Corpse Bride
Corpse Bride (also known as Tim Burton's Corpse Bride) is a 2005 British-American stop-motion animated musical dark comedy film directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton with a screenplay by John August, Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler based on characters created by Burton and Carlos Grangel. The plot is set in a fictional Victorian era village in Europe. Johnny Depp leads the cast as the voice of Victor, while Helena Bonham Carter voices Emily, the titular bride. "Corpse Bride" is the third stop-motion feature film produced by Burton and the first directed by him (the previous two films, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach", were directed by Henry Selick). This is also the first stop-motion feature from Burton that was distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. It was dedicated to executive producer Joe Ranft, who died in a car accident during production.
Corpse Bride
Animation took place at 3 Mills Studios in East London. A dozen animators/puppeteers were put to work when production began, but that number had tripled by the end of production. The initial group spent time developing each puppet's unique characteristics. The puppets themselves, built by Mackinnon and Saunders, were typically about 17 inches tall and animated on sets built three to four feet off the ground with trap doors that allowed animators access to the sets' surfaces to manipulate the puppets. The three primary characters—Victor, Victoria and Corpse Bride—were fitted with heads the size of golf balls that contained special gearing to allow the animators to manipulate individual parts of the puppets' faces. The animators' work was spread over 25 to 35 individual setups/stages, each having its own Canon digital camera. A total of 32 cameras were used on the film. Each camera was outfitted with a "grabber" system that enabled the animators to capture frames and download them into a computer to assemble a short "reel" of the shot being produced to check their work.