LAIKA's stop-motion 'Wildwood' featurette is the perfect antidote for AI slop

Owning horses has been one of the most transformative experiences in my life

From 11 on, I was involved in horses, and coming back to them has been this immeasurable experience

My name's Matt Cole, and I am the lead armaturist at Laika

I grew up right down the road from Laika. As a kid, working with horses helped me build my confidence up

I've carried that professionally through my career. I help run the armature department

An armature makes tiny little puppet skeletons, ball and sockets, hinges, designing a CAD to machining on a mill to assembling

It's really like an important step with the stop motion process. With Wildwood, we were tasked with building quadrupeds

and the animals have their own expression, their own musculature. We ended up making basically a Swiss watch inside of the puppet There are gears that drive movement There specialized joints to be able to rotate So we used to make a Swiss watch inside of the puppet There are gears that drive movement There specialized joints to be able to rotate So we have to nail down both the look and the performance

for the animators. Those are equally important. The end result is amazing

Seeing it actually out on set and under the lens, it just looks perfect

it's a big responsibility to be an ambassador for these animals and i'm really proud of what

we've accomplished in wildwood it was truly a full team that would problem solve together to

come up with solutions for how we build a stop motion horse i love the whole entire process of

stop motion it's endlessly challenging every single film is pushing things further and further

So the horse was kind of the ultimate challenge and this personally circular thing for me to revisit my childhood as an adult

That's part of the magic of stop motion at Laika. We're always looking for that way back