Laika's 'Wildwood': 2,776 Shots, 223 Puppets and a Five-Year Gamble

Laika's "Wildwood" required 2,776 shots, 223 handcrafted puppets and 142,030 replacement faces over 265 weeks from the start of stage animation to visual-effects delivery. Production VFX supervisor Steve Emerson laid out those figures at View Conference in Turin on Tuesday, calling the Portland-based studio's fantasy epic its most elaborate production yet.

The film, directed by Travis Knight, contains nearly twice as many shots as Laika's 2019 feature "Missing Link," which Emerson said comprised 1,486. "We were essentially going to be making two films," he said. "But beyond that, the shots themselves were infinitely more complex."

Emerson offered a personal measure of the time involved. "My daughter, she was in elementary school when I started working on the film in February of 2020," he recalled. "She is now a senior in high school. She is considering colleges. She drives a car, and she is dating."

How do you keep stop-motion human at this scale?

Emerson framed the film's defining challenge as keeping technology in service of handmade performance. A single shot required 1,124 face replacements, which he described as a stop-motion record. The production built 132 practical sets across 117 locations.

Portland's Pittock Mansion, recreated for a rooftop escape involving protagonist Prue McKeel, illustrates the method. Its miniature took 11 and a half weeks and 45 to 50 artists to build, measuring 14 feet wide and 10 feet tall. Crews constructed separate sections at puppet scale so animators could stage performances for integration with miniature elements and digital backgrounds.

"There's nothing that beats real glass, real cameras, with real camera people lining up shots on a real set," Emerson said. When lighting a miniature proved troublesome, the crew used motion-control rigs to capture multiple exposures and adjusted the lighting later in compositing. For another sequence, the art department assembled a temporary green-screen stand-in because the full-scale set was occupied.

What did the hardest shot demand?

The presentation's most unusual case was an ivy-covered nightmare Emerson dubbed the "Sam Raimi shot," in which vines seize and manipulate a skeleton. The team wanted the plant to behave like a sinister character, not a conventional computer-generated effect.

"We weren't looking for a simple procedural solution. We didn't want to do something in Houdini as is typical," he explained. "We wanted to make it as hard on ourselves as possible."

Artists recreated practical ivy in digital form, then used wire, cotton and stop-motion tests to establish its movement. The breakthrough came from filming wires pulled away from miniature trees and playing the footage backward. "It's weird, and it's twitchy, and it's aggressive, and it's nightmarish, and it was exactly the look that we were gunning for," Emerson said.

The same logic governed character animation. Rather than animate every puppet simultaneously, the studio sometimes shot them in separate passes against blue screens, giving animators room to concentrate on individual performances. "So whatever we need to do in order to empower those animators, we do it," Emerson said.

Knight's ambitions grew from his attachment to Portland and Colin Meloy's illustrated fantasy novel, which follows a girl trying to rescue her kidnapped brother. The director, Emerson said, saw a chance "to basically make a Lord of the Rings movie with stop-motion puppets, to do something nobody had ever done before."

"Wildwood" opens in U.S. theaters Oct. 23. Emerson closed on the work behind the numbers: "Every frame bears the imprint of the artist who brought it to life."