5/11/2023 0 Comments Laika charactersLaika had built large puppets before, specifically the five-foot Mecha-Drill from The Boxtrolls. But when you’re in a room surrounded by artists that you love and respect and there is an overwhelming enthusiasm about the idea of building the largest stop motion puppet that has ever been created-and everyone is convinced we can pull it off-I want to support that spirit and enthusiasm in whatever way I can.” OK, Now We Have To Actually Build It “Absolutely the skeleton could have been CG. “Time and again I am amazed by the solutions that the rigging, camera, and animation teams would present,” Laika visual effects supervisor Steve Emerson said in an interview with Cartoon Brew. Monkey, voiced by Charlize Theron, gets trapped in the Hall of Bones and caught in the grip of the Giant Skeleton.Īny question of the skeleton being a large-scale CG object was never seriously considered, even though Laika has readily adopt a hybrid mix of practical stop motion puppets and visual effects in all of its recent films. “And hence, the seed of insanity, was planted,” said Switaj. Eventually in one of Laika’s early meetings, someone suggested they just build the full-sized skeleton and then animate the other puppets around it at the original scale. This initial concern about fidelity was then compounded when the storyboards for the sequence became even more dynamic, suggesting that the puppets would require more close-ups and more exotic stunts. “They were only going to be an inch-and-a-half tall with no real armature in them-just a blob of foam that didn’t pose well,” explained Steve Switaj, Laika’s lead camera and motion control engineer, at a recent Kubo presentation at SIGGRAPH. "It creates a lot of sleepless nights, but it also makes it really exciting and fun to get up in the morning and come to work.The problem was, the animators did not necessarily like the idea of having to deal with the surrounding smaller puppets that interact with the Giant Skeleton. “I think that's one of the most exciting things about working at LAIKA is that we are constantly trying to find new ways to tell stories, and evolve and improve upon our old methodologies," he said. But it also allows a whole army of facial librarians to know what shots these faces are needed for, and how many times they've been used in a particular shot,” McLean said.įor him, 3-D printing is just another way to make a great film. “This number system allows the animators to know what face they're holding and what face they're putting on the character. They track facial expressions with a kind of Dewey Decimal system using an intricate code printed on the back of each face. With over 11,000 mouths and 4,000 eyebrows, just with their lead character, LAIKA created a unique job on set: facial librarians. The result is a character with a believable facial expression that stays consistent throughout the film. When a LAIKA animator is shooting on the set of the film, “they have a puppet and a whole box of different facial expressions,” McLean said, “and they would very carefully remove the mouth, and then remove the eyebrow section, and they would grab a different expression … and they would replace that expression.” They shoot one frame, and then go through the whole process again. Which is far more than any other stop-motion animation character in history.” And when you combine those eyebrow and mouth expressions together, he has over 48 million possible facial expressions. He's got over 4,000 different eyebrow expressions. For their latest film, "Kubo and the Two Strings," McLean said “Kubo, the character, has over 11,000 mouths. A tray of facial expressions for LAIKA character Kubo.īrian McLean is LAIKA’s director of rapid prototype.
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