Chapter 1: What is the main topic of stop-motion animation?
You may have heard something somewhere about the crisis of recycling and the problem of microplastics. But have you heard about how scientists are discovering very cool and creative solutions to fight this problem?
There is so much fake news about everything. I think that it is quite dangerous to talk about this, but microplastics are one of the biggest silent pollutions of all time. And they are getting everywhere, in the sea, in the soil, in the air, and already inside our bodies.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Why do we love animation so much?
In this talk, visual effects artist Brian McLean takes us on a journey into the world of stop-motion animation and 3D printing, sharing the incredible breakthroughs at the intersection of art and science, and why our brains can remember and attach to animated images and movement so clearly.
We spend great effort into trying to capture moments, freeze-frame memories. Drawings, paintings, sculptures, photography and home movies are all our attempts to remember something after it's gone. But did you know that your brain and eyes are already hardwired to do this?
I'm not talking about memory, I'm talking about the fact that your eye continues to see an object for a split second after that object disappears. I've been thinking about that fact for over 35 years. Hi, I'm Brian McLean, and I'm doing the Science.org exam, Principle of Persistence of Vision. Many of you are probably wondering, what is Persistence of Vision? Well, it's really pretty.
Your eye is an amazing organ, but it has one little quirk. It continues to see an object for a tenth of a second after the object disappears. This principle is what makes movies, cartoons, and even TV possible. Yep, that was me, 12 years old and going deep into the science of animation. I didn't want to do my science fair project on the principle of persistence of vision. I was forced to.
I wanted to do my science fair project on claymation, but my dad, he wouldn't let me. He said, Brian, this is a science fair. If you want to do claymation, you have to focus on the science that makes animation possible. So I opened up my collection of encyclopedias, and I got to work. It was here that I learned about this strange optical phenomenon called the principle of persistence of vision.
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Chapter 2: How does Brian McLean explain the principle of persistence of vision?
Eventually, you're going to end up with an extruded A. Now, just like your inkjet printer at your house, it doesn't take any longer to print a paragraph of Shakespeare or a rudimentary sentence. The detail of what you're printing doesn't necessarily add more time. We're so used to the equation. The more detail, the more complexity to something, the longer it takes to make.
But with a 3D printer, you can utilize the speed of a mass-produced object, but each object can be unique, have their own bespoke design and personality. and they were about to have a fundamental impact on the way that stop-motion movies are made.
Starting in 2006, working with a small team at a fledgling animation studio outside of Portland, Oregon, called Leica, we pioneered the use of using 3D printers for stop-motion animation to produce replacement animation. Our novel idea was to take this 100-year-old technique of replacement animation and fuse it with 21st century 3D printing technology.
We'd harness the power and subtlety of the computer animation, but instead of rendering out a model like Pixar or DreamWorks would, we would send face geometry to a 3D printer and then have it become a physical object that would snap onto a stop-motion puppet. Coraline was the first film to have 3D printed faces.
Over the course of the next 18 years and six films, Leica has continued to pioneer what stop-motion is capable of, as well as really redefining what's capable in the 3D printing industry. At first, we started printing faces out of a single material, and we had to hand-paint things. But then, for our next few films, we started using color printing.
Now, color printing was different than the inkjet or the resin printing we'd used before. Colored glue is sprayed down onto white powder. Now, the science behind this printer is the absorption rate between the liquid and the dry powder. Together, they came together to create the geometry as well as the mixed color. Now, the problem is we live in Portland, Oregon.
I don't know if you guys noticed, but it tends to rain a little bit here. So what that means, if we printed a face in the summer and that exact same face in the winter, they would come out different sizes and different colors because of the humidity differences. But it was the only color printer on the market, so for years we made do.
Now, we'd also design and engineer the entire head in the computer. Computer modelers wore many hats. They were first the sculptor that was sculpting the outside of the face, and then they would switch gears and become the engineer to engineer all the inner components. Now, starting in 2016, something really exciting happened in the 3D printing world.
I don't know if any of you guys heard, but man, us 3D printing nerds were stoked. Are you ready for this? Voxel printing. Thanks. You've all heard of pixels, right? The little 2D dots that make up 2D imagery? Well, a voxel is basically a three-dimensional pixel. A voxel is tiny. There's something like 338 million voxels in a cubic inch.
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