The story starts with a young girl singing and playing the ukulele, walking through a magical forest. But it’s not as simple as it may sound: a monster evolves from her shadow, and continues evolving, as it chases her through the woods. In a film that is literally titled Chase Me, I do think that if I were the protagonist, I might be running a little bit faster, considering the many fantastic and frightening shapes the monster takes as it stalks the girl through the trees, but that’s just me.
Deschaud says, “Chase Me is a story about embracing your fears and turning them into something beautiful.”
- Two total years of work
- Four months of CG animation
- Ten months of nonstop 3D printing (roughly 6,000 hours!)
- 80 liters of resin
- 2,500 3D prints (300 of which were painted)
- 12 different 3D printed sets
Every single frame of the film was designed by Deschaud in CG first, before it was processed into 3D prints. It was then recreated through stop-motion animation, at 15 frames per second, to achieve the final result. The set and characters were 3D printed in 100 micron resolution, and beyond removal of the support material, there was not much finishing required.
Bigger pieces, such as the massive tree in the forest, were printed in 22 separate parts, and later assembled. Sets like the waterfall needed to 3D printed frame by frame, in order to give them the illusion of movement. The 3D print of the young girl used for wide angles was 3 cm high, while the prints used for her close-up shots went up to 7 cm.
The Form 1+, which Deschaud used to make Chase Me, was introduced in 2014 by the Boston-based 3D printer manufacturer, and uses SLA to create high-resolution objects from digital designs.
Formlabs co-founder Max Lobovsky said, “Users like Gilles-Alexandre, who are doing incredible things with the Formlabs 3D printer, inspire us to keep doing what we do. Chase Me is beautiful and powerfully moving, both in aesthetics and its attention to detail.”
Take a look at the stunning 3D printed stop-motion animated film Chase Me:
Discuss in the 3D Printed Stop Motion Film forum at 3DPB.com.