Stop-motion movie Wildwood is a staggering masterpiece

28 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by BiraIgnacio
(cbc.ca)

12 Comments

Melatonic

9 hours ago

Saw it last night and it was incredible. Magnum Opus of stop motion. The amount of effort and expertise is extremely impressive

CoastalCoder

13 hours ago

I don't want to see Hacker News become a site where products are promoted, so I'm ambivalent (at best) about this submission.

That said... The embedded YouTube trailer really is quite compelling, IMHO.

BiraIgnacio

13 hours ago

Ah, sorry, not what I meant at all. But I get how it might look.

I just found it amazing work, 16-years-in-the-making! I can't think of starting anything thing that will take more than a few days to finish :D

IncreasePosts

12 hours ago

16 years to make a movie seems more like a failure of some sort - either of vision, or funding.

eezynow

5 hours ago

or.. you know.. a masterpiece.

elekdfk

10 hours ago

weird - i do not see you making this comment on all the huge number of products that are promoted on this site

prvc

12 hours ago

A "stop-motion movie" that makes heavy use of CGI---what's the point?

Austizzle

9 hours ago

All of the "important stuff" is practical stop motion. CGI is only used in cases where stop motion is either impossible (fire, waterfalls, the distant backgrounds of shots) or impractical (the wide shot of a scene with thousands of people)

And as a general rule, the main subjects of a shot are never CGI.

So the point is- it's stop motion. The amount of hand crafted and hand animated art on display is astonishing.

Disclaimer- I work there. In a support role, not directly, but I'm lucky enough to get to see the insane level of hard work everybody is putting in for years and years for a single movie

a_e_k

8 hours ago

Saw it with my family last last night and we all loved it. I was amazed at how much Laika has upped their game with crowds and FX. That, and I definitely noticed things like the subsurface on the skin and smoother motion in general.

I previously worked at Pixar for 11 years on the RenderMan team and would sometimes talk to some of your CGI folks. I'm crossing my fingers that this is Laika's year at the Oscars.

prvc

7 hours ago

3d printing a sequence of computer animated models and photographing them stretches the definition of "practical stop motion" as I understand it to mean. This is quite apart from the issue of using post-production CGI.

kadoban

10 hours ago

Almost any movie makes heavy use of CGI. Combining them with practical effects, like stop-motion, yields better results than sticking to one technique.

The practical grounds the digital, and the digital enhances the practical.