14 DAY TRIAL // Computer-generated graphics are all well and good, but it can be troublesome to make things look realistic, especially if you want shadows and human emotions to be accurately depicted. Aron Bothman managed to dodge the issue entirely by means of 3D printing technology.
The video below is of the student film “Feats in a Fallen City” which depicts the cyclical nature of life and how loss and change are inevitable.
Aron Bothman created it as a project for his studies at The California Institute of the Arts, the first art school in the country to grant bachelor and master degrees in the fine arts.
More specifically, Bothman is a student of the Character Animation program, and while he did start out using 2D drawings of his characters, he soon took things to the next level.
And by “next level” we don't mean CGI, but physical representations of the characters in his short motion picture.
It took him five months to build the miniature sets, and then to light and film his movie one frame at a time. It's like the next level of stop motion.
Based on his 2D drawings, Bothman made a maquette of each of the characters' faces, which he photographed and, using Maya and ZBrush, sculpted and refined the faces.
That done, he turned the faces into STI files, which he then 3D printed, or rather asked California 3D printing company Cokreeate to do for him.
The different expressions were crafted out of gypsum material hardened with resin. Visually, it's a lot like organic porcelain.
Bothman used 3D printing technology because it allowed him to push the borders of what he could do. As a student of the institute, he has to make one film every year, and this one obviously brought him a small degree of fame. He was even kind enough to publish a “Making Of” video.
For those who want more technical details, Cokreate used their full-color ZCorp 3D printer to produce the figurines' faces. Each character armature was crafted by hand though.
It's hard to say where Aron Bothman will go from here. Since his talents include sculpting, 3D design, special effects and, apparently, screen writing, he could make a splash in Hollywood or become famous as some other sort of artist. That he's able to meld together so many different art disciplines, and put so much work and patience into his project, is quite telling.