Chase Me (2015), The 3D Printed Short Film

Here at 3D Rapid Print, one of the fastest growing 3D Printing companies in the Thames Valley, we like to keep abreast of the latest innovations in 3D printing.

Chase Me (2015) is a 175-second long experimental stop-motion animated short film that “follows a ukelele-playing girl who is chased through a dark forest by the monster that emerges from her own shadow.” (The film’s video description on video-sharing website Vimeo misspells the word ukulele.) It took digital artist and animator Gilles-Alexandre Deschaud 2 years to make, including 4 months designing every frame via computer graphics animation. This amounted to circa 2,400 frames over 160 seconds. (The film was shot at 15 frames per second.) Deschaud describes the film as “a story about embracing your fears, and turning them into something beautiful.”

The film used 2,500 3D printed objects (300 of which were painted) across 12 different sets, consuming 80 litres of resin and circa 6,000 hours of printing over 10 months. The film’s biggest object was a tree that measured 50x40x35cm; it took a week to print its 22 constituent parts. Falling water or objects like a growing tree needed a different 3D printed object for every relevant frame to mimic their movement. A 3cm-tall model of the ukulele-playing girl was used for wide-angle shots, whereas the versions used for her close-ups went up to 7cm.

The film premiered at the Annecy International Animation Festival in June 2016, and was also selected for the Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival. All the film’s 3D printed objects were printed via SLA on a Form 1+ from Formlabs of Somerville, Massachusetts.

3D printing is an amazing tool. It can grow your small business or start a mini revolution in an industry. Explore what it can do for you when you contact us today.

Disclaimer: Featured image of “Walk in the Forest (Shishkin)” is in the public domain as it is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. The author of the work art itself died in 1898, ergo it is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.