Interview: "Frankenweenie" Animation Director Mark Waring

We Are Movie Geeks recently interviewed Frankenweenie animation director Mark Waring. Waring discussed how the stop-motion animation process on Frankenweenie was unique, what the crew was like, Tim Burton's influences, and more:

We Are Movie Geeks: Congratulations on FRANKENWEENIE. I took my daughters to see it and we loved it.

Mark Waring: Oh good, thanks.

WAMG: Did you grow up a fan of stop-motion animation?

MW: I was always interested on those things. Whenever there was something with stop-motion on TV I would always watch it, but it was never something that I thought I would end up doing. I was always interested in art and design and films as well but it wasn’t until I was in college that I was introduced to animation through a course. It was then I realized that this was what I wanted to do. It was design, art, sculpting, film, all combined and it was something I could do for a living. Then I started studying the history of animation and thought this was really wanted I wanted to do.

WAMG: I saw where you had recently participated in a panel discussion on Ray Harryhausen.

MW: Yeah, I’ve done a couple of those. Tony Dawson, who’s written four or five books on Harryhausen, runs the Ray Harryhausen Foundation, invited me to do that. Ray has never thrown anything away. He’s kept everything he’s created throughout his whole life right down to models he made when he was twelve. There’s a whole history and archive there and Tony is helping him look after that. He’s got me involved in various talks and panel discussions. Harryhausen has been such an influence and has helped me so much in my art. He was a pioneer and his techniques are still relevant. We still reference his monster characters. The animators all get together and look at his films and study what he did and how he worked.

WAMG: What are the key differences between what Harryhausen was doing decades ago and what you are doing with a project like FRANKENWEENIE?

MW: Technically it’s exactly the same. It’s basically down to, as an animator, you’re standing in front of a puppet that got an armature inside and you’ve got to bring it to life. Turn it into something that’s moving in a believable, if not necessarily realistic, way. You have to give it emotion, which I think is what Ray Harryhausen did best. He made them angry, or frightened, or whatever they were and we’ve got to do the same thing. We’ve obviously got more technology around us now.

WAMG: And more people. Harryhausen pretty much did everything on his own.

MW: Absolutely. He did all of that on his own. He made the puppets. His dad helped make the armatures. His mom helped make the costumes, but he shot it and did virtually everything on his own. With the technology we have now, we can check our work, which he couldn’t do. We can walk away, have a cup of tea, look at it, and come back and fix anything. He had none of that, he worked blind. He had no references whatsoever. Sometimes what we do is have our animators work blind like Harryhausen did, just for practice, to kind of get into the swing of it. It’s tricky. Harryhausen developed these metal pointers that he could measure exactly how far he moved, or would need to move, say one of the Hydra’s seven heads. We still use that tool today, in spite of all the technology at our disposal.

WAMG: Did you grow up a fan of monster movies?

MW: Sort of, yeah. If anything like that came on the TV, I would watch it. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing but over here, in the UK, those sort of things weren’t really shown on TV like they were in America, but it was definitely something I was interested in.

WAMG: I noticed in FRANKENWEENIE Victor’s parents are at one point watching HORROR OF DRACULA with Christopher Lee on their TV. Who’s idea was that?

MW: Oh, I’m sure that was Tim Burton’s choice. After all, FRANKENWEENIE is Tim Burton’s childhood. Victor and Sparky are Tim and his dog. That’s what he based everything on, the whole idea of a boy and his dog and what that meant to him, he just packs FRANKENWEENIE with his world and I suppose HORROR OF DRACULA is just a film Tim remembers fondly from his childhood and that’s why he chose to include it.

WAMG: Did Tim Burton give you much creative leeway with FRANKENWEENIE, or was it strictly storyboarded?

MW: He was involved a lot, especially in the early development stages. All of the character designs come straight out of his sketchbooks. We’d worked together in the past and all of the inspiration comes through him. I think the storyboarding style as well. The early stages of the process set the tone and the film shows that. There’s very little in the film that doesn’t have his fingerprints all over it. That said, he’s very open to suggestions. He likes to surround himself with people who know him so a lot of the crew from THE CORPSE BRIDE also worked on FRANKENWEENIE.

WAMG: How many animators worked on FRANKENWEENIE?

MW: I guess around thirty. There are different levels of animators. We have four or five lead animators, then fifteen or so who are crafting every day doing their work. After that there’s a team of assistants who animate as well. Some are good at intimate character work, some are broader at animating the broader action scenes. So we mix and match and steer people towards their strengths.

WAMG: I remember when Tim Burton made MARS ATTACKS fifteen years ago and wanted to use stop motion, but decided he could make CGI look more like what he had in mind. Why do you think he went back to old school stop motion for CORPSE BRIDE and FRANKENWEENIE?

