Week 10 – Podcast

This is my section of the podcast for our group, talking about the future of 3D printing in stop-motion.





Looking into the future of 3D printing and its use in stop-motion animation, we can already see from systems such as Cuttlefish that the technological possibilities are becoming greater and greater every year.

Considering how far we have come in the last 10 years alone, it’s reasonable to assume that 3D printing will soon become even more refined and cheaper, making it more and more accessible to stop-motion studios and independent animators.

But as with all technological progress, there are some potential pitfalls that need to be understood and addressed. Looking at the history of CGI, after it came into general use in the film, television and (later) gaming industries in the late 90s and early 2000s, the ease of its use led to many poor-quality effects and even entire animated films where the animation teams had clearly cut corners during production to save time and money.

One of the offshoots of this is the so-called ‘uncanny valley’, or the effect of human faces and expressions appearing unnerving and alien, despite trying to realistically represent human expression.

Up to now, the practice of making stop-motion animations has involved an almost entirely hands-on approach, with hand-made puppets, models and sets, giving stop-motion a unique aesthetic that feels grounded in reality.

But as most 3D printing is linked with CGI in terms of digital modelling and design, there is certainly the potential for the uncanny valley to move over to the realm of stop-motion as more and more assets are 3D printed.

Animators need to be aware of the past failings in one area to avoid making them in the other, and in fact there has already been research done into the uncanny valley effect and how to avoid it.

As LAIKA studios have shown in one of their more recent projects, Kubo and the Two Strings, one way to get around this problem is to 3D-scan a hand-made model which can then be animated digitally and re-printed to keep the original aesthetic.

They also combined these 3D-printed models with pure computer animation in the final film, blurring the lines between stop-motion and CGI. This could well be the future of the medium: where 3D-printed stop-motion and digitally animated models are blended together, with expressions so refined it’s impossible for audiences to tell whether they are animated physically or digitally.

With that in mind, it could be argued that what has always made stop-motion so unique could be lost entirely in the future, which might lead some animators to question how far to take their use of 3D-printing.