Madame Tutli-Putli's making-of revisits how composited human eyes gave its puppets their gaze

The National Film Board of Canada's blog resurfaced a four-part making-of interview with directors Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski on Madame Tutli-Putli (2007), revisiting one of stop motion's most distinctive visual-effects techniques: real human eyes composited onto the puppets' faces. Portrait painter Jason Walker filmed actress Laurie Maher's eye and eyebrow performance after the puppet animation was already shot, then used a colour-coded timing system he called the "Wunderbar" to align her gaze to each puppet head's frame-by-frame orientation before compositing the eyes on in After Effects, matching the set's lighting and the puppet's residual motion (reported in detail by fxguide at the time of the film's release). No CGI was used anywhere in the finished shots. The technique, and how it differs from rig-removal and CG face-replacement systems used on other stop-motion productions, is now written up on the Wiki's new Compositing human eyes onto puppet faces page.