3D Printing

Artist 3D Prints Animated Film without Film

Remember when you were just a kid and you drew these little flip-book animations, possibly using a pad of sticky notes? Then, you grew up and got a job and slowly surfed the waves of entropy towards death (and possible rebirth?).  Meanwhile, Belgium-based French artists like Julien Maire never grew up, moving well beyond your cute flip-book drawings to create a 3D printed animation series that would have blown your cartoons out of the water.

3d printed animation

At iMAL in Belgium, CNET reports, artist Julien Marie has used a Form 1 3D printer to create the 85, three-dimensional still frames for his unique installation “Relief”.  In clear resin, Marie 3D printed each frame of a person digging, an animation created by Paul Jadoul of Studio l’Enclume,and attached them to a moving belt placed in front of a light projector. The frames then moved in front of the light, casting a moving film on the opposing blank wall.

3D printed animation made with form1

The work is described at iMAL in the following way:

3d printing animation julien marieMedia Archaeology is a new science. It’s not studying the history of cinematograph and gramophone, but how our perception of the world is transformed through the camera lens and the speaker,” the project’s description reads.

In French, ‘3D cinema’ was also called ‘relief cinema’ (relief as in ‘relief map’ or ‘bas-relief’). The term went out of style when we were forced to admit that ‘relief cinema’ didn’t exist. ‘Relief’ evokes materiality, while ‘3D’ is commonly understood as a mathematical and computational concept. Through expanding and contracting pieces, and stereolithographic projections, Julien Maire’s installations indirectly address new technologies, media archaeology and manipulate fiction.

Marie’s work is not the first to bring the art of zoetrope-like animation to 3D printing.  Design studio Nervous System recently created its own series of 3D printed animations that are just as uncanny as Marie’s.  But, as far as I’m concerned, in the field of 3D printed animation, the more the merrier!

Sorry for saying that thing about you surfing the waves of entropy.  I shouldn’t make those sorts of assumptions.