If you're a fan of LAIKA Studios' stop-motion animated spectacles, you probably have a good idea of what you're in for when their latest film Missing Link heads into theaters this April: Stunning animation, well-developed characters voiced by top-tier acting talent, and a surefire Oscar nomination come awards season. But more casual moviegoers might miss out on just how much work and artistry goes into making these relatively small but highly complex and sophisticated puppets move, one frame at a time, in order to bring the next great adventure to the big screen. That's why the following movie details from my set visit to LAIKA Studios, along with a small group of fellow journalists, highlight the many, many people behind the scenes of the production.

During our visit, we got to chat with the departmental leads of a number of areas that make LAIKA films possible, from costumes, to puppet fabrication, to rigging, and production design. This is where the nitty-gritty details of stop-motion animation really gets done. We learned about the painstaking detail of hand-sewn and surprisingly highly engineered costumes for dozens of puppets, the engineering challenges of making a foot-tall puppet for a husky character covered in fur, the technological advances in rapid prototyping (which previously earned LAIKA a Science and Engineering Academy Award) used on this film, the challenges posed by animating a massive elephant, and the many and varied landscapes across 60+ locations in this globe-trotting adventure. Missing Link looks like another marvelous movie from LAIKA and it's thanks to the hard-working cast and crew that it can now come to life!

Featuring the voices of Hugh JackmanZach Galifianakis, Zoe Saldana, Timothy Olyphant, David Wailliams, Emma Thompson, Matt Lucas, Ching Valdes-Aran, Stephen Fry, and Amrita Acharia, Missing Link hits theaters on April 12th.

Here’s the official synopsis for Missing Link:

This April, meet Mr. Link: 8 feet tall, 630 lbs, and covered in fur, but don’t let his appearance fool you… he is funny, sweet, and adorably literal, making him the world’s most lovable legend at the heart of Missing Link, the globe-trotting family adventure from LAIKA. Tired of living a solitary life in the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Link recruits fearless explorer Sir Lionel Frost to guide him on a journey to find his long-lost relatives in the fabled valley of Shangri-La. Along with adventurer Adelina Fortnight, our fearless trio of explorers encounter more than their fair share of peril as they travel to the far reaches of the world to help their new friend. Through it all, the three learn that sometimes you can find a family in the places you least expect.

Costumes with Costume Designer Deborah Cook

  • missing-link-laika-set-visit-7
    Photo via Laika
    Sewing and fabrication techniques from 1890 - 1910 were referenced for the costume designs since that's the time period Missing Link is set in.
  • Period illustrators like Henry Rousseau and more contemporary illustrators like Errol Le Cain were referenced for the globe-trotting, adventurous feel of the costumes and the film.
  • LAIKA's stop-motion costumes can't use real fur due to the "boiling" effect on screen. In order to "anchor" the furry textures, they printed it down and used hand-stitching to give the animators the right amount of control.
  • Mr. Link's ill-fitting costume, which looks like it's under tension as it stretches across his frame, is purposely sewn and designed to look that way but is not actually stretched taut at all.
  • Adelina's "extremely daring" adventure outfit features a swan bill corset and pants, which were "almost considered underwear" at the turn of the century. It's an outfit meant for women cyclists and suffragettes.
  • missing-link-costumes
    She's also wearing a mourning brooch in memory of her late husband. Her dress was inspired by a Victorian mourning dress, but the colors were changed to give her more of an adventurous spirit.
  • All of the costume's fabric has a fine wire mesh that allows fine control of creasing, folding, etc. This has to be done to keep each of the dozens of puppets consistent on multiple animation stages.
  • "A lot of yaks" were referenced for some of the cold-weather costumes that used yak fur in the lining, collars, and sleeves.
  • Special attention is paid to keeping the size and scale of the patterns consistent for close-ups and wide shots, which all require their own specific printed fabrics.
  • The time from development to final realization of a costume can take years. Cook is already working on LAIKA's next film and has been for three years. For lead characters, actual production of the costumes themselves takes months.
  • For the elder Himalayan woman, she's wearing a mix of traditional clothing and also some eccentricities: "We have notes of authenticity but also some creative license because she's totally crazy and and we really wanted to show that.
  • missing-link-costumes
    She has a walking stick with a yak tail at the top ("as a cleaning, dusting thing"), a conservative and traditional apron, a lot of beads ("which wouldn't be normal; they're marriage beads ... her daughter's just wearing one", and traditional earrings.
  • The Western-themed villain sports a gun inspired by Wyatt Earp's gun and the style of coats, gloves, belt buckles, holsters, and stirrups that Wild West villains had.
  • These puppets and costumes are handled by many people under strenuous conditions, including world tours after production, so the highly engineered costumes are "built to last, definitely. Stronger than a car, some of them."

