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The Role of Preproduction in Coraline

 

            Coraline is an animated film, and its development required fastidious preproduction and production. Due to the nature of the film, each second required 24 distinct shots, and an animator can only complete two to seven seconds of footage per week. The preproduction involved is similar to that of a non-animated film, if not more demanding. The puppet-actors appearing on screen have to be well thought out and designed; locations, clothes, and props have to be chosen and designed, and the shots have to be sorted by location and assigned to various animators. But even before any of this, the plot has to be created, along with a script and storyboard. The script has to be very clear so that props can be created accordingly. In fact, it takes the costume artist at least six weeks to design and knit a single piece of clothing, and some take up to 6 months. Thus the clothes represent a significant investment and must be sure to satisfy the intentions of the scriptwriter, which can be achieved with an accurate and detailed storyboard. The same applies to locations. All locations were created specifically for the film. Since they are on such a small scale, it took a lot of imagination and thought to find the proper materials to build them. The set may have a small scale, but it is extremely detailed and contains many different locations. The forest of cherry blossoms, for example, was made out of popcorn.
             The puppets themselves were an important focus of preproduction. Henry Selick, the director, went through countless variations of Coraline in order to find what body shape, hair color, etc. would fit best with the character. Coraline's puppet alone required the combined efforts of seventy people, and in the end, twenty-eight identical puppets were created for the movie's production. Each took four months to build. In order to successfully convey emotions, 6,300 face pieces were created, resulting in over 207,000 possible face combinations.


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