Posted in: Movies | Tagged: boxtrolls, entertainment, film

Numbercrunching The Box-Trolls

Published Tue, 02 Sep 2014 09:36:56 -0500

Last updated Tue, 02 Sep 2014 11:40:20 -0500

The new animated movie, The Boxtrolls, from the makers of Coraline and Paranorman have a few statistics they would like to share with you…

An animator typically took 1 week to complete 3.7 seconds' worth of footage, which is just under 90 individual frames
The movie was made utilising 56 cameras and 892 lights including 68 fluorescent fixtures
190 puppets were built for The Boxtrolls
79 sets were built for the movie, and there are 26 unique locations in the story; these were crafted by 13 model builders, 12 carpenters, 9 scenic painters, 8 set dressers, and 4 greens artists
200 costumes were made for the movie
There are 14 different fabrics in Lord Portley-Rind's hat
Mixing puppets and CG, the ballroom set hosted 150 Cheesebridgeians
Over 53,000 individual face parts were 3D-printed; of those, 15,000 were Eggs'
Eggs had over 1,400,000 possible facial expressions
Eggs's sweater(s) used 233 yards of threads hand-dyed in varying colour tones
The movie's smallest costumes were for Eggs as a toddler: the sweater, measuring 3.5" from cuff to cuff across the length of both arms and chest, and the socks measuring 5/8" long
Snatcher had over 1,180,000 possible facial expressions
Winnie had over 600,000 possible facial expressions
Winnie's dress ruffle(s) required 37 yards of bias-cut chiffon ribbon
The White Hat ladies' ballroom dresses each had 8-10 hoops linked together by concertina wires, which sounds musical and ethereal but is barbed and dangerous
CG humans are in 185 shots of the movie
CG Boxtrolls are in 131 shots of the movie
The Mecha-Drill stood @5' tall, weighed over 75 pounds, and was made of over 600 metal, plastic, and steel pieces; the 5 full ones created, out of 8 total, are the biggest stop-motion puppet rigs ever built
The stop-motion flames "burning" in the furnace of the Mecha-Drill are courtesy of a working iPad displaying a loop video inside the "mouth" of the device
3 iterations of Snatcher's truck were built
The river running through the sewer scene where Eggs climbs the ladder was in fact handmade; a rig holding a 4'x2' pane of shower glass passed over a nest of white aluminium fishing-line wire, tiny pieces of mirror and mylar, and coloured masking tape to perfect the illusion of a watery surface – creating rippling liquid without actual liquid
More than 20,000 props were handmade for the movie
55 different sculpts of prop cheeses were created for The Boxtrolls
24 different types of weeds were manufactured by greens artists
The movie's smallest prop was the tiny sewing thread and needle
The vinyl record was approximately 2" across, with its label being approximately 0.25"
The name of the musical group on the label on the vinyl record is Quattro Sabatinos, named after The Boxtrolls director Anthony Stacchi's young son, Sabatino
The following amounts of materials were used or consumed during production:
80 pounds of hot melt glue sticks
96 cubic feet of gold urethane foam
898 cans of spray paint
1,000 sheets of sandpaper
2,000 tongue depressors
2,896 feet of 2×4's
2,904 doughnuts
4,000 X-Actblades
6,928 feet of 1×4's
12,000 cotton balls
35,488 square feet of plywood
The faces for all characters are now permanently housed in LAIKA's face library, which currently numbers over 1,300 archival boxes of nearly 53,000 faces