Laika’s ‘Wildwood’ VFX Supervisor Steve Emerson Details the Making of Travis Knight’s Stop-Motion Epic

Laika’s “Wildwood” took more than five years of stage animation and visual-effects work, with 2,776 shots requiring a carefully orchestrated mix of handmade puppets, miniature sets and digital imagery. But for production VFX supervisor Steve Emerson, the defining challenge of Travis Knight’s fantasy epic was ensuring that the technology served the stop-motion performances rather than overwhelming them.

At View Conference in Turin on Tuesday, Emerson walked audiences through the Portland-based studio’s most elaborate production yet, from rebuilding a local landmark to creating a nightmarish, seemingly sentient mass of ivy.

Emerson detailed 265 weeks from the start of stage animation to VFX delivery, 132 practical sets across 117 locations, 223 handcrafted puppets and 142,030 replacement faces. A single shot required 1,124 face replacements, which he described as a stop-motion record. He also offered a more personal measure of the time involved.

“My daughter, she was in elementary school when I started working on the film in February of 2020,” he recalled. “She is now a senior in high school. She is considering colleges. She drives a car, and she is dating.”

The film contains nearly twice as many shots as Laika’s 2019 feature “Missing Link,” which Emerson said comprised 1,486. “We were essentially going to be making two films,” he said. “But beyond that, the shots themselves were infinitely more complex.”

One example was Portland’s Pittock Mansion, recreated for a rooftop escape involving protagonist Prue McKeel. Its miniature took 11 and a half weeks and 45 to 50 artists to build, measuring 14 feet wide and 10 feet tall. Separate sections were constructed at puppet scale, allowing animators to stage performances that could be integrated with miniature elements and digital backgrounds.

“There’s nothing that beats real glass, real cameras, with real camera people lining up shots on a real set,” Emerson said. When lighting a miniature proved troublesome, the crew employed motion-control rigs to capture multiple exposures, enabling the lighting to be adjusted later in compositing. Another sequence required the art department to assemble a temporary green-screen stand-in because the full-scale set was occupied.

The presentation’s most unusual example concerned an ivy-covered nightmare shot Emerson dubbed the “Sam Raimi shot,” in which vines seize and manipulate a skeleton. The team wanted the plant to behave like a sinister character rather than a conventional computer-generated effect.

“We weren’t looking for a simple procedural solution. We didn’t want to do something in Houdini as is typical,” he explained. “We wanted to make it as hard on ourselves as possible.”

Artists recreated practical ivy in digital form, then used wire, cotton and stop-motion tests to establish its movement. A breakthrough came from filming wires pulled away from miniature trees and playing the footage backward, producing something that felt unnaturally alive. “It’s weird, and it’s twitchy, and it’s aggressive, and it’s nightmarish, and it was exactly the look that we were gunning for,” Emerson said.

That interplay between practical work and digital effects also shaped character animation. Rather than animate every puppet simultaneously, the studio sometimes shot them in separate passes against blue screens, giving animators more room to concentrate on individual performances. “So whatever we need to do in order to empower those animators, we do it,” Emerson said.

Knight’s ambitions, Emerson explained, were rooted in his attachment to Portland and Colin Meloy’s illustrated fantasy novel, which follows a girl trying to rescue her kidnapped brother. The director saw an opportunity “to basically make a Lord of the Rings movie with stop-motion puppets, to do something nobody had ever done before,” Emerson said.

The film opens in U.S. theaters Oct. 23. For Emerson, the scale of “Wildwood” ultimately came back to the work of its artists. “Every frame bears the imprint of the artist who brought it to life,” he signed off.