Callum Loughnan

Printing Puppets (2022)

From a very early age on Callum had been fascinated by drawn faces and the stories they tell, in turn himself doodling faces and characters in a range of styles, exploring the ability to express emotions through them. This early fascination found an application in stop motion as the tool for movie making where the creation of intricate faces communicating a range of emotions has been a complex and laborious process.

Having modern day directors like Tim Burton and Wes Craven using stop motion proves that it is more than just an old-fashioned style of movie making; rather that the technology conveys a particular story and emotion with a distinct character. But, puppetry and Claymation have always been very labour-intensive ways of making movies and Callum Laughnan’s Master’s research is aiming to improve this.

For this research Callum took inspiration from two contemporary methods which provide superior stop motion production in regards to facial expressions. The first one is the 3D printed replacement method, as used by Laika studio where the incremental changes in a face or body are individually printed in a rigid material and inserted for each 1/24 th of a second to create the illusion of movement. This results in thousands of expensive, non-biodegradable faces and other parts to be printed and ultimately being discarded. The second one is mechanical positioning of faces as seen in Corpse Bride by Tim Burton which involves manually adjusting gears and screws to animate flexible silicone faces. A single character is easy, but a feature film with lots of main and side characters requires a lot of manual work from highly specialized artisans, engineers, and sculptors to create each character. This ultimately restricts access to this particular film making technique.