Puppets with Creative Lead/Puppet Fabrication Supervisor John Craney

  • missing-link-puppets
    The Puppet Department takes up 20,000 square feet and accommodates around 100 artists; Missing Link maxed out at 86 fabricators.
  • The department pulls from all sorts of backgrounds and disciplines, like jewelers, illustrators, engineers, textile experts, hairdressers, ceramics and pottery.
  • Mr. Link was particularly challenging as a puppet. He's large, husky, covered in hair, and a foot tall.
  • Puppet sculptor Kent Melton starts the fabrication process with a maquette, which then goes through seven internal departments: Armature, Casting, Molding, Costume (the biggest department), Paint, Hair, and a small Sculpting department.
  • The "illustrative, sumptuous style, with rich texture" was a visual note from writer-director Chris Butler throughout the picture. He also wanted to maintain the silhouette and robust shapes of the characters, specifically Mr. Link.
  • Mr. Link has a sophisticated armature, or internal skeleton. Normally a puppet takes about nine months to go from concept art to fully realized; Link took a bit longer. He has 250+ pieces and components throughout his foot-tall armature. It includes a belly to allow for "squash and stretch" and a complex chest architecture to allow fine-tuned breathing animations. (Link's belly is made of the same resin used for climbing wall holds, so it's very durable.)
  • missing-link-puppets
    The metal parts for joints and other aspects of the armature are all fabricated in-house.
  • There's also an in-house "triage" unit for repairs to the costumes and puppets themselves.
  • The Link puppets have silicon-tin, silicon-platinum (which is a high-end medical grade material), and urethane skins, of different hardnesses and densities, which are then hand-painted. They then have ~500 applied pieces of fur on them. Production took about three days for each one, for this phase.
  • LAIKA's style is to appear very naturalistic but without the "boiling", "scattering",  or "scattering" of other traditional stop-motion animation houses.
  • One puppet wears a separate puppet on its head: The elder Himalayan woman has a chicken roosting on her head; this is its own puppet.
  • There are three chickens; two are meant for the supporting character and one is a "stunt chicken." Two are made of foam and the third has the "squash and stretch" built in.

3D Printing with Director of Rapid Prototyping Brian McLean

  • missing-link-3d-printing
    LAIKA was the first studio to fuse replacement animation with 21st century 3D printing, on Coraline.
  • Their 2005 printer would print out a 3D Coraline face out of white plastic, which was then hand-painted (on the order of thousands) while the eyebrow and mouth were two separate pieces. The seam line between them was then digitally erased.
  • On ParaNorman, LAIKA used a color 3D printer. It worked by laying down powder and then jetting down colored ink, then curing it. They used this on ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo and the Two Strings. The issue was that the powder was very soft and prone to breakage.
  • The solution--combining the detail of the resin printers with the color option of the "ink jet" printers--came very recently: a full-color resin printer that LAIKA helped to "beta test."
  • Missing Link features 106,000+ resin faces, all printed by the new printer.
  • Rather than jet down colored ink on a white powdery substrate, the new printer jets down colored resin layer by layer, on the order of 18 million colored voxels (or 3D pixels) per cubic centimeter.
  • The sophisticated printing technology also includes various dithering patterns to change how different shapes portray different colors.
  • The 3D printer is a Stratasys model with some custom software/programming from LAIKA and Fraunhofer.
  • McLean and his team won a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award (or "Nerd Oscar") for these achievements in 2016.
  • McLean revealed that the animators use an X-Acto blade to move and animated puppets' eyeballs and lids.
  • Each Lionel head alone features 50 - 60 custom pieces.
  • missing-link-3D-printing
    On Coraline, they reused faces multiple times for different shots. For Missing Link, they had to develop a custom system to animated the fur on Link's lower face/neck and have it coordinate with his upper facial expressions. They printed out a "driver system" for every individual face. This means that the animators had to drop in the driver systems, which use magnets to connect to the fur lining, and push out/pull in the fur to match the animations.
  • It took a a year to develop the systems to allow custom control for the animators without giving them too much extra work. One early prototype used paddles to achieve that, but it was too cumbersome and limited.
  • Lionel's face takes about 2 hours to print, but they can print an entire row in about the same amount of time because the printer still goes through the same mechanical passes each time.
  • The colored resin used for the printer also allows for a flesh-like appearance which gives a translucent quality that lets light through.
  • In computer animation, sub-surface scattering programs give rendered skin and flesh a life-like quality. LAIKA's resin-printed pieces have this quality by a nature of the material.
  • McLean thinks the future of this technology is all going to come down to materials, such as rubber and metallics, and control over translucency and opacity, gloss and matte, etc.
  • LAIKA acts as a sort of R&D lab for the industry since they're using the printers for workable, manufactured pieces, not just prototyping.
  • Each custom piece has its own unique ID along with plenty of meta data that's collected and archived so they can keep track of variables.
  • While Coraline had about 30 people in the Rapid Prototyping department, Missing Link employed about 90.
  • There are also about 50 replacement chicken heads and necks that were printed for a close-up shot.
  • Normally, each printed face had to have 30 minutes to an hour of sanding to be camera-ready, but most of the new faces were unsanded after printing. The only ones that required sanding were for extreme close-ups.

