Zombie Stop-Motion

I recently saw the movie, Paranorman, a new stop-motion comedy-thriller about zombies, ghosts, and more. The animation was pretty impressive.  The beautiful and painstakingly hand-crafted details were astounding, and further enhanced with CGI effects. The creators of the movie, LAIKA animation studios, embraced both hand-made and digital techniques to create a unique style. They used clay models and moved them bit by bit, like traditional stop-motion, but they combined this with innovative digital processes. They used a 3D printer to create the facial expressions on the characters, a fairly new technique for the animation industry. Coraline was the first movie to use it, and  Paranorman was the first to have a color printer. They used these printers to create over 31,000 faces, and used rapid prototyping to switch them on the bodies as they were filming. It infinity increased the possibilities (up to 1.5 million) of facial expressions for the stop-motion characters. The addition of color from the printer allowed for much more detail in the characters faces, and even added the translucent pinkish color of real skin. The result was much more lively and interesting characters on film. This innovation is a huge stride for stop-motion films, and may just give them a competitive edge in today's world of CGI animation.

 Information found at:  http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118057663