“Everything about colour 3D printing at the time was very inconsistent: results from print to print, the printers themselves. The dimensional accuracy, the repeatability, the material being stable, the machines being reliable,” McLean recalls. “We were giving up everything that had really made this successful on Coraline. The Z650 also boasted the added capability of printing in colour, which enticed LAIKA to purchase five of them. Z Corp, who would later be taken over by 3D Systems, had released to market the Z650, powered by Z Print technology, which sees powder spread across liquid binding material. LAIKA’s mouth-zipped-shut policy, as you’ll have worked out, wasn’t the only change during those years.
#LAIKA CHARACTERS MOVIE#
Paranorman was the first stop-motion movie to use a colour 3D printer, a feat that earned the eponymous ghost- whispering character TCT Magazine Cover Star status in Volume 20 Issue 5. That all changed as the company’s second film, Paranorman, was released. This activity was largely kept under wraps by LAIKA, a company still finding its way and wanting not to publicise its secret weapon.
#LAIKA CHARACTERS SKIN#
After printing, sanding, priming and coating the face with a lacquer skin tone, the painter would then add a drop of colour to fill the freckle. For the freckles, the RP team would spend weeks dialling in their depth, usually around 3,000th of an inch deep, to make it easier for the painters. The painters tasked with implementing these features couldn’t afford to misplace them – it takes 40 hours to generate three seconds of footage in stop animation, and there’s no undo button at any stage. “We wanted Coraline to have freckles on her face, we wanted Other Mother to have lipstick on.” We wanted to have some complex paint jobs on the characters’ faces,” Brian McLean, Director of LAIKA’s Rapid Prototype department, told TCT. “We thought they were cutting edge at the time, but they were really us trying to find creative solutions for some technical limitations, because the faces were printed out of a single material. More than 20,000 different faces were produced this way, while typically a stop-animation movie can expect only 800.Īdding the finishing touches to Madame Frou Frou, a star of The Boxtrolls movie. Through its Rapid Prototyping (RP) department, LAIKA was using an Eden 260 PolyJet machine and printing faces in a solid white plastic, before hand-sanding would smooth out the surfaces and hand-painting would add colour. LAIKA, before its debut film had even premiered, had ripped up the process and started again. Coraline went on to gross 124 million USD and gain a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 90%. What you’ll learn about LAIKA, though, is it’s a company relentless in its quest for improvement, not just of itself, but the art it practices too. Knitting those images together achieves the sense of movement, and movies are made. Replacement animation of characters’ faces has traditionally been done through the hand sculpture of hundreds of different facial expressions, which are then photographed and replaced with another expression. Founded only eight years earlier, through Coraline, Paranorman, and in 2014, The Boxtrolls, LAIKA had established itself as one of the most impressive filmmakers in its genre.Ĭentral to that immediate success was an inventive new approach to character design through replacement animation. It’s 2013 and a production company whose latest stop animation movie is about to earn it a third consecutive Academy Award nomination in the Best Animated Feature category arrives at a crossroads.
A tray featuring an array of faces printed for LAIKA's movie, The Boxtrolls.
0 kommentar(er)
