“Then we typically add digital elements and finally assemble the complete shot digitally.” For every single element of a film, the LAIKA team makes a conscious decision whether it will be created digitally or by hand-in what is first and foremost an artistic choice, driven by the needs of the story. “After drafting the script, we storyboard, create animatics, fabricate both digital and physical assets, and ultimately shoot a scene with physical assets on stage,” Emerson says. “With CGI, we can go beyond what’s possible in the physical world-and in combining it with stop-motion, our movies don’t lose their unique and artistic aesthetic,” Emerson says. VFX are designed to mirror the handmade quality of the physical designs, in a collaboration with the same artists who make the physical assets. In addition to building incredibly detailed puppets and sets by hand, they’re also created virtually by the visual effects team. For 2019’s Missing Link, LAIKA 3D printed more than 100,000 unique facial expressions.
“Then, instead of hitting render at the end of creating an asset, our animators just hit print.” When a new expression is needed, this custom manufacturing process allows the animators to create a new face in a day. “We use Maya to create thousands of facial expressions,” Emerson says.
These individual faces are placed on the puppets, one after the other, to bring the characters to life in the stop-motion animation process. “Someone will solder those components together to create the armature and slip it into a nice cozy silicone body sleeve to drive the puppet’s performance.” Altogether, it takes about nine months to manufacture a puppet, from the moment a director approves the digital character design to the animation-ready puppet being carried out to the set.īeginning with Coraline in 2009, LAIKA began using 3D printing to fabricate the expressions for the film’s characters. “In the end, a lot of the armatures are composites of modular and custom components,” Emerson continues. Using Inventor, they look at modular components from our library to see what they’re going to need in terms of things like balls and sockets and joints to create a given armature, or if they need to fabricate something custom or bespoke. “Once it’s approved by the director, it gets handed off to the armature team to create the skeleton in the body of the puppet, which is what lets the animators control and pose it frame by frame. Of course, a production begins with the puppets: “It starts on paper, 2D art,” Emerson says, then the character is translated into a digital sculpt using Maya. So we blend CGI into our productions-because at the end of the day, we want to harness the best of both worlds.” “Every frame involves a lot of thought and a lot of effort. “It’s a magical art form, but it’s also very technical, and incredibly time-consuming,” Emerson says.
And everything is shot in-camera.” When played sequentially, stop-motion shots form animated stories with a uniquely warm quality that’s hard to achieve digitally. “It uses real physical sets and real puppets that are manipulated in very subtle ways across individual frames. “Stop-motion is one of the earliest filmmaking techniques,” says Steve Emerson, VFX supervisor at LAIKA. The company is known for its Academy Award-nominated films Missing Link, Kubo and the Two Strings, The Boxtrolls, ParaNorman, and Coraline. But far from Hollywood, the Portland, Oregon-based studio LAIKA is synonymous with the handmade, artisanal charm of stop-motion animation.
Laika characters software#
Most animation studios today rely completely on digital visual effects, using software all the way from preproduction through designing, rigging, and animating characters. Architecture, Engineering, & Construction.