10 years at Laika (by Steve Emerson)

10 years at Laika (by Steve Emerson)

October 27th, 6:30PM - Viewconference 2016, Turin (Italy). Steve Emerson, VFX supervisor at Laika, talks us about the company where he works and who recently turned 10.

Through a journey in various movie productions, we could have to opportunity to admire the skills and meticulous precision with which the animation artists work in this Studio become famous with its first movie “Coraline and the Magic Door”, and subsequent productions like “ParaNorman”, “Boxtrolls - the magic swords”, until the last release “Kubo and the magic Sword”. The common denominator of Laika is, as you may know, to produce films in stop-motion.

Beautiful are the behind the video we can watch during the talk, about the making of of their movies, where the animators are inside the world of Coraline (and other films), reproduced in scale.

Steve explains that over those ten years, sometimes for budget requirements, sometimes because their ideas were often difficult to fully support by real models only, Laika has begun to make use of the 3d animatino and compositing to complete some scenes, such as one of the opening scenes of Kubo, where the princess is on a small boat in a stormy sea with huge waves.

The final effect - of course - is awesome, in the course of the talk I had the impression that the new Laika orientation towards the use of new technologies is a little criticized by Steve Emerson (but it is my personal impression!) with the consequent loss of the intrinsic poetry inherent in the stop-motion animation, loved by people - like me - who have more than 40 years and when thay has a child admired movies as King Kong or even Clash of the Titans (the one of 1981).

The last video shown by Steve Emerson, however, delete all our dubts of this kind: an awesome and fantastic animation of a giant skeleton (it is actually much larger than one person), all made with stop-motion animation artists seen in every frame and that from time to time - just to give an idea of how much work has been necessary to complete the whole animation that lasts some seconds - in fact we can see they wear different shirts (maybe three or four, probably the days he needed to accomplish that animation).

What more ... Happy birthday Laika!

You could be interested to these products:

If you're a fan, a creative, or a professional in CG, animation and 3d, and you want to stay updated, you may be interested in these products:

...

---

Some ideas for your purchases

Here you can find some products that I have carefully selected for you and related to the contents of this page, and are sold on Amazon.it