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Stop-Motion Animation ■ ■ ■ ■ H Visual effects artists painted out the seams caused when animators applied face parts to change Norman's expression. feature ParaNorman at home and at school, in chase sequences through a well-populated town, in a graveyard and a forest, and a variety of other locations. "Historically, stop motion has felt like it was shot on a tabletop," says Laika President, CEO, and Animator Travis Knight, who re- ceived Annie and VES nominations for animating the star of Cora- line. For ParaNorman, Knight was producer and lead animator. "We wanted ParaNorman to feel more expansive. We did that through set design and animation performances." He's little, but this boy with a thousand faces has a mighty presence in a big, wide world. Eight thousand faces, and more than a million expressions, in fact, when animators arrange and re-arrange Nor- man's tiny mouth and eyebrow pieces like a jigsaw puzzle to create happy faces and sad faces, and lip-sync his dialog. As for the big, wide world, we see the star of Laika's stop- motion Computer graphics tools and techniques helped make this pos- sible in two ways. First, designers worked with Autodesk's Maya, Pixologic's ZBrush, and Adobe's Photoshop to shape and color facial expressions before sending digital models to 3D Systems Corpora- tion's full-color ZPrinter 650 for outputting the face parts. Second, the visual eff ects crew used a combination of Maya, Side in response to a centuries-old curse, Norman becomes a hero. "Th e epic fi nale of the movie is an amazing blend of old tech and new tech, 2D, stop motion, CG, compositing," says Sam Fell, who directed the movie with Chris Butler. "Th at was a high point in terms of pushing the envelope. And, we have a dynamic chase sequence that tops every action seen in stop frame. Action was a big ambition. I thought at some point we' and reaction shots," adds writer/director Butler. "We wanted to do proper fi lmic acting, not just pose to pose. Part of the reason we were able to achieve that is we asked a lot of our animators on set. But, the technical innovations of face replacements gave us a degree of acting in the faces we haven't seen before. Pushing the envelope is almost Laika's brand. Push and push and push, and if can't be done, that's a reason to try." "We had a very ambitious style of acting, with extreme close-ups d be reined in, but we never were." Eff ects Software's Houdini, and Pixar's RenderMan to extend back- grounds, swirl witch-infested tumultuous skies, populate the town with CG puppets, and, in general, help make it possible to create an action/adventure fi lm in stop motion. Compositors put it all to- gether with Th e Foundry's Nuke. Pushing the Envelope Th e Focus Features comedy tells the story of an 11-year-old boy named Norman, who is normal in every way but one: He can see and talk to the ghosts of dead people. And, that makes Norman an outcast. Norman lives in the town of Blithe Hollow, which was the site, 300 years earlier, of a famous witch-hunt. He has one friend, the chubby Neil, also an outcast, and both boys suff er bullying. Even at home, Norman is misunderstood. He makes his father angry when he talks to his grandmother's ghost. His older sister is an- noyed, his mother forgiving. Norman doesn't care. He bonds with Neil by talking to the ghost of Neil's dog, which Norman can see but Neil can't. He pins zombie badges on his backpack, and decorates his room with zombie posters. When zombies invade Blithe Hollow and ghosts rise from graves says Brian McLean, creative supervisor of replacement animation and engineering, and director of rapid prototyping. Th e crew re- moves the face parts from the supporting material, and cleans and sands them. Th en, rinses and repeats. Th ousands of times. For Coraline, the groundbreaking technique worked so well that the studio took it to another level for ParaNorman, creating more parts for more characters, and using the machine for new purposes. Coraline, for example, had approximately 200,000 potential fa- Face Off Laika fi rst used rapid-prototyping machines to print small face parts for Coraline. Animators popped mouth and brow shapes onto Cora- line's face, rather than create her facial expressions by sculpting pli- able silicon models with armatures inside. Rapid-prototyping printers are similar to ink-jet printers, but rather than applying ink to paper, multiple print heads spray a UV- sensitive resin in layer after layer onto a powder-based supporting material to build the model. "Th ey look like sugar cookies from the oven when they emerge," cial expressions created with combinations of mouth and eyebrow parts. Norman has 1.5 million. For Coraline, artists painted color onto the parts. Th is time, the crew used full-color printers that could build color into the model. Th ey put the printers to work creating props as well as face parts. And they even printed visual eff ects. For example, to simulate motion blur, they printed Norman's face with his nose in triplicate. August/September 2012 33 Images ©2012 Laika, Inc.