Stop-motion animation wizards blend the physical and digital worlds

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. “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. 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.

“In the end, a lot of the armatures are composites of modular and custom components,” Emerson continues. “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.

Character design begins with sketches, which are then translated into digital models used to develop the physical puppet. Image courtesy of LAIKA.

“After drafting the script, we storyboard, create animatics, fabricate both digital and physical assets, and ultimately shoot a scene with physical assets on stage,” Emerson says. “Then we typically add digital elements and finally assemble the complete shot digitally.” For every single element of a film, the LAIKA team makes a conscious decision whether it will be created digitally or by hand, driven by the needs of the story.

Over the years, LAIKA has developed a set of rules about what should be real or virtual: “If it’s a lead or speaking character, they’re almost always hand-animated stop-motion puppets,” Emerson says. “We want to get as much in camera as we can. But once we move beyond the immediate environment, the hero performance, and everything that’s touching the character that’s the focus of the shot, all bets are off. That’s where I come into the discussion,” to evaluate the options for VFX.

Watch the video (1:15 min.) to see how character performances are created with hand-animated stop-motion puppets and blended with digital elements to complete a shot. Image courtesy of LAIKA.

Emerson also envisions using new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to help LAIKA further blend the physical and digital aspects of production. “We use some pretty crazy rigging systems in order to be able to get really nuanced performances out of these puppets,” he says. “To get a machine to recognize those rigs, so we can paint them out in post-production and create mattes efficiently—I think that's where we're headed. We’re trying to eliminate tasks that artists aren't crazy about doing.”

Augmented Reality (AR) is another tool that can help push boundaries. “In stop-motion, there's never enough puppets or sets,” Emerson says. “Oftentimes, we have to shoot performances on green screens. AR means being able to have a digital representation of those sets, line up a puppet, and then remove the green screens on set and show a director what the shot composition will be. It would be a game changer.”

Artists manipulate the puppets representing the hero characters on physical sets, with each subtle motion captured in-camera. Image courtesy of LAIKA.