Mark Shapiro had an interesting journey to the world of stop-motion. His background was in marketing and communications and he had worked around the world in the areas of brand development, advertising, public relations, film production. He had also done a lot of writing for companies like Nike, Town & Country Magazine and Upper Deck. Then in 2007 he joined LAIKA, the Oregon-based animation company behind the wonderful hit feature Coraline. A native of Seattle, Washington, Shapiro's career was built on an education from Emerson College in Boston and a Bachelor of Arts in English from The Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

Coraline, by the way, required some 150 sets that were built across 52 stages at LAIKA’s studio. Spanning 151,140 square feet, the different stages were the most ever deployed for a stop-motion animated feature. Now comes ParaNorman.

In this 3D stop-motion comedy thriller, a small town comes under siege by zombies. Only a local boy named Norman, who is strangely able to speak with the dead, can stop this, but he has to take on ghosts, zombies and, worst of all, grown-ups, in order to save his town from a centuries-old curse. The production, which is shot frame-by-frame, required 1.3 million "replacement" faces to depict all the facial expressions of the main character. The 'stylized realism' of the setting was made to reflect an old-fashioned Massachusetts town.

The festival runs from October 19th to the 21st at Concordia University’s J.A. de Sève Theater in downtown Montreal. Meanwhile, there is still time for filmmakers to submit to the festival. The deadline for submissions is September 21, 2012.