Dec 27, 2019

How they did It: The "Missing Link" production designer Nelson Laurie about the complexity of hybrid production

Seasoned production designer Nelson Lowry has honed his craft on Laika's stop-motion hybrid features. He has worked on Paranorman, Kubo and the Two Strings, and most recently Chris Butler's Missing Link. This epic tale of an English explorer's adventures with a Yeti-like Sasquatch is considered the studio's most ambitious film to date.

Prior to being at Laika, Lowry moved around different productions, including Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (as art director). After three features with Laika, which is based in Portland, Oregon, he's embraced a creative process that thrives on challenges.

“Things that used to be insurmountable are now kind of common to us,” he tells Cartoon Brew over the phone. “And because the directive from [Laika president] Travis Knight is to keep pushing the boundaries of the technology, we have to do that on each show.” Effects like water simulation, digital backgrounds, and particularly the atmospheric perspective in certain shots are feasible now and add value to the storytelling.

On Missing Link, Lowry's key tasks as production designer included meetings with director of photography Chris Peterson and vfx supervisor Steve Emerson. They would take the most difficult storyboards and categorize them into what they called “buckets,” each with a different level of complexity.

The first level of complexity was a foreground element with just a matte painting behind it. Next, it would be a foreground element, a background miniature, and a small vfx extension. Each categorization kept raising the stakes of difficulty, cost, and time. This process helped the team to decide what could be feasibly constructed physically, and what would need to be created digitally.

Lowry's team consistently collaborated with Laika's in-house vfx department to bring each piece of the project into existence. “We're not just giving them marching orders; we're working with them and they're bringing stuff back to us,” he says, adding that considering how tangible the stop-motion discipline is, his work feels essentially like building live-action films.

Below, Lowry goes into greater detail about his work on Missing Link. He talks about what was built and what was done in post-production, the scale of the characters, the cultural references he employed, his fascination with color palettes, and the specifics of sets like the imposing Shangri-La or the Santa Ana train station.