MW: I think partly stop motion is a physical thing, it’s a tactile thing. You can see the work that’s gone into it. I would have loved for MARS ATTACKS to have been stop motion. When I first heard about the film I thought it would be the perfect homage to ’50s sci-fi and B movies and flying saucers and all those things. It would have been perfect if they’d gone down that route. They had originally wanted to do it as stop motion. They had brought some puppet people in and had made armatures and I think it was quite last minute that they actually pulled the plug and went with CGI. They may have been worried about the time it was going to take with deadlines or whatever and I think if they would have gone that way, it would have been fantastic. There’s a magic to the art of stop motion that CGI just doesn’t have. It doesn’t mean that CGI is wrong or that one style is better than the other, I just think with stop motion you better see the craft on display.

WAMG: Had you seen the FRANKENWEENIE from the ’80s before you got involved with this project?

MW: Oh yes, we used that film as a reference for so many of the shots, but obviously the story has been fleshed out much more. I think it had its own mood and momentum but the feel of that short is what we were going for.

WAMG: There’s a short on the Blu-ray release of FRANKENWEENIE titled ‘Sparky vs the Flying Saucer’. What can you tell me about that?

MW: Well, I directed it and it was great to have the opportunity to do that. In the film itself, Victor is showing making a little film, a home movie with Sparky acting as a giant monster and the idea behind ‘Sparky vs the Flying Saucers’ is that this is another film that Victor has made with Sparky, and perhaps he has made a whole series of these films that he can show to his parents. This one is a Mars Attacks type of thing really with space aliens and Sparky in a space suit and all.

WAMG: Was this Tim Burton’s story?

MW: It was from Tim’s idea but the actual script itself was by Derek [Frey] who is Tim’s assistant and he and I discussed the idea and we fleshed it out with the storyboarders and made this little film. We made it towards the end of the shoot and thought about maybe tagging it on to the end of the film but it’s now on the DVD.

WAMG: Do you see possibly making some more Sparky shorts?

MW: I’d love to. I love the concept that there could be more of these films featuring Sparky hidden away in Victor’s attic. Who knows? I think we created a lovely world. Maybe we could make more shorts, perhaps a cowboy film or any classic film genres.

WAMG: What’s next for Mark Waring?

MW: I would love to work on more features. I’d love to work with Tim again. I love the stop motion format. In the meantime though I’m working on commercials in London and keeping busy.

WAMG: Good luck with your future projects and thanks for talking to We Are Movie Geeks.

MW: Thank you.

A Visit to the "Frankenweenie" Set

Jamie Portman of dose.ca had the opportunity to visit the London set of the stop-motion film, Frankenweenie. Posted below is the in-depth article in its entirety, offering insights into Tim Burton's approach to revisiting this material, the expansion of the story from the original live-action short from 1984, the work of the animators, and much more. Beware of a few SPOILERS!:

