3D's Newest Printing Feature

3D movies have held captive the hearts of movie fanatics and are not willing to let them go for some ransom. In fact, the people behind the great mind blowing effects of the 3D movie, whether native or converted, continue to strive hard into generating and adapting more and more technological changes that could be used to make these stunning movie formats come to life in the superlative sense of things. A good sign of improvement is broadcast to us by one of the industry’s leading 3D movie entertainment companies: Sony Pictures.

The latest movie franchise that Sony Pictures’, “The Pirates”, is about to release. But before being able to wrap up things, the technical staff have gone a long tiresome months to generate and let a single character come to life. Although they make use of molding – clay and stop – motion animation to express the characters’ feelings through their eyes, the Aardman Animations’ creator uses his new tech pet in order to let such character speak with more emotions plus to accomplish the great movie goal in a faster pace. He makes use of the newly introduced technology within the movie industry: 3D printers.

At a single glance you would notice that this talented printer looks like a conventional printer. The only thing that makes it quite apart from the traditional ones is that it works in a third dimension.  A certain substance is being fed to it that would build up layer by layer and the end result: an animated creature.

Ian Whitlock, the lead animator for the “The Pirates” movie, revealed that they had made 8,000 mouths for all the characters participating in the movie. A single character, i.e. Charles Darwin, was given 130 mouths while another, i.e. Pirate Captain, was given 257 individual mouths. Imagine so many molded clay mouths laying around the studio and the time it takes to mold each one into a perfect shape. Luckily, technology aids man to make his work faster and cuts it to near perfection. The 3D printer works as the layers build up in liquid form then the substance solidifies as it is being printed out layer by layer. From there, a 3D character comes to life.

The animators simply listen to the actors’ dialogues and from their broke down the mouth shapes onto a ‘dope sheet’ –referred to a phonetic breakdown. As the directors give the go signal of approval, they would send the mouths to a prototyped machine which would print out the mouths physically. The mouths come out in a flesh colored print so they make 14 different skin tones. Once those are done, they sand it and paint it. But even with such technological advancement on the animation team’s side, it took the animators two to three months to work on a single character. Looking at the brighter side of things, this is quite a faster pace than sticking to molding clays for all the features of a single character, not to mention the different expressions, which takes more than a year or two to complete.

The animation team are still using the clay molding method to generate the eyes of the characters which they believe are quite vital for expressing the characters’ feelings. Their next goal is to find a technology that would eventually help them out on this one and hopefully be able to make a 3D movie in a less time as possible. “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” will be released in April 27 of this year.

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