An Open Garage Door Forced One Nightmare Before Christmas Scene To Be Reshot
It's difficult enough to maintain movie props and keep them in good shape during filming, but what about when your entire movie is technically made up of props? While filming the stop-motion animated classic "The Nightmare Before Christmas," the filmmakers had to worry about preserving the sets, characters, and every item that would appear onscreen, and since a lot of things were made of foam and clay, that could be tough. Temperature could play a big factor, and on one particularly warm day, an open garage door led to an entire scene needing to be reshot.
In the new book "Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas Visual Companion", co-producer Kathleen Gavin shared a funny story about how sometimes the most humorous retakes have nothing to do with human error and everything to do with unusual circumstances. Instead of having his whole world changed by a journey through a magical door shaped like a Christmas tree, Jack Skellington's world was altered because of a rather mundane door instead.
The wrong kind of dancing trees
"The Nightmare Before Christmas" was filmed in a warehouse in San Francisco and as anyone who has ever been to San Francisco will tell you, temperatures can be all over the place. The warehouse didn't have air conditioning, and on one particularly hot day the crew opened a garage door down at one end of the warehouse to try and get some fresh, cool air inside. Unfortunately, that led to one of the sets, well, melting. One of the sets (likely the forest that Jack wanders through on his way to the magical circle of holiday trees) was full of trees made of foam-core and they were affected by the change in humidity when the door was opened. The melting was very subtle, however, and Gavin explained that the film's crew didn't even notice until watching dailies:
"The trees melted. So, when you watch the scene, you're like, what the hell's going on? What happened? And all the background trees are doing this throughout the scene because they're melting and moving and all because of the humidity. So, that scene had to be reshot."
While there is one very intentional dancing tree in "The Nightmare Before Christmas," it probably doesn't look great when your background trees are moving around at random. That's more than a little distracting, but it's good that it was only one scene, at least?
The perils of stop-motion
"The Nightmare Before Christmas" is a technical miracle, a beautiful film and a cinematic marvel of sight and sound. Stop-motion animation can be notoriously challenging, which is probably why these films are few and far between, but it's honestly kind of wild to hear that such a gigantic mistake happened because of something as simple as a garage door. Then again, stop-motion provides a pretty safe way to create incredible special effects in three dimensions without the use of computer-generated imagery — because it's not like melting trees could wreak the same kind of havoc as the animatronic dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park III." Sure, it's annoying to have to go back and re-do the painstaking process of moving the figures and camera just enough for each frame, but that's something you sign up for when you're involved in stop-motion, right?
Thank goodness that the team behind "The Nightmare Before Christmas" kept at it and redid the scene, what with the film at large having become a holiday classic that can be enjoyed year-round.