The Nightmare Before Christmas

One of my favorite animated movies has always been The Nightmare Before Christmas which is a stop motion Disney film. In typical Tim Burton fashion, it is a creepy, cynical, and humorous film that has it's quirky songs and lines throughout the film. The film is extremely impressive because it was filmed in 24 frames per second which means every character was moved 24 times per second in every scene, which made just one minute of the film take a whole week to make. The three years that went into creating The Nightmare Before Christmas was well worth it. The beautiful animation has created for some iconic still photos and characters that people still rave about to this day.

There are probably over 60 characters in this movie, which makes it more impressive that the animators had to use the technique of stop motion with them for three years straight (and there was only 4 of them!!! what!!!!!) Overall, this movie is amazing watch, but even more fun to research and look into. Stop motion is something that has always intrigued me, and I believe that this movie might be what started that interest.

The creation of Jack Skellington

Sarah posted about claymation earlier in October, and the video she put up about the making of Wallace and Gromit intrigued me. Everyone is familiar with the concept of stop-motion, but I don't think anyone that hasn't been involved with a claymation project realizes how much work goes into the creation of each and every frame, or more specifically, how a single character alone is created, brought to life, and then moves and changes within each frame. Because of this I decided to look into the making of one character in particular, Jack Skellington from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Below is Tim Burton's original sketch of the character:

After creating the look of a character, a story has to then be developed before the creation project can even start. This link goes to a picture of one of the many storyboards created for each scene of the movie.


Then comes the true creation process, the molding and making of Jack:


The intricate detail that goes into each and every one of Jack's limbs to give his character the perfect shape isn't lost on me, nor is the incredible amount of both facial and body expressions that have to created or positioned just so to bring Jack to life and make him smile, frown, stand, walk, or sing. Below is a video about the Facial expressions of both Sally & Jack.


The final product of the beginning of the song 'What's This?' is below. All that work, just for one quick scene!