OMg someone shut him up!

Trailer:





Today we SVA students get to have a special screening "Coraline" at the Theatre in Union Square, NYC.
The new stop motion animation is nothing less than ground breaking,
from the director of "The nightmare before Christmas" and "James and the Giant Peach", Henry Selick.

We got to be in the same room with these industry legends doing Q and A after the 30 min screening,
and one idiot freshman had to ask "Why did you pick a similar style to Nightmare before Christmas to do Coraline? ...That Gothic theme seems to go from one film to the other."

I can tell the director and the crew members were puzzled by it, and almost don't want to answer... but they answered nicely "Art is in the eyes of the beholder, but I think there's nothing similar between Coraline and Nightmare before Christmas..."

That's right!
There's nothing similar to Coraline compare to Nightmare before Christmas, the character designs are different, the color palettes are different, the story telling is different, the techniques are different. The only thing the same would be it's a kid-tale that has some darkness to it with the same director!

I can't believe an SVA student asked that question, and further more he wouldn't stop and think and shut up.
All of us were sooooo embarrassed by that one stupid question! (Ideally no question is too stupid to ask, but this one sure sounds like one!) Wasting all of our time! A good 5 minutes!
Other people could have asked better questions!


Thoughts were racing in my mind, "Someone shut this stupid guy up!"

One stop motion major senior was so angry about it afterwards saying he should have gotten beat up for it.

(On the note, some of our stop motion people did ask very very good technical questions, like how to animate doll hair, it turns out their secret is to put wire into the clumps of hair in the main character; the details to the fabrics- they hired some nutty knitter for the clothes, and all patterns on clothes are hand printed, designed, wired differently.... constructions-they used about 400 expressions for Caroline alone, 600 mouse dolls, and 40+ dolls for Caroline; and kids from NYU did ask some good script writing questions, like how to adopt a screen play from a book, what are the challenges etc.

The director mentioned something interesting about adopting a screen play from a book:
"A movie is a movie, a book is a book. When a movie is too true to the book, it doesn't work. My suggestion is... if you need to adopt a script from a book, don't talk to its writer for the first year..... the better the book, the harder it is to adopt it into screen play...... there's nothing different from writing a screen play for live action compare to animation."

A stop motion student asked whether it was a pain to get investors to let them do stop motion since CG is the trend right now, boy, did they have an reaction. lol~ Apparently, those investors were not easy to deal with.


I stayed after with some of my stop motion classmates and my friend Jackie to listen to more talks from those pros, it was a very exciting time. We got to leave our contacts with them, and saw them pack away their dolls. lol


I'm excited by this film, I will go see it when it comes out next year in Theatre. 2009, Feb.