Wildwood's heads of department on an inch-tall mouse puppet, 900 one-second shots and performance rigs

Ryan Gaur's Skwigly interview (October 23) brings together five of Wildwood's department heads: director Travis Knight, costume designer Deborah Cook, production designer Nelson Lowry, head of character and practical effects Oliver Jones, and head of character animation Brad Schiff.

Lowry puts the film at 136 unique locations, double the count on Kubo and the Two Strings, and says the characters and costumes were designed first so the environments could be built around their shape language. Cook explains that costumes made for a character at 1/5 scale need an internal understructure so the fabric moves with the puppet's body rather than against it.

Jones describes Septima, a mouse character who rides on a lead character's shoulder. The usual approach would be an overscale asset about ten inches tall. Instead the team built what he calls the studio's smallest animatable puppet: barely an inch tall, with a fully articulated armature on a cast-bronze chest block, ball-and-socket shoulders and waterjet-cut limbs. Animators perform it with tweezers.

Schiff gives the shape of the edit. The film has about 2,700 shots, roughly 1,000 more than Missing Link, and only 20 had to be reshot. About 900 shots run a second or less, cut at live-action pace, and animators move between four units at any given time. He also says rigs have moved beyond holding a puppet up against gravity: LAIKA now builds its own performance rigs for more precise, nuanced movement. The Septima build is folded into the Wiki's armature page.