Quick lesson: There's mainly three kinds of animation. The prevalent cel animation employs cartoony drawings, flipped quickly to make moving pictures, ala The Little Mermaid. Computer animation works similarly, but uses screen frames instead of cels. The third kind, stop motion - less prevalent, more challenging, and more lifelike - uses malleable stuff like clay, as in Gumby, or multi-jointed models, as in the Christmas TV classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.
Tim Burton, creator of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and oh yeah, Batman, picked the latter method for his new picture, Nightmare Before Christmas. Coming to theaters this fall, Nightmare Before Christmas is the first major full-length stop-motion film to hit the big screen in years. The premise: Holidays as we know them are produced in alternate realities and exported to our world. Overseeing Halloween is Jack Skellington, the film's hapless hero, who decides to try his bony hand on Christmas this year.
After kidnapping Santa, Jack takes flight in his casket sleigh, motored by skeletal reindeer with glowing jack-o-lantern noses. Being a ghoul, Jack's well-intentioned presents include shrunken heads and roadkill turtles. When the government catches on, Jack's in big trouble... Saying more would spoil the surprise. See the film. When you do, pay particular attention to the character's lips, how perfectly in sync they match the dialog and Broadwayesque songs.
"Unlike cartoons," says Dan Mason, lipper extraordinaire at San Francisco's Skellington Productions, "lip syncing is crucial to the end result of stop- motion animation because as a medium it is more realistic." In order to tie words to lips accurately, Dan developed his own computerized "lip library." Using digitized shots of all the film's characters, Mason listens to the dialogue, then chooses the best lip action to make the words come out looking and sounding good. In a process where each day's shot yield is counted in seconds, Dan's cost-reducing lip library makes for notably smooth shooting. And saying. And singing.
ELECTRIC WORD
Ubiquitous Computing in Action
Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas
