A tray featuring an array of faces printed for LAIKA's movie, The Boxtrolls.
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. 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.
Central to that immediate success was an inventive new approach to character design through replacement animation. 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. Knitting those images together achieves the sense of movement, and movies are made.
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. Coraline went on to gross 124 million USD and gain a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 90%. LAIKA, before its debut film had even premiered, had ripped up the process and started again. 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. More than 20,000 different faces were produced this way, while typically a stop-animation movie can expect only 800.
Adding the finishing touches to Madame Frou Frou, a star of The Boxtrolls movie.
“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. We wanted to have some complex paint jobs on the characters’ faces,” Brian McLean, Director of LAIKA’s Rapid Prototype department, told TCT. “We wanted Coraline to have freckles on her face, we wanted Other Mother to have lipstick on.”
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. 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. 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.
Playing tricks
This activity was largely kept under wraps by LAIKA, a company still finding its way and wanting not to publicise its secret weapon. That all changed as the company’s second film, Paranorman, was released. 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.
Paranorman on the cover of TCT.
LAIKA’s mouth-zipped-shut policy, as you’ll have worked out, wasn’t the only change during those years. 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. The Z650 also boasted the added capability of printing in colour, which enticed LAIKA to purchase five of them.
“We were giving up everything that had really made this successful on Coraline. The dimensional accuracy, the repeatability, the material being stable, the machines being reliable,” McLean recalls. “Everything about colour 3D printing at the time was very inconsistent: results from print to print, the printers themselves. There were a tremendous amount of things that we were sacrificing, but we were trading that off for the ability to print colour, and that was worthwhile to us.”
It was a move away from hand painting to provide colour, yet one that wouldn’t have worked without the texture artists’ expertise. Among that group was Tory Bryant, who was now being asked to paint digitally instead of manually. Bryant was using Photoshop to paint texture maps which would be wrapped around the face designs and sent to the Z650 printer. But by harnessing the traditional skills of crosshatching and colour layering, she found a way to expand the colour capabilities of the machine far beyond what anyone thought possible.
“She wasn’t just picking a skin tone and doing a solid skin tone, she was building up skin tones with cyans, magentas and yellows. That worked really well for the printer, because with a Z Printer, it is actually printing colour a little bit into the surface of a part,” McLean eulogised. “Just the act of Tory building up these colours meant the results far exceeded the colour gamuts that the printer companies thought were capable.”
LAIKA 3D printing Timeline
- Coraline | 2009 | 20,000 3D printed faces | PolyJet & mostly hand painting for colour
- Paranorman | 2012 | 40,000 3D printed faces | Z Print for faces, PolyJet for internal head components
- The Boxtrolls | 2014 | 56,000 3D printed faces | Z Print for faces, PolyJet for internal head components
- Kubo and the Two Strings | 2016 | 64,000 3D printed faces | Z Print (human faces) & PolyJet (creature faces & internal head components for all)
- Missing Link | 2019 | 102,000 3D printed faces | PolyJet (J750) for faces, PolyJet (Connex3) for internal head components
McLean referred to this invention as ‘tricking’ the Z650 printer into being more colour literate than it was. It saw LAIKA through the production of The Boxtrolls movie, but the machine's inconsistencies with dimensional accuracies still left the RP team unfulfilled. It combatted these limitations through sheer production volume – building and processing thousands of faces, and throwing 40% of them away. All the while, LAIKA’s animators wanted characters more akin to people in reality, whose facial expression could change more fluidly in between frames.
Designing Kubo and the Two Strong's Monkey character.
“The beginning of Kubo [and the Two Strings] was the first time that we started to recognise that the technology we had been using for the last four years had hit its ceiling. We had squeezed as much out of it as we could,” McLean said. “We were running into scenarios on some of the character designs on Kubo that we knew the technology was not going to work.”
These included sharp angles and tiny features. The problem LAIKA had with the Z Print technology was the prints came out as powder and before post-processing were very fragile and prone to breakage at the point of handling. With fine-feature detailed characters like Beetle, Monkey and Moonbeast to negotiate in the making of Kubo, it was time for another process revamp.
Colour me shocked
LAIKA had continued using Polyjet technology for the internal structures of the puppets’ head, maintaining relations with ObJet, now a Stratasys business. At this stage, circa 2013, the Connex3 was in early beta. Similar in many ways to the Connex2 LAIKA had been using, this new version now enabled the mixture of three colours at once. Though potentially a step back from the Z650 in terms of colour capabilities, it was a significant mark up where machine reliability, dimensional accuracy and repeatability were concerned: “We had made it work with the Z Corp printers but it was hell and back,” McLean reasoned.
Again, LAIKA found a way around the colour limitations. It began using Jon Hiller and Hod Lipson’s AMF tool to control the droplets of raw material when mixing colours. Instead of selecting fixed colours from a drop-down menu, now the team could create a gradient and make tweaks by changing dithering patterns. To create a shade of orange, the dithering patterns of yellow and magenta were made to be equal, and then inside an Excel spreadsheet the number of droplets in each colour could be fine-tuned to create a custom shade. Using this technique, LAIKA had increased the Connex3’s colour range from 46 to 256, and would manufacture more than 64,000 faces for use in the Kubo movie.
A host of Monkey's faces coming out of the Connex3 machine
The making of Kubo was the first time LAIKA felt like it had total control over the hardware and software it was using to produce the characters’ faces. Before, it had largely accepted what was on offer and worked within the constraints. The movie was another hit. But through its relationship with Stratasys, LAIKA was privy to the development of another colour 3D printing platform, the J750. The company was using this machine three years prior to its release and today has six of them working around the clock. The machine offers more than 500,000 colour combinations and is the only platform used to print 102,000 faces for the Missing Link movie, to be released next spring.
LAIKA has changed the way it does this so many times, but it has evolved again not without reason. Movies are shown at 24 frames per second. In standard stop-animation, it could be two or three frames of a film before a facial expression is replaced with a new one. In Missing Link, LAIKA has managed to achieve 12 to 24 different faces per second. Up to one face per frame. Each one with a subtle shift, a pair of eyebrows slowly rising, or a smile turning into a frown.
Monkey from Kubo and the Two Strings.
Now, there’s little painting after the print, and 80% of the faces you will see on the big screen next year haven’t required hand-sanding. From the printer, the supports are washed off, the faces soaked in sodium hydroxide solution for an hour, then soaked in water for another hour, then dried. Residual support material is picked out, then, if required, the faces are sanded, before crystal clear coating is added and gloss coats are hand painted on. The detail is profound, and the results indisputable.
From the crossroads LAIKA stood at just a few years back, it trusted its instincts, took a chance on the colour capabilities of a Stratasys machine, and profited from that relationship when the J750 came along. LAIKA is a company not afraid of change, in fact it embraces the challenges change presents, and has so far reaped the rewards of its boldness. It’s why when its tendency to change additive manufacturing workflows so often is questioned, the answer is easy.
“It’s all about the desires of the studio of trying to both produce stop motion movies that we were not technically capable of just a few years prior, but also to service the types of story that we want to tell,” McLean explains. “The fact we are constantly raising the bar of what stop motion medium is capable of doing in both its stories and its visuals, that’s our main driving force. To do that, we constantly need to pivot and drive the technology in a creative way.”
