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Shotgun Manages LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Animation and VFX

Shotgun Software is now in use at animation studio LAIKA to manage production and improve
collaboration for stop-motion and VFX work at its Portland, Oregon studio.

LAIKA implemented the web-based software as a central platform for updating production management of the data-heavy stop-motion process on its upcoming 3D animated feature ‘ParaNorman’, releasing 17 August  2012 from Focus Features. “The traditional method of sharing information and keeping a stop-motion production rolling involves armies of people with clipboards and a massive hallway of shot boards, printouts and schedules,” said Jeff Stringer, LAIKA’s director of production technology. “We have been using Shotgun to manage visual effects work for a long time, and when we started ‘ParaNorman’, we decided to use it within the stop-motion pipeline also for some of the processes we were doing manually. “The biggest benefit Shotgun gives us is the ability to organize approved artwork and relate it to the shots. When we are talking about a particular piece of artwork, everyone is now sure they’re looking at the exact same thing. That was not the case before Shotgun.” Shotgun is designed to give all parties involved in a project instant access to critical data, messaging and real-time project progress. Its open API enables studios to use Shotgun as a central platform around which they can build custom tools and bridges to other applications using Python scripting. LAIKA TD Supervisor Rob Blau said that they were able to build tools quickly that let people feed data in automatically and publish easily.   www.laika.com  www.shotgunsoftware.com