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!

From the main stage to piece of paper, can it be done successfully?

There really is something to taking an animated movie that touches the hearts of its audiences every single time it is revisited and bringing it to life on the stage. The first time I saw Beauty and the Beast on Broadway, I couldn't believe the elaborate costumes and sets, the dramatic lighting, live music, and the actors and actresses ability to flawlessly transform these two dimensional sketches into living people that truly were Belle, the Beast, Lumiere, Cogsworth, etc. in the flesh. The transformation was incredible, so much so that it was done again and again with other Disney movies such as The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and Tarzan, and I'm sure there will be even more to come.

But could the animation to Broadway process be as effective if done the other way around? Can you successfully take all the elaborate bells and whistles of a Broadway play and squeeze them back into two-dimensions on a sheet of paper? Heidi Jo Gilbert, who draws storyboards for Nickelodeon, Pixar, and Disney attempts this with Broadway's Wicked and puts together a storyboard of the show's climatic act one finale: http://www.theateradvisorblog.com/if-wicked-the-musical-were-an-animated-film/
and http://collider.com/wicked-animated-storyboard-heidi-jo-gilbert/74997/
Though these storyboards are great, they (in my opinion) fail to capture the magnificence of Wicked now that it has been given the creative liberty of the open stage for the past 8 years. What bothers me is not that a lot of the details are left to the viewers imagination, that is usually how most storyboards work, but that the sketches look similar to your generic cartoon girls instead of looking like those that made Wicked famous. The castle/clock tower look like those used in any other Disney movie. The magic, the individuality of the land of Oz gets lost in the transition.
Of course, a live-action movie version of Wicked has been in the works for a while now, due to its notorious success on the stage: http://www.deadline.com/2010/07/wicked-ready-to-cast-movie-spell-authors-meet-with-filmmakers/ My only hope is that this transition is as painless as possible.

While looking for other animated adaptations of Wicked, I came across someone who took his/her characters on the computer game The Sims, and turned them into his/her own version of the Wicked cast and reenacted every musical number through the computer game. Here is his/her's version of the musical's opening number: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HEjCy70ujM&feature=related Pretty entertaining, though I can't imagine how long it took to create this!