I met Jamie while working on ‘Coraline’ in Portland, OR so I was excited to get the chance to work with him again on the USofTara credit sequence. I was also very interested in testing out the features of his stop-motion software, Dragon.

When I arrived, Jamie had shot a test using a real pop-up book synced to temp music. We studied how real pop-up books moved when opened and wanted to translate this type of movement into the sequence. Many setups were actually built to move like a pop-up but some needed help, and others, well, we took liberties with the movement. We never strayed too far though.

Dragon was a joy to work with. I had previously tested the basic controls but on this job I was able to see what else it could do. Calculating camera moves for our manual rig, Multiple exposures while shooting, and utilizing the Cinematography window were just some of the benefits of working with this amazing program.

-Anthony Scott