Box Trolls - Using 3D printing for animation!

For the film Box Trolls there was a new step in stop motion animation as they were able to utilise the new technology of 3D printing in order to speed up the process. Feature-length stop motion films always feature the technique of replacement animation, where the faces and limbs are replaces over and over with different parts to create slight movement. The parts are pretty much the same but they a slightly different and traditionally stop motion animators would have to make every single part. Now there has been the uprise of 3D printing and for the film Box Trolls, the animators were able to push the printers to create the parts for them and print them ready for production. In this film there were up to 52,000 faces printed and needed for the final production and this was even with some characters being added in using CGI. I found that for the faces of the characters they split the faces into two parts, the top part of the face and the bottom and I found this really interesting as it would create lots of different emotions without having to always build a whole new face. I liked that this also allowed for just the change of the mouth if needed in the shot. For this film however, they could animate every part of the face much easier using 3D printing without the need to repaint every single face. The fact that technology like this is evolving and pushing animation forward really interests me and I only can imagine what else stop motion will be able to do using 3D printing.