About the film
- The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Sellick
- stop motion animation
- 1hr 16, 1993
About this gig
- I was so honoured to get to work on this iconic film in the Puppet Fabrication Department. There were about 100 people working on this film on any given day, so I was just a tiny cog in a very big machine. However, I learned so many tricks on this film from the pros I got to work with, and I still use many of those tricks today on my own puppets and creature projects.
- We all had our own puppets that we were responsible for. Since I was a late comer to the Fabrication Department, and a relative beginner in the Special Effects Industry, I mostly worked on secondary characters, such as The Corpse Family, Mr. Hyde, and others — however I also did get to work quite often on Jacks and Sallys, as things would get extremely crazy some days and all the fabricators would be busy fixing puppets.
- Near the end of the project I got the job of designing Oogie Boogie’s muscles, and I was also in charge of making about 100,000 animatable, jelly-bean sized bugs to come out of him (spoiler alert!) when he dies.
- Love my old Fabrication pals… Facundo Rabaudi, Mike Wick, Lauren Vogt, Elise Robertson, T. Reid Norton, Grace Murphy, and Liz Jennings — and our colourful supervisor, Bonita DeCarlo.