Post 4-Technical developments

3d printers now plays a huge role in stop motion animation films, as each individual character and facial expression is created this way. They have to digitally sculpt each replacement head and then send it off to the 3D printer. This allows the filmmakers to have a much wider range of facial expressions. However, with Coraline each sculpted face had to be then hand painted which was very time consuming.
Coraline was the first stop motion animation to use 3d printing, they created a total of 6,333 faces, which meant they had a an amount of 207,000 facial expressions. Another massive advantage is that they can print in colour, so the models are all ready to be used, instead of having to paint things on. (3dprint.com,2016) Most stop motion animation animators prefer using this technique, as although it is still time consuming, it is less time consuming than making the models from scratch, and having to make however many different heads with different facial expressions for each character.

In this video, the stop motion animation company 'Laika' printed over 20,000 heads for their feature length film Coraline, wich in turn created ground breaking animations.