from 2008
DON HAHN
talks about creating "Nightmare Before Christmas" for 3D

by Scott Wolf

Don is a two-time Academy Award nominee who has a fascinating background and endless talents. He was at Disney when there was still a great presence of the great original Disney animators and he continues to thrive at Disney. Part of the fun of interviewing Don is his passion for his work and Disney animation, past and present. It's an extreme pleasure to be able to bring you my interviews with Don Hahn.

Scott Wolf: You produced the 3D restoration of "Nightmare Before Christmas"?

Don Hahn: Yes, I did. That was fun.

SW: Is it true that you actually projected the faces on figures to recreate it?

DH: Yes, it is. It's like the Madame Leota effect (the head in the crystal ball) in the "Haunted Mansion." So if you have a CG coffee cup, it's a flat piece of film so what we would do is build a featureless piece of geometry that looks like the coffee cup and if you project the film back onto it you get a three dimensional coffee cup, just like when you project Leota's face onto her maquette, then you can move the camera over three inches and create the right eye version.

So we use the original film for the left eye, then project that film onto the geometry, move the camera over to the right three inches and then re-photograph it. The only thing you have to do which is tedious and impossible is by moving the camera you reveal some gaps where there's nothing. You basically go back in and Photoshop everything back in. It's some amazing people, it was all done at ILM, it's literally like Photoshop where you sample it and rubber stamp it into that space.

The whole left eye is the original, so if you wanted to see the original film, close your right eye and that's the original film, the whole right eye is the eye that's reconstructed and back-filled.

SW: What a tremendous amount of work.

DH: It's insane and it shouldn't work but it does.

SW: How did you learn how to do that?

DH: We had to figure it out. It's the first movie ever that's been done that way which was a hoot and there's an amazing guy named Joel Aron at ILM who loved the movie. There were several people at ILM that had worked on the original movie, so talk about a labor of love, they did it in a short time, eight months and they had to rebuild the whole movie as a digital movie. So imagine going in, they rescanned all the original puppets, took the blueprints of the sets and rebuilt it like a digital Pixar movie, but featureless so you have this gray featureless digital version of the movie. Then turn the projector on, move the camera, re-photograph it, fill in everything, clean up the dust, bake it together in a digital file so when you see the movie you're basically seeing right eye/left eye projected hundreds of times a second and then your polarizing glasses decode those, so there's no gate weave and no shutter flicker like you got in old 3D movies. The breakthrough is not only in converting it to 3D but it was also the digital technology that allowed you to do it without eye fatigue.

You have complete control, you can control where your eyes converge so if you're focusing on the cup, my eyes converge there and cross where the cup crosses, but then if I look at you then I can converge my eyes at you, so you can control where those cameras are. It's an amazing process and it was an amazing technical feat.

We did add a little bit, like a little bit of snow in the snow scenes so you got more dimension on the snow, but that was a joy and done exactly the way you said with the projection.

SW: I just love 3D and "Magic Journeys" at Disneyland was the first 3D movie I ever saw.

DH: I still remember that and the kite that flew up in your face, that still was an amazing thing. I love that and the Muppets 3D movie... which I worked on.

SW: Did you?

DH: I worked with Jim Henson on that. There was a little pre-show with Kermit and Mickey and we shot it on the set because he was shooting the big American finale and it was just a little throw away pre-show piece that we did. I had met him on "Roger Rabbit" because my Production Manager on it was his assistant for years and years through all his movies and stuff, Patsy de Lord. He was a complete gentleman.

SW: You're working with Tim Burton on a stop-motion version of "Frankenweenie?"

DH: Yes, he did a twenty five minute black and white short when he was still over at the studio.

I think Tom Wilhite, who was the head of the studio, really recognized that Tim was fantastic and that's when he did "Vincent" and "Frankenweenie."

I pitched it to the studio first probably five years ago, and then pitched it to Tim. I went over and showed Tim "Nightmare Before Christmas" and then as part of that visit I sat down with him and pitched him the idea to try to do "Frankenweenie" as a feature. He said, "You know, it was always truncated because it was this whole Frankenstein story and we just had twenty five minutes worth of budget and there was always so much more I wanted to do with it."

So he went off and did several other movies and the deal finally came together a few months ago, so we'll be starting on that shortly.

SW: X Atencio did a lot of stop motion work and said it was really tedious because unlike traditional animation you couldn't go just look at the drawing before to see where you were and sometimes he had to start an entire scene over. Does it still work that way?

DH: On "Nightmare" they had the ability to do like two frames of video preroll so you could see the frame you were on and two frames before it. It was a video camera that I think was attached to the side of the lens. You weren't really seeing through the lens. Now you can see exactly what the camera sees and you actually shoot on a digital camera body so you don't even use film anymore, you get like an SLR Canon Nikon camera that goes into a Mac and then you can shoot full resolution 2K images and see the complete preroll so you can see where your mistakes are. I can't say it's an easier art form but the tools make it a little easier now.

On "Nightmare" they had light meters hooked up so if they went to lunch and a light went out they would come back and they wouldn't notice it or if there was construction down the block and a light bulb dimmed a little bit you wouldn't see that until two days later when the shot came in from dailies and you'd have to redo it, so they developed a system of light meters and things to make sure everything was consistent.

SW: Sounds like a lot of learning as you go.

DH: Invent as you go, it was like doing "Nightmare" in 3D, you just invent it as you go. You start of not knowing how and then you work with amazing people, like people much smarter than I that kind of solve it all and that's really great.

More from Don:
His start with Disney and those who inspired him
Producing "Beauty and the Beast"
Producing the animation in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"

See other interviews