Jan 20, 2023

Scene Breakdown: The Creative Process behind Apple's Stop-motion series "Shape Island"

Apple TV+'s new Kids and Family series Shape Island came out today to commemorate the occasion, sitting down with director and executive producer Drew Hodges to talk about the scenes of the show and explain the craft behind the stop-motion production process.

Shape Island was co-created by book authors Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, who are executive producers along with Kelli Bixler and Hodges of bix Pix Entertainment. Ryan Pequin is a co-executive producer and head writer.

Set on a charming tropical island, the show turns three characters: serious squares, brave circles, and tricky triangles. The voice cast includes Yvette Nicole Brown as narrator, Harvey Gyllenhaal as square, Scott Adsit as triangle and Gideon Adron as circle.

Drew Hodges: The books of Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett were clearly the basis of our work. In these books, there is a lot of negative space on the pages, which really focuses on the graphic nature of the characters, especially their eyes. We wanted this to feel like the real world and not really stylized or set in voids or anything like that. We also wanted to avoid excessive confusion that could distract us from the characters that are always in the front and center.

Within that world, we wanted to create a warm, cozy, attractive place where viewers would just want to hang out. In the next clip, it's just a log, but it's their hangout. They come here to drink cocoa and eat donuts. What's more cozy than that -

During production, we had to answer the same big question as any other stop-motion project. What material to use, what texture you are looking for, whether to use real plants, make it yourself, if you decide to make it yourself, how to mass produce the necessary works in an economical way.-

Hodges: Trees are always tricky because they have a lot of leaves, so in our show we don't see much of the tree tops. You can see an example of this scene when they are sitting in the log. For plants that end up on the screen, we wanted to use the painterly palette of the book. For a long time, we moved away from paper and tried a variety of plastics that could be modeled, like the trees in this scene, thin plastic sheets formed with vacuum, but for the leaves, we realized that the thickness of other materials on a small scale was really enlarged, so that brought us back to paper. It was.

When you shut down for the day and come back the next morning, always afraid with paper that things are moving or settling down due to changes in the environment It was a risk to use paper, but in the end, we had a lot of success with it. We made hundreds, hundreds of plants, silkscreen them and passed them through a vinyl cutter to make very precise cuts based on the leaf shape vector file we wanted.

Hodges: Our character is essentially built on top of a cage, and the sides are panels, faces, sides and top that pop off. 1. One of the more interesting points of our character is that there are cases where there are limbs and there are cases where there are no limbs.I had to decide whether to put my arm on or not. In the end, using a wire covered with a surgical tube made of latex rubber, you could quickly get a lot, take the paint very well and be flexible. Usually it's very time-consuming to build arms and hands, so we were excited about the solution, but on our way, there were thousands of weapons of arm length we used; there was an entire industry dedicated to making weapons.

Hodges: One of the big challenges of arm 1 was to understand how a character holds something without a hand. The clip here was one of the first scenes we had to figure it out. How do they hold the donut - eventually, I found out that if I stretched the wire inside the arm tube and made a small hole in the donut and continued through the top, I could stick things on the edge. That way of holding something was what we call a donut arm. Whenever the character needs to hold something at the end of his arm, we said bring him a donut arm.

The characters do most of their emotes with their eyes, so we ended up needing five different shapes for their mouths to cover the dialogue. But when we multiplied the shape of the eyes and the shape of the mouth, there were hundreds of combinations that could be used to show emotions.

Hodges: We wanted it to feel like a miniature world on a small scale. When we started, we were translating 2d images so we could make it anything. The letter could have been three inches or three to four times larger than that. The little doll will be really attractive and obviously miniature, but the depth of field is very shallow, so in a sense you can hardly wear shoes. In addition, the grains of sand look larger, and the thickness of the paper is exaggerated...We are smaller than most stop-motion dolls, but we still manipulate them

Hodges: As I said earlier, we wanted to avoid excessive confusion that can distract from characters that should always be front and center. But everyone on the team is telling their own story, so we know that if someone had a hard time making something, we wanted to use it. Often on the set, I saw something moving, and if it moves, we can use it - it can be animated, but in the end, these details are a lot of fun.

Off-screen, sound effects like seagull cawing or wind blowing mean you don't always need a lot of stuff in the frame. You don't always have to look at it to know it's there. We knew the material we were working on and the build we wanted to do, but everything was in service to the story and ultimately worth it