Stop-motion movie Wildwood is a staggering masterpiece | Hacker News Reader

Stop-motion movie Wildwood is a staggering masterpiece

cbc.ca

36 pointsBiraIgnacio15 comments

Saw it last night and it was incredible. Magnum Opus of stop motion. The amount of effort and expertise is extremely impressive

I don't want to see Hacker News become a site where products are promoted, so I'm ambivalent (at best) about this submission.

That said... The embedded YouTube trailer really is quite compelling, IMHO.

Ah, sorry, not what I meant at all. But I get how it might look.

I just found it amazing work, 16-years-in-the-making! I can't think of starting anything thing that will take more than a few days to finish :D

16 years to make a movie seems more like a failure of some sort - either of vision, or funding.

or.. you know.. a masterpiece.

The only people who will find this a masterpiece are people who are not actually enjoying the movie itself, but deriving a meta enjoyment of it by constantly saying to themselves "wow, can you believe how much mastery that shot must have taken?"

How is that not enjoying the movie itself? By what objective measure are some aspects of a work to be valued higher than others? Who can claim to be an authority of how to value a work?

weird - i do not see you making this comment on all the huge number of products that are promoted on this site

A "stop-motion movie" that makes heavy use of CGI---what's the point?

All of the "important stuff" is practical stop motion. CGI is only used in cases where stop motion is either impossible (fire, waterfalls, the distant backgrounds of shots) or impractical (the wide shot of a scene with thousands of people)

And as a general rule, the main subjects of a shot are never CGI.

So the point is- it's stop motion. The amount of hand crafted and hand animated art on display is astonishing.

Disclaimer- I work there. In a support role, not directly, but I'm lucky enough to get to see the insane level of hard work everybody is putting in for years and years for a single movie

3d printing a sequence of computer animated models and photographing them stretches the definition of "practical stop motion" as I understand it to mean. This is quite apart from the issue of using post-production CGI.

That's a fair complaint, but for the most part that only applies to the faces (which would be an absolute nightmare to hand animate in sync with the voices in a way that felt real) and hair on some characters. The rest of the bodies, and objects in the scenes, are usually entirely hand animated.

To avoid the 3d printing elements would undoubtedly result in a less realistic and immersive movie. Not that you couldn't do it, but I think that's one element that makes these movies work so well.

Saw it with my family last last night and we all loved it. I was amazed at how much Laika has upped their game with crowds and FX. That, and I definitely noticed things like the subsurface on the skin and smoother motion in general.

I previously worked at Pixar for 11 years on the RenderMan team and would sometimes talk to some of your CGI folks. I'm crossing my fingers that this is Laika's year at the Oscars.

Here is a behind the scenes video

https://youtu.be/ocEXQSIcT-o?si=lxHFIaSioF9xLpnC

Almost any movie makes heavy use of CGI. Combining them with practical effects, like stop-motion, yields better results than sticking to one technique.

The practical grounds the digital, and the digital enhances the practical.

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