Wildwood's voice cast reveal how filmed booth sessions -- not just audio -- became animator reference

Peyton Elizabeth Lee, Jacob Tremblay and director Chris Butler describe how Wildwood's voice performances -- recorded as early as 2021, years before animation began -- were filmed in the booth rather than just captured as audio, so animators could draw on the actors' facial expressions and hand gestures as physical-performance reference, not only their line readings. Lee says the filmmakers "filmed us the whole time recording" and that the team wanted to "create the characters and the feeling of the film...from the inspiration of how we sounded"; Tremblay says he worked from little more than "a little bit of concept art...just some early sketches." Butler frames it as a deliberate escalation of live-action reference: "we were really trying to sell this as real people," using "more live-action reference [than] any typical animation" so the puppet performance reads as unmanipulated. The practice is a documented variant of stop-motion's dialogue-first recording order (see the Wiki concept "Recording the voice track before the puppet moves"), where LAIKA now banks a filmed physical-performance reference alongside the fixed audio track months to years before a puppet is animated.