How 3D Printers are Changing Filmmaking

Stop motion, a form of animation that I really love, one of my favorite movies has to be Coroline. 3d printers have been very popular the last few years, and have been showing up in schools and colleges. But did you know that 3d printing can be used for stop motion animation? LAIKA entertainment's 2012 feature paranorman was one of the first stop motion animation movies to use different 3d printed elements. LAIKA has been working very hard to make stop motion easier for animators. they call this process "replacement animation" with is like swapping out different facial expressions, like customizing a character in a game. The face just kind of pops out to replace it with another expression. LAIKA has revolutionized the process by employing 3D printers to create these various facial expressions and limbs in motion. unfortunately its not quit that simple. The team first has to model the character by hand with real materials to keep there signature polished look. After this hand made model is created, it tis then scanned by a 3d scanner to make sure the three dimensional expressions are suited to 3D printing. The entire animation has to be perfectly planned out before any 3d printing is done.

I really loved reading about this, stop motion animations is some thing I would love to see more of, I think there really fascinating and to see that there are coming up with more ways to make it easier is amazing. I hope more people will get into making professional stop motion animations with these 3d printers. it was also really amazing to see how they actually work, we have one in my high school that I got to see a couple years ago with my digital photography teacher. we got to see one in action and hold the end results on the villa fieldtrip earlier in the year. digital printers will hopefull make our lives easier in the near future.