The Making Of-The Nightmare Before Christmas

Summary

The Nightmare Before Christmas is presented as a large-scale stop-motion production based on Tim Burton’s early story, character designs, and artwork. Inspired by the holiday specials Burton enjoyed as a child, the story imagines a character who discovers Christmas and tries to recreate it. Director Henry Selick and a crew of more than 100 artists and technicians spent about three years bringing the film to life.

Design and visual style

The film’s look draws on Burton’s earlier work, German Expressionism, Dr. Seuss, and the pen-and-ink illustrations of Ronald Searle and Edward Gorey.

• Halloween Town uses dark silhouettes, etched-looking textures, and a limited palette of black, white, and orange.
• Christmas Town contrasts with Halloween Town through vivid colors and energetic camera movement.
• The human world has more regular shapes and softer colors.

Artists developed designs through sketches and alternatives, then made quarter-scale models to plan set construction, camera angles, and how sets could be divided for the sound stages. Clay and plaster were textured with inscribed lines to make the sets resemble illustrated pages.

From planning to animation

The team storyboarded scenes in detail, combining drawings with dialogue, music, and sound. This allowed them to settle the timing and action before beginning the labor-intensive animation.

Sets were built in miniature but lit to look like full-size movie environments, sometimes using 20–30 small lights per scene. Motion-control cameras enabled programmed moves such as tracking, booming, panning, tilting, and rolling. Camera crews and animators coordinated closely to prepare each shot.

Stop motion was filmed at 24 frames per second: animators adjusted a puppet slightly, took a photograph, and repeated the process. A minute of finished footage could take a week to shoot. Animators acted out and rehearsed performances, tested movements, and refined them with the director before filming final takes. Because a mistake could require reshooting an entire shot, the process demanded careful, consistent work.

Puppets and performance

Sculptors shaped characters in oil-based clay. Each puppet contained a hand-machined metal armature with ball joints and hinges, then was molded in foam latex and finished with paint, clothing, hair, or fur.

The production made about 60 characters, with duplicates bringing the total number of puppets close to 200. Jack’s expressions and speech were created with hundreds of replacement heads. Exposure sheets matched head shapes to dialogue and songs, and replacement pieces were also used to animate blinks. Sally’s expressions were handled with replaceable facial masks, while her pose and camera angle helped convey her off-balance quality.

Atmospheric effects—including snow, smoke, shadows, fire, and lightning—were added in layers. For one effect, packages were traced frame by frame, and hand-drawn ghosts were composited around them.

Production scale

The production used 19 sound stages, with as many as 20 stages and 15 animators working at once. Its scale and detailed, frame-by-frame craft were described as a major technical achievement for stop-motion animation.

Creators and contributors featured

• Tim Burton — Creator of the story concept, characters, tone, and original visual designs
• Henry Selick — Director
• Danny Elfman — Composer, lyricist, and songwriter
• Greg Olsen — Associated with set design and model work
• Gordon Baker — Featured discussing visual-effects work
• Other contributors — Storyboard artists, art directors, set and model builders, sculptors, puppet fabricators, animators, camera operators, lighting crews, and effects artists; most are not named in the subtitles.