Animator Creates a 3D Printed Film Using 2,500 3D Printed Pieces

Gilles-Alexandre Deschaud has worked in the visual effects industry as a digital artist and animator for the last seven years, and during that time he’s experimented with various animation techniques which made use of painting and drawing.

At the moment, Deschaud is doing his PhD research at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis in Motion Picture and Film studies, but it’s his most recent experimentation – and the discovery of 3D printing – that led him to create Chase Me, a hauntingly beautiful stop-motion animation film.

Over the course of two years, Deschaud modeled and built 2,500 3D printed pieces which he then manipulated to make Chase Me, a story about a young girl embracing her fears — and turning them into something beautiful.

He designed each frame of the film in CG before translating the images for processing via 3D printing. All the sets and characters for Chase Me were printed at 100 micron resolution, and Deschaud says they required only minimal finishing once the support material was removed.

“When I first saw the Form 1 3D printer on Kickstarter, I knew that was what I needed to make a 3D printed film,” he says. “I wanted to bring 3D printing technology to the art of stop-motion animation to create a new kind of film. I wouldn’t been able to have such tiny, complex and detailed prints without the Form 1 printer.”

One of the very detailed set pieces, a gnarled tree, took about a week to print on the Form 1+ and it’s composed of 22 separate parts. The finished project was about 50 x 40 x 35 cm, and the ground beneath the tree was sculpted from plasticine before all the pieces were bent and glued together. It’s but one feature of the dozen sets which Deschaud built for the film.

In total, the character and set pieces consumed some 80 liters of resin to create. The process of making all the various sets and character required approximately 10 months of continuous printing, and the artist says that represents some 6,000 hours in total.

“Users like Gilles-Alexandre, who are doing incredible things with the Formlabs 3D printer, inspire us to keep doing what we do,” says ” says Max Lobovksy, the co-founder of Formlabs.”Chase Me is beautiful – and powerfully moving – both in aesthetics and its attention to detail.”

You can find out more about Deschaud’s film by visiting chasemefilm.com.

Formlabs was founded in 2012 by a team of engineers and designers from the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms. Their SLA printers are used with a suite of high-performance materials for 3D printing and intuitive 3D printing software.

What do you think of the sets and characters created for Chase Me? Let us know in the 3D Printed Animation forum thread on 3DPB.com. Check out more images from Chase Me below.