Native St. Louisan Brad Schiff is an Oscar nominee for Best Achievement in Visual Effects for Kubo and the Two Strings and one of this year’s Cinema St. Louis Award honorees. He serves as the animation supervisor of LAIKA Studios, which specializes in stop-motion animation, a process that involves moving objects — e.g., puppets, models, or clay figures — in small increments, taking a photograph after each tiny change, and then assembling the individual images into a moving picture. LAIKA’s run of Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature include Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, and Kubo. The studio’s most recent film, Missing Link, screens for free at this year’s SLIFF. Schiff made his first animated films in high school here in St. Louis and discovered stop-motion animation in college, when he developed a passion for the form. His career encompasses television (Celebrity Deathmatch, The PJs, Gary and Mike) and commercials, and he’s worked on such non-LAIKA stop-motion-animated films as Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs.