Skellington Productions

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Photos from Cinfex issue #56.

If you look carefully at the lower portion of the photograph, you will see a ThingM being used to shoot the puppet animation a single frame at a time. The animator, Owen Klatte, is doing "substution animation", whereby he interchanges different puppet heads with pre-articulated facial expressions to create the effect of spoken dialogue. The video monitor will playback video frames previously taken in conjunction with the film exposures in order to make sure the present frame matches up smoothly in the animated sequence. When the frame is properly set-up to be committed on film, ThingM takes the next camera exposure.

These 3 guys were most enthusiastic about getting ThingMs in use on this show: camera operator Eric Swenson, director of photography Pete Kozachik, and animator Paul Berry. Pete got the studio to equip all the 35mm Mitchell cameras with ThingM controls. More than a dozen camera set-ups were shooting multiple scenes simultaneously with different animation teams.

Years later, Skellington Productions went on to do the puppet animation scenes in "James and the Giant Peach". In the interim, many animators and production techs worked at another animation studio, Danger Productions, on a Saturday morning TV series, "Bump in the Night". The Danger crew ordered their own batch of ThingMs for nearly twice the number of camera set-ups.

Another article about "The Nightmare Before Christmas" is posted at this web site about animation productions.