 This is Leica Studios, the animation house responsible for the Oscar-nominated films Coraline, Paranorman, and The Box Trolls. Their upcoming film, Kubo and the Two Strings, is their biggest, most complicated, and ambitious feature to date. It uses the biggest puppet they've ever made and the most sophisticated technology they've ever incorporated. We went behind the scenes with some of Kubo's key personnel and looked at what Leica stands for and what it took to make Kubo happen. Our culture here, there is something of an inherent restlessness in the creative culture. We always want to challenge ourselves. We always want to try something new. We always want to tell new and original stories, to dive into new genres, to explore different aspects of what it means to be human. And we do it in kind of a strange way in that we are, our style, our execution of the way we make our films is a convergence of art and craft and science and technology. Stop-motion animation involves building puppets and props and moving them around on miniaturized sets, shooting their movement one frame at a time with high-def cameras pushed close enough to make tiny things seem huge. Leica uses CGI to hide the armatures that support the puppets and to erase the seams in the puppets' 3D-printed faces. But most of their effects work is done practically and in-camera by a team of stop-motion veterans. As you're developing a film, for the first two, three years, all you're doing really is figuring out who these characters are, what this world is, what are the themes that you're addressing, what parts of your own life are you weaving into the movie to give it resonance and meaning. And then it's only once we feel pretty confident in our foundations that we start developing the film visually, that we start thinking about what the characters look like, what does the world look like, how are we going to bring this to life, how are we going to execute physically to make this thing happen. Each supervisor's department breaks down into teams that work simultaneously on a variety of production aspects at once across 72 different sets. The sets, rigging support, and character bodies are custom-designed and mostly built by hand. Once we've got the character design and the character lineup, the first thing we do is sit with the director, the head of animation, and the production designer, and we want to get three really important sort of things from them. We want to get the director's vision of the whole film and really what the storyline for all of these characters is. We want the production designer to give us the key, sort of visually, what is important on this film, what is the pattern language, and what line are we using? Are we using a straight line or are we using a curvy line to create our characters? And then of course the head of animation, that person will know everything there is to know about these characters before we go into that room, and they tell us what they want from that movie. Generally, it's like, we want it to do everything and more. We're like, really? Again? Again? You know, we are constantly trying to raise the bar. We're constantly trying to redefine what we think is possible for the stop-motion medium, and that is what makes it absolutely exciting and wonderful to get out of bed and drives you to get to work, and you can't wait to get here, but also causes for a lot of sleepless nights because you never quite know how you're going to solve the problem. The fun thing about each show, and also the stressful thing, is the problems. Every character sort of line-up that we walk into on a film will have a whole line of problems usually, about 24. If there's 24 puppets, we'll have 24 problems. The monkey character needed to have realistic but posable fur, so the design team wound up coating fur fabric with silicone rubber. They used a similar technique on Kubo and his mother, who have real human hair on their heads, coated with silicone. Needle had to have a complicated armature that would support his armor plates but let him move, so the rapid prototype department got involved in designing interior wire frames for the puppet, rather than just working on the face. And the costumes were meticulously researched and designed, but because the fabric had to hold poses, the clothing on the puppets is full of wires and tiny weights that hold each fold in place. On Kubo, Georgina and her team started working extensively with laser cutting and etching of fabrics. We always try to do as much as we can, practically and in camera, and only through experience are we able to make those decisions quicker. And we can look at something early, the idea of it, and go, okay, well, I can tell you from experience what the problems are going to be from an animation point of view, what the problems are going to be from a camera point of view, what the problems are going to be from a set building point of view, how much it's going to cost, and then it becomes just a choice by the director and the producer. With Kubo, the effort to use practical effects, including building immense sets that break apart so animators can access any part of them to reach the characters. These sets include multiple copies of a huge sailboat that appears to be made of tiny leaves, a snowy landscape covered in a crunchy foam that moves just like snow when the characters step on it, and it also involved making some giant robot eyeballs. So the rigging has changed immensely since Coraline. It's got a lot more nuance. It's got a lot deeper into the actual puppetry, and we've taken on a lot more automation, and we're developing a lot more relationship with our motion control department. The robots can also be controlled with a bowling ball interface for live interaction. Cooperation cross-platform has become a key discipline at LECA because when the designers or directors have creative goals they don't know how to meet mechanically, they don't necessarily know which department will be able to solve the problem. The film's flying moon beast became an issue for several departments because it was such a detailed design, it needed to glow, and it needed to fly. Moon Beast was unusual just because it was asking people to exercise a muscle that they typically don't ever think about using. We're very familiar with working with different departments for different things, but when you were thrust together on a common problem, it was difficult just for little things like who's running it, how are we, whose idea do we go with? And that was where LECA's sort of mentality really fell into place. In order to achieve the look of some of these characters on Kubo and the Two Strings, we knew we needed to try a different printing technology. The powder printing technology was not going to afford us what the director wanted out of these characters. So we had an opportunity because of our reputation within the 3D printing industry to talk to 3D printing companies and start to see if they had anything in development. Our challenge within the RP department is to never allow the technology to dictate what we can do. And that's, I think, one of the things that has made us so successful as a department because there was no ceiling. We never knew what the limits of this technology was, that whenever we would see a challenge or whenever we would see a character design, we had a group of really talented artists and technicians and wizards that were just willing to accept it and figure it out. I love that aspect of it. I still, you know, I've been doing this for nearly 20 years and I still think it's as close to magic as anything that I've ever seen. So much of the magic of LECA's movies involves the care and detail that goes into every piece. It comes from their staff's experience and it comes from their willingness to make each project more ambitious than the last. I worked on Nightmare Before Christmas. In those days, we would bring everyone together to make a movie and when the movie was over, everyone would kind of just disappear and go their own ways, find other jobs. LECA's different. We, you know, it's set up as a studio that will continue to make stop motion animated pictures and there's a, the consistency of it allows you to really refine your processes and really hone in how you end up making these movies and when you're able to refine the processes, then the scale of the movies can get bigger because you're not having to reinvent every time you come back. And then just the ability to constantly push the medium, you know, in new directions is the exciting part. We always strive to be as good as we can. We always strive in our art to be perfect, to be as, to make these things as beautiful, as powerful as they can. But we are human after all and we always fail. The entire film is filled with all different kinds of imperfections and failings and it's something you have to come to terms with and I think there is something beautiful about that. I think that it's one of the things that makes stop motion so unique is that inherent in what it is, it's crafted by human hands and so it has that raw human quality. It's frustrating. Sometimes it's maddening to work in this medium because of the imperfections, but I think that's one of the things that makes it inherently beautiful and so we really embrace that side of it because it makes these things human.