I saw a news report on the making of the new movie The Boxtrolls. It's an animated movie. But unlike other studios these days, they're animating it old-school, using stop-motion animation. That's not so unusual, Wallace and Gromit's studio works the same way.
Anyway, this behind-the-scenes look at the making of Boxtrolls showed that their studio has several 3D printers, which they use to make parts for the models they use in their animation. Further, they make some of their animations by printing character parts by the hundreds, each with slightly different shapes. I'm thinking, that's quite impressive, they went through a lot of work to...wait a minute, where did they get the designs for all these parts that they're printing out? Sure enough, they design them, using computers. So, rather than use computer animation - in which they design characters on computers and then have a computer do the grunt work of rendering them on the screen - they use real-life models, which were designed on computers, printed out, and then filmed for the screen by hand.
Now how does that make sense? I realize that old ways of doing things often have their charms, but this seems to defeat the purpose of it. It's like making a font based on your handwriting, or programing a synthesizer to sound like a buzzy lo-fi electric guitar, or bringing a mini-espresso machine camping. Yes, I know people do those things too.
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