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Often those issues are corrected in post-production.” Creating a more engaging stop-motion experience “It is a time-consuming, intense, insane process at times, that is rife with issues. According to Emerson, each animator can capture somewhere between three and a half or four seconds per week. With 24 frames in a second, that means the studio’s animators had to painstakingly gather nearly 134,000 frames. Laika’s most recent project, Missing Link, had a runtime of 93 minutes. So, we do this again and again and again and again until we have a 90, 95-minute, 2-hour movie.” Then, after we’ve done 24 of those, we have a one-second performance. So, for every frame across one second of film, we pose a puppet, we take an exposure, we move the puppet or something else within that environment in the smallest of increments, and we take another exposure. “What we do here at Laika is we take puppets-fully articulated puppets-and we create miniature sets to put those puppets within, with real-world light, and we capture them one frame at a time. In a recent webinar, Steve Emerson, Laika’s visual effects supervisor, stepped through the studio’s labor-intensive process.

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Professional stop-motion animators must overcome those same challenges, while taking storytelling and artistry to the next level. Plus, there’s only so much artistic expression to extract from items lying around the house.

If we revisited those amateur efforts today, we’d undoubtedly notice some pretty severe technical imperfections, such as seams in the clay we used to shape our puppets and alignment issues with our cameras. Many of us were assigned stop-motion art projects as early as elementary school. It’s a technique with origins in the 19th century. Flipping through the still images quickly enough creates the illusion of movement. In stop-motion animation, objects are photographed, moved slightly, and photographed again, over and over. These leverage the studio’s existing Intel Xeon CPU-based infrastructure to accelerate digital paint and rotoscoping tasks.Ī classic film-making technique meets modern technology Laika teamed with Intel to build tools based on the oneAPI programming model.

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Cleaning up unwanted lines is currently a manual and repetitive process, making it an ideal target for machine learning.

Creating a modern stop-motion feature film is more complex than ever Laika’s latest project, Missing Link, involved more than 106,000 different 3D-printed faces.

If all goes according to plan, you will enjoy the product of Laika’s efforts in the studio’s next film. At the same time, Laika wants to preserve the characteristic imperfections of its handmade artwork, leaving artists in charge of what goes and what stays.

These artifacts are inherent in the way Laika builds its characters, so the AI has to be trained to identify the offending lines, trace them through a process called rotoscoping, and track them. The studio is training neural networks to detect and help correct lines and other artifacts on the faces of its puppets during post-production.

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So, Laika teamed up with Intel to create software tools able to save time and keep its animators focused on their craft. Needless to say, the company has plenty of repetitive tasks that could benefit from acceleration. Laika, the stop-motion animation studio best known for its feature films Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Missing Link, captures and edits tens of thousands of frames for each of its movies. This article is part of the Technology Insight series, made possible with funding from Intel.ĪI is really, really good at automating repetitive tasks.

Laika characters