See the Laika Exhibit at the Portland Art Museum

Over the weekend we went to the Portland Art Museum to an exhibit about the art produced at Laika, an animation studio nearby.

Because Laika uses stop-motion animation, each movie generates tens of thousands of artifacts – dolls, sets, costumes. Although stop-motion animation has been around for over a hundred years, in Laika’s current manifestation all sorts of computers are used in the prototyping and filming of their movies.

For instance, to get a range of expressions for a character, around 40,000 faces needed to be printed from a 3-D printer. 

The exhibit highlighted the detail, range of materials, the richness of films such as: Kubo and the Two Strings, the Boxtrolls, ParaNorman, Coraline. 

If you are able, this exhibition is a must see.

P.S. This exhibition contained a zoetrope that produced a strobing effect and triggered me to relive my high school math class on another planet. Lucky for me, trained staff were on hand to redirect me to a more suitable space-time coordinate.