A couple of weeks ago, right before the Frankenweenie white carpet premiere, a group of bloggers {including myself} had the opportunity to interview the child actors from the film. The stars included Charlie Tahan {Charlie St. Cloud} who plays Victor, Atticus Shaffer {The Middle} who plays Edgar E. Gore, and Robert Capron {Diary of a Wimpy Kids series} who plays Bob.
Despite their fame and success, all of the boys were so down to earth and normal! They are all 14 but they seemed much older as they were very professional and polite. As a group we were able to ask them some questions and below are their answers!
Question: What was your favorite thing about your character?
Charlie Tahan: Victor is kind of like loosely based on Tim’s childhood I think a little bit. He’s been one of my favorite directors, so I was honored to be able to sort of play him.
Atticus Shaffer: And for me, the- the characters that I normally play are either they are my voice, kind of the very calm eye in the storm characters. And, and some are smart, you know, they know how to figure out problems and whatnot. But then this one, he’s just so over the top.
And he’s a semi villain, he loves everything more big and over the top and, and also being able to do the impression of Peter Lorre for the voice is just awesome for me. Because I love doing impressions, I love doing accents. And he’s kind of like the Igor character and I knew how to play that off, but like the second or third audition into it, they said if possible, do a Peter Lorre impression. And I was like this is so new for me, it’s going to test my acting abilities, I want to do this. And so my mom and I like the home schoolers that we are, rented Maltese Falcon and we already had Casablanca, and just sat down and really studied and that alone was just such a thrill for me.
Robert Capron: Yeah, for me the thing I like the most about Bob is that despite the fact that he’s a really big guy- like he’s huge- despite the fact that he’s really big and he could very easily be a bully, he’s not, he’s actually a very nice person. That was one of the things I liked about his character.
Question: What do you find challenging about voice acting?
Charlie Tahan: This is my first voice over thing ever. So I thought it was going to be a lot harder because especially after I found out that I wasn’t going to be with the other cast, to read with them- especially for me, I think it was a little bit easier because half my scenes are with me and Sparky. Because I have a dog at home, I kind of just imagined that my dog was there. But it’s pretty easy.
You don’t have to worry about like blocking or where to stand or hair and makeup, so you can mostly just focus all your energy just into your voice, so it’s a little bit easier.
Atticus Shaffer: Man, I love doing voice over. I mean, that’s the whole reason I got into the business in the first place, is because I love to play with my voice. I love telling stories, being able to put myself into these completely new characters. And also with the fact that there is such a long list that you do have to worry about for, for theatrical, because you have wardrobe, makeup, memorizing lines, choreography, everything.
But whereas you just have a small list for voiceover, which is, is making sure that your voice is well. And you know what the character is like, you know the character voice. I like to say that you put your soul into the character, because you’re giving it the voice, and especially in a Tim Burton animation. It’s stop motion animation, it’s not drawn up, these are things that you can move and touch with your hands. And it’s almost as if the thing that’s been the character has been built. And then you give it a voice, and now it’s able to talk. And then you have the animators who are able to move it, now it has motion. Then with Tim Burton, and the set designers they create this world that it’s in. And so now it has its own earth, its own portion of earth, its own fantasy world. And so in a way it is kind of creating like your own little monsters in a sense.
Robert Capron: The thing that I like about voice over is that it’s significantly easier than like actually filming. It’s way easier, because like Atticus and Charlie said, there’s so many different variables that go into filming, because you need the lighting, you need to look good with the hair and makeup. With this the character is already made basically. So all you need to do is supply the voice. But like Charlie said, too, a challenging part of it was that you’re not actually recording with other actors. You’re just doing it by yourself. And that can be kind of weird, because you’re talking to yourself, in a way. And that may sound weird but usually somebody else will read the other lines first, and that makes it easier.
Question: Did they film you doing your part and base the animation on that?
Charlie Tahan: Like Victor, or, any of our characters, didn’t actually look like ourselves, but when I first saw the movie, Victor somehow reminded me of myself. But I don’t know exactly how, but his eye movements and he just sort of reminded me of myself.
Atticus Shaffer: And also too because it is stop motion animation and it does take such a long time to film something like that, they broke the script up into acts. So you have act one is from the first recording session and then when you come back, you kind of redo things for act one that kind of fit into the storyline more.
And then you record act two and then so forth and so on until finally after act three, you just kind of come back to redo things from act three. And also maybe sound effects or grunts that you kind of need and to make the characters seem more real.
Question: How long is the process?
Charlie Tahan: Well it’s been three years since we started filming. Well I only worked ten days on the whole movie, but it’s spread out once every two months or so. So it wasn’t like ten days in a row.
Atticus Shaffer: Yeah the thing that’s funny about working on a voiceover thing is that you may think you’re done with it and then like five months later, they’ll come back and say, “Oh, we need a couple extra grunts.”
Charlie Tahan: Exactly, I had to go one day and just laugh once, then I had to go home.
Robert Capron: Yeah one session I had to go into, I had to say one line, then all I had to do is scream.
Question: Did you see the original Frankenweenie?
Atticus Shaffer: It was amazing. Well, and for me in particular, what was really cool for me is that during the audition process, one day I was about the fifth kid called in. And I’m there and everyone was still waiting and they hadn’t started the auditions yet, and they put on the original Frankenweenie short. And so I was one of the few kids that while being there was able to sit down and watch it start to finish. And then I went in and I definitely feel that to have that in the back of my mind and to see how the original did it and then now how he’s doing it, it was definitely very helpful.
Charlie Tahan: Yeah I thought it was cool because it seemed like the original Frankenweenie was kind of like a rough cut, sort of a sketch of this one. I feel like I read like somewhere that it was like, it was a short that Tim tried to pitch to like producers and he wanted to make it a feature film at first. But he never like was able to because people shut it down. Obviously it’s been like a pretty long time since that, that was one of the first things that he did. I mean it’s cool to compare that one to this one- there’s so many more characters, it’s a lot more complex.
Atticus Shaffer: Something else that I found interesting- originally it was Edward Scissorhands and Frankenweenie that Tim wanted to make. And he was rejected for both.
Robert Capron: The original short was definitely like an outline of what this movie is. And I find that really cool, because thanks to stop motion animation, Tim was able to expand on everything in the short. I just felt that was a really cool thing to do.
Be sure to check out Frankenweenie, in theaters now!
Note: Disney provided my travel and accomodations to cover this event. All experiences are authentic & all opinions are my own.
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