SLIFF/Kids Interview: BRAD SCHIFF – Stop Motion Animator – PARANORMAN, BOXTROLLS

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman July 16th, 2014

A native St. Louisan, Brad Schiff serves as the animation supervisor at LAIKA Studios, the award-winning company behind  “Coraline,” “ParaNorman,” and the upcoming “The Boxtrolls.” Before making his creative contributions to LAIKA’s films, Brad cut his teeth on a number of  popular American television series, including MTV’s “Celebrity Deathmatch,” “The PJs,” and “Gary & Mike.” In 2001, Brad brought home a Primetime  Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for his work on “Gary & Mike.” Brad’s commercial-directing clients have included the  NFL on Fox, Nintendo, and Samsung. In 2004, Brad worked as an animator on Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride,” the first of what has turned out to be a series  of Academy Award-nominated features that includes Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”  Although Brad’s busy schedule only allows a hometown visit once a year or so, when in St. Louis he always indulges in pizza from Imo’s and a “famous roast beef sandwich” from Lion’s Choice – he calls both “a must.” If he’s here in the summer, Brad is certain to catch a Cards game at Busch Stadium; if he’s here in winter, he journeys to Savvis Center to root for the Blues.

Brad will be in St. Louis on Saturday August 2nd, for a program called Behind the Scenes with Brad Schiff, Supervising Animator at LAIKA Studios. There will be a screening of PARANORMAN, followed by a Q&A with Brad.This is part of the second annual SLIFF/Kids Film Festival put on by Cinema St. Louis. The event will be at COCA – Center of Creative Arts located at 524 Trinity Avenue in University City. The program begins at 7pm.

For more details about the SLIFF/Kids film fest, visit Cinema St. Louis‘ site HERE

We Are Movie Geeks caught up with Brad Schiff to discuss his films, his future projects, and his upcoming event in St. Louis.

We Are Movie Geeks: So you’re from St. Louis, right?

Brad Schiff: Yes I grew up in Clayton and then I moved out to Town and Country. I went to Parkway West High School where I graduated in 1988.

WAMG: When you grew up in St. Louis, were you a fan of stop motion animation?

BS: I always really dug stop motion animation but I don’t know if I realized it was stop motion animation at the time. I always loved KING KONG. I think the most poignant one for me was CLASH OF THE TITANS. I used to make little stop motion with my friends with G.I. Joes and stuff but never with any intent of doing that for a living.

WAMG: We did a Ray Harryhausen tribute at St. Louis International Film Festival last year.

BS: Cool. What did you show?

WAMG: We showed a new documentary called RAY HARRYHAUSEN SPECIAL EFFECTS TITAN and then we also showed THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD.

BS: Yeah, Ray Harryhausen came to visit the studio when we were working on THE CORPSE BRIDE. That was back in 2004.

WAMG: What are the key differences between what Ray Harryhausen was doing and what you were doing on a project like PARANORMAN?

BS: Fundamentally it’s all the same. Everything we’re doing is the same. We have some technological cheats that he didn’t have. Things have advanced in so many ways. He would use gauges to mark like where the elbow was, where the top of the head is, where the wrist is, so he would know where to move it every time. What we have is Frame Grabber software so when you get to say, frame 100, you can see your last 100 frames as well as your current frame. You can see exactly where you’ve been and where you are. You just toggle back-and-forth so you can see your previous image and your live image.

WAMG: I guess Harryhausen couldn’t really check his work until the film came back from the lab.

BS: It’s amazing! It blows my mind sometimes. We make mistakes even looking at it. You’ll get a few frames past and then you will think “Oh shucks, I forgot to move the wrist”. So then you have to delete a couple of frames. So that’s a luxury. You can actually cut back. You can delete frames as long as you can get to a place where you could match your puppet back up.

WAMG: How did you end up being a stop motion animator? Where you an artist as a kid?

BS: Yes I was. My grandfather was a master woodcarver and I used to sculpt and play down in his studio in New Orleans. I took every art class I could. Then I went to college at Central Missouri State and majored in art. I was also playing rugby at the time. My instructor recommended that I drop drawing classes. To this day I can’t figure out why. My stuff wasn’t the best in the class but it wasn’t the worst either. The only thing I can think of is that maybe he was trying to light a fire under my ass. At one point I didn’t want to have anything to do with art anymore because I became really self-conscious about my drawing ability. I had a buddy who was going to school down in Florida and he was taking these animation classes at the University of Tampa. He couldn’t draw either but he had this instructor named Richard Protovin who did these beautiful watercolor animations and his philosophy was that you don’t have to draw great to animate great. There was something about it I just found it intriguing. So I transferred colleges. I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew I didn’t want to graduate with a business degree. When I was down there, I discovered I had the ability to sculpt and it became evident that stop motion animation was what I wanted to do. My sculpting looked good but I couldn’t animate very well. I was just transferring some of my old college films from VHS the other day and it’s a miracle I’m even in the business right now.

