Building a tiny world

 

In the creation of Coraline the movie, every single tiny detail was hand crafted by someone on the team. From every blade of grass, to every strand of hair on the puppet's heads. Nothing was computer generated, Henry Selick did not want anything computer generated. Even the flame that burns up the doll of her parents in the fire place was created by John Allan Armstrong. It took him about 3-4 weeks and 1,200 drawings to create the illusion of fire in that short scene. The same goes for the fog throughout the movie, Selick hired a team to focus on creating fog with the help of using air guns and cutting and pasting clips of manipulated dry ice.

OTHER FACTS:

• 1,300 square feet of fake fur was used to stand in for live and/or fake grass
• The snow was made of superglue and baking soda
• Over 130 sets were built across 52 different stages at the studios; spanning 183,000 square feet, the 52 different stages were the most ever deployed for a stop-motion animated feature. 
•  The leaves in the scene where Coraline is returning to the well were created by spraying popcorn pink and cutting it up into little pieces.