LAIKA Studios' Techniques on Facial Features
In LAIKA Studios' latest release, The Boxtrolls (an animated film in which cheese means status and where box-wearing trolls are the lowest of the class system), the intuitive technique of mixing stop motion with 3D printed faces that are digitally painted from scratch and then slotted onto the characters is big business!
This imaginative means of animating has lead this film to be not only very successful, but incredibly popular in terms of how it was made. It isn't just animators that are talking about this! LAIKA have literally been applying century-old techniques to their work but with 21st century technology. They started out in using computer generated imagery and effects since their 2009 Coraline and has been used by them ever since.
The photograph above is from SIGGRAPH 2014 and shows some of the 3D printed faces of one of the characters. These are then simply exchanged and reused throughout the film. Here, you can see Fish, one of the characters, being put together:
An interview carried out by The Los Angeles Times was a very interesting watch as it gave an honest opinion from the LAIKA team on how difficult it was to actually use stop motion as a method for making the film. One scene even took them 18 months to complete!
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