And the Academy Award goes to… a 3D printer

This year at the 82nd annual Academy Awards (3/7), movie stars will be sharing the spotlight with breakthrough technology.

Avatar, nominated for best picture – along with art direction and visual effects – and Coraline, nominated for best animated feature film, were brought to the big screen thanks to innovative 3D printing (or rapid prototyping) technology by Objet Geometries.

For Avatar, James Cameron relied on Objet-created models to plan how his characters fit in Pandora’s lush environment. With 3D printing, the production company Legacy Effects made detailed figurines of each blue-skinned humanoid to test lighting for every camera shot in the movie. The company also used the technology to create a Transformer-like, walking battle armor complete with cockpit.

For Coraline, LAIKA productions used Objet to create thousands of models ranging from cars to doorknobs and food spreads. The technology helped the movie break new ground in stop-motion animation, allowing the character Coraline to exhibit well over 208,000 facial expressions – an extremely significant jump compared to the 800 possible expressions in one of the last stop-motion films to generate buzz, The Nightmare Before Christmas, created in 1993 by the same director.

A leader and innovator in the rapid prototyping industry, Objet printers are changing the way the films we love are made.