The Boxtrolls follows Eggs, a boy who straddles two societies: the rich who live up high in their expensive fabrics, and the Boxtrolls, creatures who live below ground and wear boxes. According to Wired, the movie is set in a Dickensian fantasy world, allowing the creative team of the animation studio, Laika, to essentially go crazy for their first period piece, which took several years to produce.
For the stop-motion animation film, every set, puppet, costume, and even facial expression was hand-constructed and then repositioned by hand at least ten times for one second of filming. So you can see why it might take a while to produce when one animator out of a hundred must create 150 frames, representing 6 seconds, per week. What are the numbers on that for this 96-minute film? Don't break out the calculator just yet: We did the math for you. At minimum, the animators created 5,760 seconds worth of material, composed of at least 144,000 frames. Just about, anyways, and that's assuming every shot was perfect and needed no editing or revision. Did we mention it was all done by some very intense, very meticulous hands?
Watch the video interview below with Laika animation supervisor, Brad Schiff, about the creative processes of creating this stop-motion animation film.
Watch the time-lapse video below to see the creation of Fish, one of the Boxtroll characters.
Check outThe Boxtrolls photo gallery on Wired, which shows the creative team in action, from the scenic designers to costume designers to animators.