3D Printing

Laika has been well known for utilising 3D printers in their stop motion feature films over the last few years, and while "Coraline" pioneered and popularised the use of black and white 3D printers, it was "ParaNorman" where they started using full colour 3D printers, which sped up puppet production considerably and allowed the team to make the large number of puppet faces required for the film (Only taking a year for production and two years for the animating itself).

While they still had to individually hand paint each printed piece in "Coraline",
the production process definitely went a lot quicker as compared to more
traditional methods.

The 3D colour printers created the replacement faces for the film's puppets, initially modelling them in Maya and ZBrush elements, 31000 individual face parts were printed in order to achieve the expressions required. The rapid prototyping for the faces was a 10-step process within 5-6 hours of cleaning anc oating, and the faces made up 1257 archival boxes. There were 178 individual puppets created for the film's 61 characters, with the main character Norman having 28 individual full body puppets and more than 8000 faces.

Although the film is mainly stop motion, many scenes were enhanced with digital visual effects work. This ranged from rig removal, set extensions, ghost effects, atmospherics, crowds and dace replacement line removal. "ParaNorman" was also the first film where LAIKA experimented with The Foundry's KATANA in their lighting pipeline, which was later on fully embraced in "The Boxtrolls".

KATANA is a 3D application that allows the user complete control and enhancement of look development and lighting to assets in an existing pipeline. KATANA's filters let the user create, define and modify their specifically chosen elements by directly engaging and working with their 3D scene data. The application takes an intuitive node-based approach, and is used to work on any specific assets the user wants to develop, add filters, and control output nodes for renders, and any dependencies between renders.

LAIKA shows that there is nothing wrong with mixing together traditional and digital techniques together to produce something at a faster pace, so as long as the end product still manages to turn out the way they want it to. I suppose the biggest issue that they might face is depending too heavily on CGI, which would make what should still be a stop-motion film at heart, too 'unnatural'. But so far, LAIKA hasn't actually made that mistake, cleverly using a variety of techniques for the various effects they needed to create for their films, such as the app they specially created for the fire effects in "The Boxtrolls".