Nightmare Before Christmas

I think that the smooth motion of the puppets is great, especially the spider like way that Jack moves, very creepily. I think that the way they achieve in stop motion is amazing, the skill and patients that it must take.

Zero the ghost dog is created through double exposure (source: the DVD extras for Nightmare), which is now something that we can do through computers and take for granted. I think it is great that they had the manual skill to create the effect, which looks so much more interesting then a computer generated effect may look.

I generally really like Tim Burton films, I love the dark feel to the films. The shadows, creepy figures and strange buildings. It all adds to the feel of the films. I think that this represents part of my personality, I love the strange, the horrific, and dark, creepy stories, images, films etc. This is something that could think about including in my work.

Stop motion puppets have been used to create this animation. Lip syncing is created using different puppet heads, which are replaced to create the mouth shapes of the vocal sounds. Many of these have to be used for each sound to create realistic, smooth motion between the vocal sounds. The puppets joints will have hinges or ball joins which you are able to move but are stiff enough to stay in place so that each small movement for every frame can be captured to create the smooth movement of the puppets.