The Corpse Bride - A Must See!

The Corpse Bride by Tim Burton is a stop-motion film about the wedding of Victor and Victoria. At the wedding rehearsal, after setting his future mother-in-law's dress on fire, Victor flees. He flees into the forest to practice his vows so he can get it right at his wedding tomorrow. Victor loudly declares his vows and places Victoria's wedding ring on what he thinks is a tree branch. After reciting the vows, Victor discovers that he just married the Corpse Bride and is whisked away to the land of the dead. But the problems are not limited to Victor's new marriage. During the rehearsal, an early wedding guest Barkis Bittern arrives. Later, it turns out that he is there to steal Victoria's hand in marriage. Victor finally decides that he really wants to be with Victoria but will not go back on the vow that he made to the Corpse Bride. Victoria in the mean time is forced into marrying Barkis Bitten. The Corpse Bride realizes that it would be unfair for Victor to be married to a corpse and gives him her best wishes in his marriage to Victoria. The Corpse Bride gets a look at Barkis Bittern and realizes that he is the man who killed her when she was planning on getting married. She tricks him into drinking poison and he dies.

The Corpse Bride is the first feature length film to use stop-motion technology. Stop-motion filming involves stringing together an enormous amount of still images together to create movement. Each image sets the movement forward one set, like a flip comic book. This movie however takes this procedure to a new level. Using a program called Apple Final Cut, the creators digitally enhanced the series to make it more fluent and precise. Another one of this movie's firsts is that it uses digital single lens reflex cameras to take each frame. Digital SLR cameras are used because of their image quality.

The use of color in this film is interesting. The land of the living is primarily colored with dark, dull tones. This world contains a lot of soft, light blues, grays, and dull mauves. In contrast, the land of the dead is brightly colored. The land of the dead is made up of colors that are warm and bright. This color reversal suggests that the living people are in a dull, dreary, and sullen world. The land of the dead is where the party is. The stuffy Victorian lifestyle is left to those with a pulse. Living is a temporary state that the dead mock. The use of color also signifies the life of Victor and Victoria. Victor is clumsy and tends to fall all over himself, while Victoria is forced to marry into money because of her family's financial situation. Her family is living a wealthy lifestyle while there is no money to back it up.

The one aspect of The Corpse Bride that really impressed me was the natural eye movement. The characters eyes would open and close, as well as move to look at people and objects. The movements are fluid and precise. With the knowledge that this film was shot using digitally enhanced stop-motion technology, I suspect that the eye/pupil movement was done using a computer program. I feel that if the eyes were moved inch by inch frame by frame they would appear unnatural and choppy. Observation of real eye movement was possibly a source for the animators. I would venture to guess that the eye movement was something they created before hand and digitally placed it into each scene.

Seeing a movie where the digital art is so spectacular really puts into perspective how lucrative an industry it could be. I was really impressed with the amount of skill that the Burton crew possesses. Even though the photographs, taken with digital SLR cameras, were assembled using Apple Final Cut Pro, I think that a lot of the enhancements could have been done in Photoshop using the techniques that we learned. Specifically, a lot of Photoshop enhancements could be done in the background and in the use of shadows. Backgrounds that are made in Photoshop would be much less expensive than having to physically construct copious numbers of scenes. The cloning tool and the band aid tool could save days of work. The artists could use these tools to remove a stay shadow or a flaw in the print without retaking the sequence. Without a significant amount of knowledge about Apple Final Cut Pro or the process used to make this film, I cannot name all the ways Photoshop can be used. No doubt it is a handy tool to know how to use.

Seeing The Corpse Bride solidified the idea that digital art can be turned into something concrete and functional. It can exist in other mediums other than the screen of your computer. The sky is the limit of digital art. Computers can do a lot of amazing things, and can aid people in extending their artistic limits. I feel that digital art is the way of the future. I am not suggesting that paint brush and canvas are dieing tools, but a newer more user friendly type of art is certainly up and coming.