Released July 11th, 2012

Page count: 160 pages

Size: 9.75” x 11.5”

The Art and Making of ParaNorman

By Jed Alger

Preface by Travis Knight

Forewords by Chris Butler and Sam Fell

Published by Chronicle Books

Distributed by Raincoast (Canada)

http://www.raincoast.com/

http://www.chroniclebooks.com/

– Gift Idea –

Over the past few weeks, we have been featuring books and other items marked with the red and green gift idea tag.  This is the third in this year’s series.  

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The Art and Making of ParaNorman Book Review By Erin V.

Aptly named, this is the book about the art and making of ParaNorman.  The book is divided into seven chapters, and each one has a good bit of text included (full text pages) along with the images of the process behind the scenes.

The interesting thing about reading about ParaNorman’s behind the scenes process versus other animated films, is that fact that it is not CG or hand-drawn, but rather stop-motion.  So it is interesting to see not only the photos of the animators working on the film as well as all of the little models, but also the amount of artwork (both drawn on paper and on the computer) that still goes into the film.  Each character has to be designed before it is actually modeled out (complete with its unique moveable skeletal structure for the actual animating process).

The attention to details that went into the film, including lighting, animating, and clothing the characters, are covered well in this book.  Seeing the bare-bones so to speak, of every aspect of the process for creating a stop-motion film is fascinating indeed, and fans of this style of animation are going to love perusing through the pages here.  We also get a brief history of LAIKA (the studio behind ParaNorman, as well as Coraline), as well as a look at how a touch of CG was used for the finale’s more complicated effects.

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To find out more about the The Art and Making of ParaNorman, or other books, visit Raincoast’s website here.