The team at animation powerhouse Laika, makers of the much beloved and Academy Award-nominated Coraline, are sure to knock us dead with ParaNorman, another stop motion feature film shot in 3D with Dragonframe.

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LAIKA, the studio behind the stop motion, 3D feature film Coraline, is currently busy on many stop motion projects including a new 3D feature film. While we cannot divulge information about the film, we can tell you they are using Dragon Stop Motion for all of their shooting in both their House and Entertainment divisions.

LAIKA has the distinction as an animation company that its CEO is also a world class animator. Travis Knight was the lead animator on Coraline, tackling the toughest shots and always bringing a depth and emotion to his performances.

Travis Knight-

“Dragon is a extraordinary achievement in design and function, an elegant blend of creativity and technology.  LAIKA uses Dragon on both our commercial and feature film stages as the core piece of our production technology.  It is a program that is at once simple and sophisticated: accessible and intuitive for the most troglodytic artist, yet sufficiently deep and robust for the most grizzled, technophilic veteran.  With its ingenious interface, reliable performance, and exhaustive set of features, Dragon is as essential to modern stop-motion production as an X-Acto blade and a power drill.  It makes other frame-grabbing tools seem as antiquated as a surface gauge.  I can’t imagine animating with anything else.”

Thank you Travis for that amazing quote—we hope we continue to live up to those expectations.

If the name Breakthru Films rings a stop motion bell for you – you may remember their Academy Award winning short: Peter and The Wolf. For their newest stop motion adventure, they equiped their stages with Dragon Stop Motion. The Flying Machine (in 3D) celebrates Chopin’s 200th birthday with an epic journey that takes flight on a magical piano. The film is set to premiere in Beijing, London and Warsaw. You will be hearing more from us about this ambitious project soon.

The Flying Machine was shot using our IOTA 3D Sliders and IOTA Controllers. The Breakthru team started production with other commercially available 3D sliders. Unfortunately these were not production ready in terms of strength and repeatability, so they turned to IOTA . Here is what the Breakthru camera team had to say about using our IOTA 3D System.

Excerpt:
“We had the opportunity to try other 3D solutions before we began to use Dragon Stop Motion’s IOTA system. To explain, we used Dragon Stop Motion software from the beginning of shooting–before the release of the IOTA 3D system. We were drawn to Dragon’s multiple exposures, which could easily adapt to work in stereo. Dragon Stop Motion worked with 3D sliders from other companies, although these sliders were far from ideal.

How does the IOTA 3D slider perform? The first thing worth noting is the surprisingly lightweight, compact design, which, despite its small size is able to work in any position and at any angle. Even with heavy cameras and lenses, the IOTA slider keeps perfect accuracy. This is great to see, given our experience with other sliders. Another noteworthy feature is the high temperature resistance.

The IOTA 3D slider is fully integrated with Dragon, so it’s controlled by the software. This solution allows us to achieve high flexibility, unattainable with other systems. Setting any starting position or reversing stereo channels is rarely needed but we really appreciate the options.

We particularly appreciate Dragon’s ability to preview in 3D. The opportunity to evaluate stereo directly in Dragon, without exporting to compositing programs, truly accelerates our work flow. It’s not just that Dragon gives you a 3D preview, it gives you professional 3D controls such as parallax adjustment for both channels and calipers for measuring the degree of the parallax. Such nuances as the ability to assign floating 3D window only add to our enthusiasm for the IOTA / Dragon system. With Dragon 3D, all of the tools a stereographer needs are at hand.

Dragon gives us the ability to assign three stereo interoculars. This enables us to achieve multiple IO’s in a single pass. It is especially useful for tests or even bracketing your interocular. This feature in 3D sliders will be appreciated particularly by those who want to have stereo adapted to varying display sizes.

The IOTA is unquestionably the best 3D slider we have used…”