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s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 4 c g w 1 3 A N I M A T I O N ith their third feature film, Laika has quick- stepped stop-frame animation into heady new worlds. Cheese- bridge, the film's location, is a Victorian-era town with quirky buildings, cobblestone streets, a town square, and a castle-like Guild Hall where snooty, rich, cheese-obsessed aristocrats and the Cheese Guild's "White Hats" meet. One would-be White Hat, the red-hat wearing Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kings- ley), has convinced the citizens of Cheesebridge and the White Hats that Boxtrolls steal their cheese and snatch their children. His chief evidence, such as it is, is a baby's disappearance. His goal: to become a White Hat. The Boxtrolls, harmless dumpster divers and mechanical tinkerers, are strange little crea- tures that live in the sewers and wear cardboard boxes around their middles. Their names are the labels on their boxes: Fish, Shoe, Oil Can, Fragile, Specs. They didn't steal the baby, they rescued him; the baby grows up wearing a box labeled "Eggs." When Eggs meets Winnie, the ruling White Hat's daughter, the two become determined to set the story straight. The result is a madcap action/adventure story with Snatcher chasing Eggs and the Boxtrolls over rooops, through the streets, and into the sewers. Boxtrolls has more action, more charac- ters, and a larger environment than usually seen in a stop- motion film. "We're taking a hard look at this magical medium and trying to do different, exciting things," says Steve Emerson, visual effects supervisor. "A big part of that has been embracing CG technology. Our philosophy is moving forward while looking backward. We respect the cra for what it is and then take a supplementary role. They make their magic on the stages, and we fill in the gaps." Emerson notes that Laika shot Coraline, the studio's first stop-frame film, almost entirely in camera. With ParaNorman, the studio's second film, CG artists helped the directors open up the stop-motion world. The Boxtrolls takes the notion further. "We did a lot more on this film than in the past," says Eric Wachtman, look development lead. "We have more back- grounds and set extensions, and the complexity is greater. On ParaNorman, we had a handful of [CG] buildings and houses. On this film, we had 20 or 30 rendered at character level with displacement, paint, roof tiles. And the complexities of the characters' costumes went far beyond what we did for ParaNorman." As with ParaNorman and, to a lesser extent, Coraline, the hero puppets' faces are printed from CG models using a rapid-proto- typing system based on 3D Sys- tems' printers. Animators create expressions by combining printed mouth and brow parts (see "Face Forward," August/ September 2012). In addition, the stop-frame department heads rely on artists in the visual effects department to extend their world. During the course of a stop- frame production, animators typically position the puppets on 50 active stages, but it isn't enough. To determine what Boxtrolls needed, Emerson sat with the department heads early in the process as the group broke down the script. "I sat back and stayed quiet to see what they could pull off on the stages, in the model shop, and the puppet depart- ment," Emerson says. "When they ran out of resources, every- one in the room turned to me." C G E X T R A S The hero characters are always real – there are no digital dou- bles for the live-action puppets that star in the film. And the focus of a shot is real. But, the sequences oen called for more characters than the puppet department could handle. "For crowds, we typically build the first and second rows physi- cally," Emerson says. "Everything beyond is up for grabs." Modelers working in Auto- desk's Maya have physical pup- pets for reference and typically begin their modeling process with scans of a gray maquette. Working closely with the art, rapid-prototyping, and puppet departments, the modelers fit the CG extras into the same world as the real puppets, mak- ing sure that the CG faces look the same as those output with the 3D printers in the rapid- prototyping department. "The scan data dictates the contours, crevices, and the surface of a digital puppet," Emerson says. "But because we don't have to worry about the same mechanics internally, the split lines, or the mechanics of the mouth bag, we can make surface textures that are uni- form and perform correctly." Matching the physical puppets only goes so far. "Even though some of the final puppets might have a little thumb print, they try not to have that, so we don't add it to ours," Wachtman says. "We tried put- ting striation lines, like in some of the printed faces, but they looked wrong when we animat- ed the faces frame by frame." To create crowds of Boxtrolls, the modelers built kits of parts that the animators could mix and match to create variations. The art department supplied (TOP) ANIMATORS COMBINE FACE PARTS PRINTED WITH A 3D PRINTER TO CREATE CHARACTERS' EXPRESSIONS. (BOTTOM) VFX ARTISTS REMOVE THE SEAM LINES FOR FINAL SHOTS.