Puppet Rigs with Head of Rigging Ollie Jones

  • missing-link-special-effects
    "Rigging is the function of giving the animator the ability to movie puppets through space. If the puppet is jumping or flying, we build an apparatus to allow them to do just that."
  • The Rigging team builds XYZ rigs that allow a character to be moved through space in any dimension, up and down, forward and back, and side to side.
  • The rigs also stop time or freeze the character in place between shots.
  • The Rigging department is composed of 10 people who design things in CAD and then mass produce rigs as needed, in-house.
  • The department doubles as a special effects/practical effects shop as well. One example is a bagpipe that needs to be animated as it's played. The team used a syringe to inflate or deflate the bags incrementally as needed.
  • Mr. Link's size proved challenging as well since the rigs needed to be beefed up with multiple nodes in order to securely hold the puppet.
  • They used a 200% zoom-in for a number of close-up shots and sequences. Rigging and Costumes worked together to develop one special shot where Mr. Link splits his pants. An animator unstitched the fabric a stitch at a time to "tear" the fabric and allow Mr. Link's fur to push through.
  • An elder yeti proved to be a complicated puppet. She has remote control devices that controlled the torso, knees, and thighs, which were covered in fur and preventing easy access.
  • Some of the puppets have "jetpacks", turnbuckles attached to the back of the puppet that grants a fine amount of control to move characters around, subtly. It also helps to eliminate chatter or scattering by minimizing the amount of contact the animator has with the puppet. ("Jetpacks" were originally used on Monkey in Kubo and the Two Strings, but were put on every character in Missing Link.)
  • Another close-up was a 600% version of Link's mouth. The shot is taken from inside Link's mouth and centers on Lionel. There are mechanisms to control the jaws, cheeks, and tongue through 16 paddles.
  • missing-link-special-effects
    The elephant and horse proved to be particularly challenging for the Rigging department. "Doing anything where flesh is exposed is difficult." They worked on the internal mechanism for the elephant and collaborated with the Puppet department to get the motion right.
  • The elephant required a larger rig to animate it, plus the additional challenge of having it navigate a tree-filled jungle. It's Missing Link's biggest puppet/rig build.
  • For the horse, the Rigging department built their first sling-like / cradle-like goniometer.
  • For the interior of a stagecoach, writer-director Butler wanted the perimeter of it to have some 200 tassels, which all had to be animated as they got jostled around. They managed to achieve a natural, harmonious swinging motion with a simple rig after lots of research and trial and error, six months' worth.
  • In the interior of a steamer ship, a fantastic action set piece and chase scene throws the characters all around as the ship tosses about in storm waves. The Rigging department achieved this by moving the cameras more so than the puppets/characters themselves.

Concept Art and Sets with Supervising Production Designer Nelson Lowry

  • missing-link-sets-locations
    The 1960s photography of National Geographic and the patterns of the Victorian Era served as an inspiration for the visual look of the film. The stylized caricatures of the humans and leads in the film were also part of designing the overall look.
  • ~300 pieces of concept art were created to develop the look of Missing Link. The entire concept art department is just Lowry and three other people.
  • The visual palette of the film is essentially limited to three or four colors per scene or setting.
  • The color script also tracks 60-some unique locations, such as the very blue Pacific Northwest, the very green jungles, and the earth tones of the Wild West.
  • The tall trees in the Pacific Northwest were all individual elements that could be swapped and replaced as needed. This setting is one of the earliest ones in the movie and we spend a fair amount of time here.
  • missing-link-sets-locations
    The target per animator is 4.3 seconds of finished animation per week. Depending upon the complexity of a shot, it could be around 2 seconds per week. That's for 31 animators and 97 units at peak.
  • Kyoshi Saito's woodblocks inspired part of the look of the Himalayan village, along with authentic, researched elements like logs stacked on top of the houses as insulation, slate slabs leaned against the foundations to prevent rain water from leaking into the buildings, and the unique red color derived from natural pigments found in the area.
  • The production designers use paper and cardboard miniatures to prep builds and scenes and to map camera movements before full sets are built up.
  • There's a small, rough maquette of a village scene in the distance of a shot in which Lionel rides a horse through a mountain pass. The shot is a layered composition of close-up stop-motion animation, forced-perspective background elements like the little village, and computer-generated backgrounds as filler.
  • missing-link-sets-locations
    The lumber operation features a giant log flume that runs the length of a hillside.
  • There are tapestries in the yeti village and temple that come from Tibetan tapestry designs, but they're very much in the fantasy realm. All of the elements are non-denominational and not appropriated from any particular culture, so they're an amalgamation of various influences.
  • Principal photography took about 92 weeks. Lowry was working on end credits sequences a few weeks before this set visit.
  • The imposing icicles were made of a rather soft and bouncy silicone.

Enjoy these others behind-the-scenes shots of the practical sets of Missing Link!

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

McVitie's Saloon from LAIKA's Missing Link

missing-link-art-book-review

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

missing-link-images

And for more on Missing Link, be sure to check out these recent write-ups:

missing-link-poster