Nearly everything is turning digital these days, including movies and movie-watching. Laika is a hybrid studio that’s been digitalizing its products in a specific manner. It starts with the age-old, slow-motion (i.e. 24 handcrafted frames per second). Then, these frames are cleaned and modified through visual effects along with addition of new characters and background.
“We’re dedicated to pushing the boundaries and trying to expand what you can do in a stop motion film,” said Jeff Stringer, the production technology director at Laika. “We want to try and get as much as we can in-camera, but using visual effects allows us to scale it up and do more.”
A similar experiment was done with Laika’s latest feature called “Missing Link.” This is the fifth feature movie by Laikato be nominated for Academy Award for the best-animated feature and his first to win a Golden Globe award.
It is said that the digital background of this film exceeded a petabyte of storage. The editing team spent 112 million processing hours to render the complete movie. This figure equates 12, 785 years in total.
This complex task took place on the Intel’s Xeon Scalable processor. Laika engineers teamed with Intel engineers to apply AI to speed up and further automate the articulate process of the company.
Stringer added: “Our biggest metric is, is the performance believable and beautiful? Our ethos is to not let the craft limit the storytelling but try to push the craft as far as the story wants to go.”
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