LONDON - It's an undistinguished low-slung building on Sugar House Lane, a dingy street whose picturesque name belies the cheerlessness of this East London neighbourhood. Yet if you penetrate its drab exterior, you enter a wonderland -- the wonderland of filmmaker Tim Burton's spooky imagination.
This is where Burning Windmills Productions has taken up residence -- an appropriate name for the company behind Burton's upcoming animated feature, Frankenweenie. Both the company name and the film's title evoke memories of the legendary 1931 film, Frankenstein, and the scene where the townsfolk react in frenzy to the rampaging monster in their midst.
"Remember the scene where they run up to a burning windmill at the end?" producer Allison Abbate asks. "That's why we're calling our company that. And we definitely have a burning windmill in our movie!"
That, and a lot more. Frankenweenie, which Disney has set for autumn release with a high-powered vocal cast that includes Winona Ryder, Martin Short and Martin Landau, is Burton's much-anticipated full-length reworking of his 1984 animated short of the same name. Then, as now, with this tale of a boy named Victor who restores his dead dog Sparky to life, Burton was rendering affectionate homage to the horror films that enchanted him in his childhood.
That enchantment permeates the labyrinthine corridors of this astonishing studio. You arrive at the homemade laboratory where the young Victor, the kid who loves monster movies, goes to work on Sparky in the aftermath of his pet's fatal collision with a car -- and if you're reminded of the creepy setting in which Boris Karloff creaked into life in the original Frankenstein, Burton will be delighted.
Move on and you'll find the gloomy pet cemetery, which plays such a crucial role in the story.
"Of course, there's a graveyard, since this is a Tim Burton movie," Abbate says cheerfully.
Then you're suddenly in the midst of the actual filming of a dramatic moment. A dedicated science teacher has lost his job, condemned by the community for encouraging a spirit of inquiry among Victor and his fellow students. You watch the kids' beloved Mr. Rzykruski leaving a hostile PTA meeting, moving sadly down the aisle of the auditorium while a sea of faces watches his humiliation.
This sequence has a live-action intensity that surges out at you in playback. But of course, it's not live action at all -- and this is the miracle being wrought during every second of filming.
The scene is being shot in a tiny playing area maybe half the size of an average living room. As with all the production's 35 shooting units, Burton's artistic team is working in a toy-sized setting, where every prop is reduced to scale. And while Mr. Rzykruski and his tormentors will loom large on the big screen, just as the diminutive King Kong did nearly 80 years ago, they are, in actuality, small and brilliantly engineered puppets whose movements -- right down to the flicker of an eyelash or twitch of the lip -- are being meticulously created frame by frame by the tiniest of adjustments and manipulations.
Animator Mark Waring towers over his miniature performers as he sets up the shot. Remote-control cameras are in place, but that's only the beginning.
"There are 40 characters who've got to move, and I'll be right in the middle, trying to duck up and down out of the way of a shot," Waring says. "Rzykruski's going to be walking down this pathway, and all the other characters are watching him go, and will be turning as he passes. So I'm doing this literally frame by frame. All these heads turn a tiny degree. And I do it again and again."
Mr. Rzykruski's shifting facial expressions help heighten the drama of the moment -- which is why another animator, Danail Kreve, is available with a choice of 36 different miniature mouths to slot into the embattled teacher's jaw.
Welcome to the old-fashioned world of stop-motion animation. Its distinguished antecedents include: the 1933 King Kong; Ray Harryhausen's science-fiction adventures of the 1950s; Wallace and Gromit; and the groundbreaking contributions of Canada's National Film Board.
Burton brought the process into an eerie new dimension in 1993, when he produced The Nightmare Before Christmas, and then explored it further with The Corpse Bride.
The original Frankenweenie lasted only 28 minutes, but Burton is convinced there's an audience out there for a full-length version.
"We've added more to the beginning, so you get more of a sense of the relationship that the kid has with his dog," Abbate says. "We also added to the ending, so that now, it's not just about Sparky and whether the townspeople accept and embrace him.
"Here, the secret gets . . . out, and other people try to do the same thing, with disastrous results. So you set up that nice conflict of Sparky being different from other creations, because he was created out of love, not out of competition or power."
Burton also has a screen version of Dark Shadows currently in the works, so he isn't on hand today. But his inventive spirit is present everywhere. The puppetry, including an intriguing collection of Burtonesque monsters, is a prime example.
"They're all out of Tim's imagination," Abbate notes. "He's personally created them. He did the character designs, and they've been transferred directly from his drawings to sculpted puppets. Not since Nightmare Before Christmas has there been something which has spun so purely from the mind of Tim as this one."
The Victor puppet is a little over 15 inches tall. Sparky is 4.2 inches long, and there's one small puppet which is only five-eighths of an inch in size.
Burton's credits -- Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, a controversial Alice In Wonderland, Beetlejuice, to name only a few -- reveal a filmmaker who shuns the conventional. Frankenweenie is no exception. Yes, there will be a 3-D release, but it's being shot in old-fashioned black and white -- and that, Abbate acknowledges, "makes it both controversial and exciting at the same time.
"This particular story hearkens back to a movie Tim was inspired by. He got excited about making movies by seeing those old black-and-white horror films. And he really feels that black and white underlines the emotional quality of the movies and the bereft feeling that Victor experiences when Sparky passes. He felt it was the only way he could tell the story."
Abbate is the award-winning producer of some of the most innovative animated movies of recent years - among them, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Corpse Bride. She's a huge fan of the stop-motion process.
"It's not just that it's fun, but that it's so old-school. Yet it still works. Everything that people do here is so creative. Everyone here is an artist, down to the tiniest prop."
And those props are tiny. Many can be held in the palm of the hand. "This is Victor's chair," Abbate says, passing over a miniature chair. "Feel how heavy this thing is." She's now holding a weighty thumb-sized book and lets it fall with a thump. Every tiny prop is meticulously crafted. Yet they aren't fragile. "That's because everything has to be so stable."
As with all classic horror movies, events start going horrifically wrong, as Victor's friends try to repeat his experiments using their own pets, often with hilariously creepy results. Abbate is mum on details, but she does drop tantalizing hints about a "mummy" hamster, a ferocious werecat, a Godzilla turtle, and monkeys who become something out of Gremlins.
So what is Burton creating here? An animated horror movie? A dark comedy? Not exactly.
"Most of the time, it's a heartfelt love story between a boy and a dog," Abbate says matter-of-factly. "But it's done with real affection for the old movies of that genre that inspired Tim."
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