media Produces First Original Microdramas Shot in US for TelevisaUnivision's ViXMicrO (Exclusive).

Emerson described 265 weeks from start of scene animation to VFX delivery, 132 action sets in 117 locations, 223 hand-made puppets and 142,030 alternate faces. One shot required 1,124 face swaps, which he described as a stop-motion record. He also provided a more personal measure of the time involved. Popular in Variety

"My daughter, she was in elementary school when I started working on the film in February 2020," she recalls. "He's a senior in high school now. He's considering college. He drives and he's dating."

It's almost twice as long as Leica's 2019 film "The Missing Link," which Emerson says includes 1,486 shots. "Originally we were going to make two films," he said. But beyond that, the photographs themselves were infinitely more complicated."

One example was Portland's Pittock Mansion, which was renovated to escape from the roof featuring protagonist Prue McKeel. The miniature took 11 1/2 weeks and 45 to 50 artists to complete, measuring 14 feet wide and 10 feet tall. Individual parts were created in puppet scale, allowing animators to stage performances that could be integrated with miniature elements and digital backgrounds.

"There's nothing like real glass, real cameras, with real cameras putting pictures together on a real set," Emerson said. When lighting a miniature proved problematic, the crew used motion control rigs to capture multiple exposures, which allowed the lighting to be adjusted later in the composition. Another sequence required the art department to assemble a makeshift stand with green screen because the set was occupied at full scale.

The most unusual example of the presentation involved an ivy-covered nightmare that Emerson dubbed the "Sam Raimi shot," in which vines grasp and manipulate a skeleton. The team wanted the plant to behave like a sinister character rather than a conventional computer effect.

"We weren't looking for a procedurally simple solution," he explained. "We didn't want to do what's typical in Houdini." We wanted to make it as difficult as possible for ourselves."

The artists digitally recreated the practical ivy, then used wire, cotton and stop-motion tests to determine its movement. A breakthrough from filming wires stripped from miniature trees and playing the footage back, producing something unnaturally lifelike. "It's weird, and it jumps, and it's aggressive, and it's nightmarish, and it was exactly the look we were shooting for," Emerson said.

This interplay between practical work and digital effects also shaped the animation of the characters. Rather than animating all the puppets at once, the studio sometimes shot them in separate passes in front of blue screens, giving the animators more room to focus on individual performances. "So whatever we need to do to empower those animators, we do," Emerson said.

Emerson explained that Knight's ambitions stemmed from his attachment to Portland and Colin Melloy's graphic fiction novel, which follows a girl who tries to rescue her kidnapped brother. The director saw the opportunity to "basically make a Lord of the Rings movie with stop-motion puppets, to do something that no one had done before," Emerson said.

The film opens in US theaters on October 23. For Emerson, the "Wildwood" scale eventually returned to the works of his artists. "Each frame bears the stamp of the artist who brought it to life," he signed.