Brisk! Eminem! The SuperBowl! My first animation related paycheck ever! Sandpaper!

A month ago, I got to work as a rapid prototyping sander on this spot for Brisk that aired during the SuperBowl.  Eminem's facial animation was done using rapid prototyped replacement faces. This is the same process used in Coraline, in which the facial animation is done in a 3D animation software like Maya before stop motion begins. Each frame is printed out by a 3D printer as solid object. The stop motion animator attatches the right plastic face to the puppet, moves the puppet however much they need to, takes a frame, and then puts new faces in place as s/he animates. This picture I found online gives a pretty good idea of how it works:

The faces come out of the 3d printer without color and covered in a waxy residue that needs to be sanded off before paint will adhere to them. That was my job! As you can see, those little faces are full of crevices and detailed areas that required lots of vigourous but careful sanding. The process took practice - we were all worried about sanding down any details on the faces, so for a lot of the time we didn't use high grit enough sandpaper. Often sanders could be seen brushing the little puppet heads against their faces to check for smoothness; after a while your fingers got numb from the sandpaper, and I know my fingernails got sanded flat!

I got to work alongside many talented people, learned to work a flocking gun, and ran some pretty nifty errands, too, like going to a Japanese stationary store for some mini burger erasers that got doctored up and then not used in the final spot. It was a great learning experience, and I'm happy to have participated in something that was seen by such a wide audience!

Here is the final ad: