LAIKA, the Oregon animation studio known for Coraline, used more than 142,000 3D printed facial expressions to make its new stop-motion film Wildwood, according to 3Dnatives.
Stop-motion characters don't change their faces by moving. Instead, animators use "replacement animation": between photos, they swap in a new face that shows the next tiny step of a smile, a frown or a surprised look. Played back quickly, the swaps look like real emotion.
Every face has to match the one before it in color and texture, or the difference would show on screen. LAIKA printed them in full color on Stratasys PolyJet J750 and J850 printers, using Cuttlefish software from the Fraunhofer IGD research institute. The film was a long project: director Travis Knight began working on the adaptation around 2010, and production started in 2021.
Try it at home: make a mini stop-motion movie with a phone and a few printed faces. Print three or four versions of a simple face (happy, surprised, sleepy), take one photo per swap, and play them back with any free stop-motion app.