Annie Awards Program Book

26
special Achievement Annie Award
Martin Meunier brian Mclean
ASIFA-Hollywood honors LAIKA Facial Structure Supervisor Brian McLean and LAIKA Facial Animation
Designer Martin Meunier with a Special Achievement Annie Award for the development of the Rapid
Prototyping (RP) process, which was utilized in this year’s Annie Award nominated animated feature
Coraline.
The team’s challenge was intense: Director Henry Selick’s goal was to create a feature- length film with all
the smooth facial transitions of CG animation, executed with handmade models. Coraline involved more
than twenty characters, requiring more than fifteen thousand different faces in total. Hand-sculpting
those thousands of expressions would have taken several years (and a matching budget) to complete.
Meunier and McLean rose to the occasion by creating the RP Process, which worked out a method that
seamlessly married high-touch with high-tech.
Working from high resolution scans and detailed resin castings of the hand-crafted original sculpts, the
RP department’s classically trained CG artists build multiple replacement faces in the computer using
key expression drawings as a guide, careful to retain every hand sculpted detail and imperfection that
the original sculpt possessed. In the final stages, these computer “sculpted” faces were delivered as
three-dimensional, printed objects. The objects were then cleaned, sanded and painted by hand. By
respecting the integrity of the original sculpture, none of the characters lose the human touch that went
into their creation.
Martin Meunier started working in 1989 as a Modelmaker for films and commercials in France. He then
moved to the US in 1994 to work on Henry Selick’s James and the Giant Peach and has since collaborated
on four other projects with Selick as a Modeler, Creature Supervisor and Stop-Motion Designer. During
that period he also worked for Tippet Studio, Digital Domain, ILM, The Orphanage and M5 Industries as
well as several publishing and toy companies.
brian Mclean has worked as a commercial sculptor for Warner Brothers and Disney. He has also served
as a sculptor and model maker for M5 studios (best known for the TV show Myth Busters). As well as
introducing 3D printing technology to CalArts, McLean was a model shop supervisor and model-making
instructor there.
37th Annual Annie AwArds