Set in the Victorian era (mid- to late-1800s), Missing Link reflects that time’s rich color palette and love of vibrant, intricate designs.
Pattern and Color
The Rule of Thirds
Missing Link’s highly stylized design of characters and objects is influenced by the rule of thirds. It’s not actually a rule, but a guideline for composing images based on the idea of putting important parts of the image 1/3 or 2/3 away from the sides (or top and bottom).
Missing Link employed several new digital effects, but also expanded the development of physical puppet technologies.
Missing Link employed several new digital effects, but also expanded the development of physical puppet technologies.
The Elephant
Animating the elephant, with its complex rolling gait, called for new puppet and rigging technologies.
The Design
The Movement
The Shoot
Mr. Link
Link is the heaviest lead character ever created for a LAIKA film to date, and one of the most complicated.
The Fur
The Pants
Mr. Link’s Mouth
Breathing Life
Mr. Link was affectionately described by the LAIKA team as a “Hairy Avocado,” loveable and cuddly on the outside. On the inside, he is a nest of metal parts that includes a mechanical belly mover, a chest breather, squash-and-stretch devices, worm gears, and racks and pinions. His “fur petals” were attached in layers, much the way feathers lie on a bird’s neck, to facilitate life-like squashing and stretching. All the puppets for Missing Link were built approximately 20% smaller than the puppets of previous LAIKA films. This scale difference allowed sets to be smaller and kept Mr. Link, the largest character in the film, at an animator-friendly size of 16” tall.
Concept Art, Missing Link, 2019.
Even though the props are miniature, many are made the same way as the full-size versions.
The Stagecoach
A seemingly simple scene required an enormous number of moving parts.
The Train
Although it is a prop, the train ran on rails just like a real one.
The Ship
When a prop is too big to move, everything else must move around it.
3D Printing
LAIKA is considered a leader in the use of Rapid Prototyping (RP or 3D printing) for facial animation and was awarded a Scientific and Engineering Oscar® plaque in 2016 for its innovation in the field
Faces
Missing Link is LAIKA’s first film to 3D print custom animated facial performances for every character in every shot of the film
Visual Effects
Computer-generated (CG) effects are used to enhance and extend traditional stop-motion filming techniques. Missing Link used more CG effects, assets, and characters than any LAIKA film before.
Hybrid Filmmaking
LAIKA pioneered the use of CGI (Computer- Generated Imagery) to expand the visual scope of stop- motion beyond the animation stage. This enabled them to do things not typically found in stop-motion, like creating large crowds, big effects, or wide vistas. Of the 1,486 shots in Missing Link, 465 shots required CG set extensions, 460 required CG special effects, and 325 required CG animation.
Missing Link called for some of the largest sets built for a LAIKA film.
World Building
The globe-trotting adventure Missing Link had 1,486 individual shots, the most of any LAIKA feature to that point. The most basic building block of filmmaking, a shot refers to the space the audience sees inside a single film frame. The film broke many records for the studio, with more than 110 sets and 65 unique locations, more than in any previous LAIKA production. Many custom-made and unconventional materials were used to create the film’s landscapes, such as silk-screened and laser-cut craft paper, textured fabrics, plastic beads, tissue paper, miniature railroad materials, goat hair, foam balls, and blacklight paint.