WAMG: Where those shot on film?

BS: No the stuff down in Tampa was shot on a three-quarter inch machine that kind of did frame-by-frame.

WAMG: Did you grow up a fan of monster movies?

BS: Yes, I loved the monster movies. I loved cartoons though more than anything. I loved Looney Tunes and I loved Scooby Doo. I would come home from school, pour a bowl of cereal and watch He-Man and G.I. Joe cartoons. I couldn’t get enough cartoons.

WAMG: It seems like stop motion has made something of a comeback over the past few years. What do you attribute that to?

BS: There’s been a huge resurgence to it, that’s true.It really started bubbling with NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS and then with JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. The mecca for stop motion animation and that time was San Francisco. There was a show on ABC called Bump in the Night. And then Disney bought ABC and shut down anything that wasn’t a Disney show. Then about three years later, around 1998, Celebrity Death Match came around, and The PJs, and Gary and Mike. There was that little wave. There was not a whole lot going on in Los Angeles, it was all happening in New York and Portland. Then in 2004 we did CORPSE BRIDE and around that time Aardmann animation started to break through with Wallace and Gromit. Of course CG came about as well and CG developed its own look but stop motion was something a little bit different, a little bit tactile, just inherently I think because you’re making it by hand. I think there’s an inherent charm that goes along with it.

WAMG: When Tim Burton made MARS ATTACKS in 1996 I remember reading that he wanted to use stop motion but he decided to make CGI that would look like stop-motion. But then he went back later, with CORPSE BRIDE and FRANKENWEENIE, to stop-motion.

BS: Yes, there were a couple of us that work here, myself included, that were hired to work on MARS ATTACKS. This was before I was out of school at NYU. My friend Georgina Hayes here at LAIKA, she was hired to work on MARS ATTACKS. And around that time production shut down. I think someone was doing a CG test of the Martians. Somebody got a model and took it to ILM and they did a great job with the characters from that film. So yes, Tim wanted to do CGI that looked like stop motion and it didn’t quite look like stop motion. Even to this day as we move forward, especially here at LAIKA,, I feel like we’re pushing the medium forward in a way that nobody has yet. People may always think that it’s CG. And I think that’s a huge compliment. And you’ll even hear people like Tim Burton say that CG just doesn’t have that stop-motion look, and I don’t know just what that means. Does that mean it has to be sort of rough and raw? I don’t think so. That’s like saying all CG has to look like ANTS or A BUG’S LIFE.

WAMG: I know what you’re saying. I get confused. Even when I saw the trailer for BOXTOLLS I thought “Oh here we go – here’s a CGI that’s trying to look like stop-motion”. Even when I saw PARANORMAN at the theater I wasn’t sure what I was watching, at least until the very end. Didn’t they bring out one of the armatures?

BS: Yes during the end credits. We always have a little surprise during the end credits.

WAMG: Was CORPSE BRIDE made over here or was it made over in England?

BS: It was made in London.CORPSE BRIDE was the first in this awesome run of feature films that I’ve been able to work on.

WAMG: About a year ago I interviewed Mark Waring (Animation Director on FRANKENWEENIE – read the  interview HERE).

BS: Oh yeah, I lived with Mark Waring when I was over there!

WAMG: How many animators would work on a project like PARANORMAN?

BS: We start off with a team of 22 and it will grow if we get behind schedule, or for that final push we may need a few more bodies, I think we got up to 30 on PARANORMAN. On BOXTROLLS we started with a team of 24 and we grew to 30. Every animator is responsible for a quota of 4.3 seconds per week.

WAMG: I see, but aren’t some scenes more elaborate and  difficult than others?

BS: Oh yes, some are incredibly complicated. We had an animator on BOXTROLLS that was animating a dance sequence . We had choreographers come in and you had to mimic and learn every move of a dance. It’s always easier to animate what you know, but it’s very difficult to animate that type of dance sequence with multiple characters. The more characters you have, the more difficult it is. The more difficult the action, the choreography, the longer it takes. If you had just one medium shot of a puppet maybe you could knock out eight seconds in a week.

