![]() ![]() “We believe storytelling is an important part of who we are,” said Travis Knight, Laika’s president and CEO, who also directed the studio’s most recent award-winning film, Kubo and the Two Strings. It's hoped that at some point in the future the exhibition will appear at other locations around the world although details of where and when have yet to be revealed. An incarnation of the exhibition staged at San Diego International Comic-Con in July of this year was a roaring success with people queuing for hours to get a glimpse of the Laika team's work. 14 and runs through May 20, is a natural and logical extension of that. Laika remains devoted to telling new and original stories in unprecedented ways, and the exhibition, which opens its doors on Oct. Production is currently underway on Laika's fifth full-length feature although details regarding exactly what it is about are currently still a closely guarded secret. Coraline, the studio’s first feature, in 2009, remains its most successful, with a domestic box take of $75.29 million (unadjusted for inflation) worldwide, it made $124.6 million (unadjusted). ![]() “With CGI, we can go beyond what’s possible in the physical world-and in combining it with stop-motion, our movies don’t lose their unique and artistic aesthetic,” Emerson says.Established in Portland, Oregon, in 2005, Laika has produced four Oscar-nominated features, including Kubo and the Two Strings, The Boxtrolls, ParaNorman and Coraline. VFX are designed to mirror the handmade quality of the physical designs. In addition to building incredibly detailed puppets and sets by hand, they’re also created virtually by the visual effects team. For 2019’s Missing Link, LAIKA 3D printed more than 100,000 unique facial expressions. “Then, instead of hitting render at the end of creating an asset, our animators just hit print.” When a new expression is needed, this custom manufacturing process allows the animators to create a new face in a day. ![]() “We use Maya to create thousands of facial expressions,” Emerson says. These individual faces are placed on the puppets, one after the other, to bring the characters to life in the stop-motion animation process. “Those components are soldered together to create the armature and slipped into a nice cozy silicone body sleeve to drive the puppet’s performance.” Altogether, it takes about nine months to manufacture a puppet, from the moment a director approves the digital character design to the animation-ready puppet being carried out to the set.īeginning with Coraline in 2009, LAIKA began using 3D printing to fabricate the expressions for the film’s characters. “In the end, a lot of the armatures are composites of modular and custom components,” Emerson continues. Using Inventor, they look at modular components from our library to see what they’re going to need in terms of things like balls and sockets and joints to create a given armature, or if they need to fabricate something custom or bespoke. “Once it’s approved by the director, it gets handed off to the armature team to create the skeleton in the body of the puppet, which is what lets the animators control and pose it frame by frame. Of course, a production begins with the puppets: “It starts on paper, 2D art,” Emerson says, then the character is translated into a digital sculpt using Maya. ![]()
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