No matter how realistic a computer animated movie like Toy Story 3 might seem to you, it's still just a bunch of numbers inside a computer. That makes the computer animation process much more ephemeral, leaving behind few tangible relics such as hand-drawn animation cels or articulated stop-motion puppet. But why should that be, when 3-D printers can bring any 3-D computer model to life?
Freeze! might be the first computer animation to live outside of just the hard drive. Created by Dutch animation studio Job, Joris & Marieke, Freeze! shows a pencil-drawn figure leap out of a piece of paper, dance across a table, smash a coffee cup, and then perform a series of acrobatic flips to land in a jar sitting on a shelf.
That series of events doesn't take up a lot of screentime: just 11 seconds, in fact. But what makes Freeze! special is that it's been expanded into an entire exhibition, where every frame of the animation is represented in physical form. There's a separate 3-D printed figure for every one of the 100-odd frames the Freeze's dancing figure moves across the screen. The exhibition space even recreates the setting of the Freeze! cartoon, which is itself a recreation of Job, Joris & Marieke's animation studio, right down to the table, shelves, and portraits on the walls.
The result is a static installation that actually explains the principles of animation, without being animated at all. If you look closely, you can figure out what happened to the table, even if you never saw the Freeze! cartoon at all. Freeze! and its accompanying illustration were made for the Move On exhibition at the Kunsthalkade in Amsterdam, celebrating 100 years of animation, and will be on display until May 10, 2015.
[via The Creator's Project]