WAMG: You’ve worked with Wes Anderson (on FANTASTIC MR. FOX) and Tim Burton. What are those guys like when directing animated films? Are they hands on?

BS: Well, Tim co-directed CORPSE BRIDE with a guy named Mike Johnson. And on FRANKENWEENIE, which I did not work on, Tim co-directed with a friend of mine named Trey Thomas, who’s kind of a stop-motion legend. On FRANKENWEENIE, Trey Thomas did sort of the same thing that Mike Johnson did when he was co-director. They directed the day-to-day operations and they would send the stuff to Tim every week. And Tim would come in to the studio maybe every two weeks, and go through the dailies and stuff but he didn’t, on CORPSE BRIDE, really direct the animators personally. It was usually Mike Johnson. But Tim would come through and he was friendly with the crew. Everybody knew him but he didn’t do the day-to-day stuff. I think he was working on ALICE IN WONDERLAND about the same time we were shooting CORPSE BRIDE so he was consumed mostly with his live-action stuff. Working with Wes Anderson was a whole different experience altogether. That was a weird way to make a movie. We were making FANTASTIC MR. FOX in London and Wes was in Paris, yet though he was in Paris he was very hands-on. We corresponded through vmail with him. He would send a reference video of himself. He would send live-action videos of himself acting out every character and they would edit those together so you would have six of Wes on the screen, each acting slightly different. One as Kristofferson, one as Mr. Fox, one as Ash. It was pretty funny. I had really good interaction with him. I did the Whackbat sequence. I was able to sit down with Wes and we talked about things like the rules of the game. It was really just a couple of sentences that he had written in the script so I proposed a bunch of ideas and different actions, how the action would work with the pitch, and he and I worked on different things that he wanted to see, and that was really cool! He was really fun to work with even though it was an odd way to work.

WAMG: Let’s talk about BOXTROLLS Have you seen the finished film yet?

BS: I have not! Do you believe it? I have seen all of the sequences because we are able to see all of the sequences on our database, but I have not seen it in one long run.

WAMG: Is BOXTROLLS 100% stop motion?

BS: All of the primary stuff is stop-motion. All of the main characters are stop-motion, but one of the limitations of the medium is how big you can make your sets and how many puppets you can actually have somebody animate out on set. We have used a lot of visual effects to make our world bigger. Sometimes we put up a green screen and do set extensions, which has made the world seem much larger. We’ll do digi-double box trolls or digital crowd characters, so there are scenes in the film where you’ll see dozens of Boxtrolls, but maybe six of them are practical and the rest are effects. There’s a shot in all of the teasers that we have done, it’s kind of a medium close-up of maybe 10 Boxtrolls and they’re all clapping their box. Three of those are practical and you cannot tell the difference. One of the reasons you cannot tell the difference is that all of our visual effects are informed by practical elements, so you’re not just making up a texture. You are looking at a real texture and they’re copying the texture and you’re looking at the real paint jobs of the puppets, so they’re copying the paint jobs of the puppets. So everything is informed. Even in PARANORMAN, the clouds looked like a bridal veil. That was a running theme, a running design element through the film, and we did some practical tests on stage early on, rotating it around. Our rigging department, lead by Ollie Jones, made this rig that you can spin but what you couldn’t get from it was the vaporous feeling of clouds. But the effects department was able to take those practical elements and practical tests and copy them, make models of the tools, just like the practical element, and they were able to manipulated in ways in the computer that we couldn’t do out on stage.

WAMG: So what is the next big project you are going to be working on?

BS: I’m working on something, but I can’t tell you much about it right now. Sorry! We are six shots in the can but it’s still under wraps. I think the studio is still trying to make a deal with the distributor for the next bunch of films so there will probably a big media splash soon.

WAMG: On August 2nd you were going to be here in St. Louis at COCA. They are showing PARANORMAN, then you are speaking. Are you bringing some of your puppets with you?

BS: Yes I’ll have a couple of puppets with me. I think I’m going to get up before the film and say a few words, then will have a screening of PARANORMAN, and then will have a Q&A. I hope a lot of people stick around. I’ll have a Norman with me and I hope to have a Boxtroll with me, so I’ll have a few of the puppets that people can come and take a look at.

WAMG: Well, good luck with BOXTOLLS and all of your future projects and I hope you have a great time when you’re back in St. Louis.

BS: Thanks a lot.