My favorite movie of all time is The Nightmare before Christmas. I got so fascinated by it so much when I was two until now. I remember five years ago I ask myself, what the special effects in the movie are. I went on online and did a research; I found out that it took almost three years to do the movie because the characters are made out of clay texture. I thought it was a special program that made it look like that. But I was wrong; clay was use for the whole setting and of course computer program was use to add voices, background music, sound effects and etc. The Nightmare before Christmas is not a live action movie with tons of special effects, nor is it a cartoon. Instead, it's stop-motion animation with tons of special effects. Tim Burton's (guy who created the story) masterpiece used sophisticated computer-controlled cameras to execute state-of-the-art camera movement for this feature film's stop-motion animation. Puppets (built of a foam latex material covering intricate metal armatures) were manipulated frame-by-frame on real miniature sets. The painstaking film took nearly three years to complete (dozens of animators and crew members averaged only 60 seconds of film per week), because each different pose or position equaled a 24th of a second. I will recommend to watch in youtube or borrow a friend’s copy of the movie to check out the behind the scene to get the whole concept of how it was made and what are the special effects.
Links
The Nightmare before Christmas 3D - http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4200796.html
The Nightmare before Christmas - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/specialfx/effects/history.html
