Director Travis Knight brought lessons from live-Action filmmaking to “Wildwood,” aiming to give the Laika stop-motion adventure the intimacy and visual storytelling of a live-action film. He discussed the approach in an interview with IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast.
One of the film’s most demanding shots follows Prue, played by Peyton Elizabeth Lee, as she crosses her bedroom. Knight wanted the camera movement to reveal how the room’s decorations reflect Prue’s shift from a carefree child to a more disaffected teenager.
Making that simple pan work required extensive engineering. Laika uses Canon cameras on motion-control rigs, which allow precise movement but must be advanced frame by frame. Knight said the camera was enormous compared with the puppet-scale set, so the crew had to make room for it as well as the animator.
The team built the bedroom set so it could open around the camera and close again. Knight described the arrangement as a clamshell, noting that the complicated construction was necessary for a shot that ultimately just moves across a room.
Knight said his live-action work changed his relationship with the camera and helped him pursue a style that would avoid some of the usual limitations of stop-motion cinematography. The film also includes large-scale battles, magical forest scenes and flying giant eagles, which required their own technical work, including fabric-and-feather puppets designed to make flight feel convincing and tactile.
“Wildwood” is playing in theaters.
Sources: IndieWire.