A film crew is down on its haunches, barking instructions back and forth, cameras trained on a bulky grey box, waiting as the birth of a futuristic action figure happens before their eyes. It will be 72 hours before they have all the footage they need.
One year later, Major Chip Hazard emerges from a tank of liquid in mere seconds, lasers firing toward his anatomy as he makes his ascent. Archer, his co-star in 1998 movie Small Soldiers, joins him immediately after.
As rapid prototyping made its Hollywood debut, it represented a 3D printing machine operator’s dream: functioning parts – in this case nefarious action figures – produced in the time it takes to send an email. But the creation of the Small Soldiers was just a fantasy in a world where missile technology is used to improve the functionality of action figures that subsequently wreak havoc. As a movie, it may not age all that well, but its credentials as an anecdote, piece of trivia and the premiere of an industry trend are in a healthier state.
Behind the scenes
The location for this piece of filming was a 3D Systems Tech Center in Valencia, California in 1997.
“Three days of shooting for 20 seconds of action,” was the assessment of Jan Richter, who ran the Tech Center at the time. “It was unbelievable. I’ve never been on a movie shoot before, and I’ve heard the comments of ‘hurry and wait.’ That was it.”
Typically, the Tech Center was used for prototypes and design validation models, and while there were prop shops making moulds with 3D printing technology at this time, the Small Soldiers call came as a surprise to 3D Systems – so much so, the company wasn’t sure what to charge the studio to use its facility. In the end, it was a very tiny fraction of the movie’s 40m USD budget.
“We’d been brought up on this is for prototyping,” said Covestro Additive Manufacturing’s Andrew Graves, who worked for 3D Systems in the 1990s. “All the applications were in aerospace, automotive and consumer goods, and there had been a few artists that had been using it making direct use models or masters for metal casting, but it was the first time that we’d heard of the movie industry [being interested in 3D printing]. It was just cool. Our industry was expanding to making films.”
For 3D printing’s initial step into movies to happen, 3D Systems agreed to dedicate an SLA 5000 within its Tech Center to the Small Soldiers film crew. For three days, a tent was erected around a machine based in the corner of an L-shaped configuration of nine printers. Before filming commenced, a mock figure was printed with an early Accura resin (the actual figures would be fabricated by hand), but when the film crew set up their equipment, Richter told TCT that syrup was used to fill the vat due to concerns that the lighting used by the crew would cure the resin while filming was underway – the studio had to pay for that. Once the syrup was loaded, the cameras started to roll and captured the footage you see in the opening scenes of the movie. Because the filming took so long, the crew set up camp beds by the machine. They also captured other footage within the facility, such as passing shots of the other printers, but these were never used.
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When the movie hit the cinemas a year later, the reaction was muted, at least outside of the industry. Richter jokes that even by 1998 people still didn’t want to listen to him talk about his job at parties – that would change in time – though people within the industry had begun sharing files to print their own moulds and make their own models. At some point thereafter, Jason Lopes then of Legacy Effects, an American special effects studio, had got wind of the story and would share his perspective on it at industry events like the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG).
“My whole thing was to really understand this tool from a different perspective,” Lopes told TCT at this year’s AMUG. “Everyone sees it for product development, prototyping, this and that. For me, it was how do we see it as an extension of ourselves, and especially with the younger generation, to start understanding there are different ways of doing things. Every idea now has a chance. It’s a lot easier to prototype something today, even if you’re not good with your hands, there’s a way to bring something into this world and give it an opportunity. [I wanted to] A) get people hooked by showing them the history of these films that they’ve seen, and then B) inspire them to think that I’m going to be more daring, I’m going to try, try, try more and I’m not going to fear failure.”
Lopes has spent the last 15 years at the intersection of movies and 3D printing, working on Iron Man, Jurassic World and Pacific Rim. In all that time, he hasn’t come across an earlier on-screen depiction or end-use application of a 3D printer. Today, they’re often used as a prop to convey a futuristic feel, and, increasingly, to produce the props themselves.
“The irony is,” Lopes continued, “it’s shown in the opening scenes. The way those [Small Soldiers] characters were made was not with 3D printing, it was [with] hand traditional fabrication [techniques], but it gave us a glimpse of what’s to come.”
...And action!
What was to come was 3D printing’s role in movies, like any great actor, evolving over time. Three years after Small Soldiers, a ‘rapid prototyper’ was used by a character in Jurassic Park III to portray the prototyping of a velociraptor’s resonating chamber, and now, you’d be spoilt for choice to pick your favourite Hollywood application of 3D printing.
Lopes counts the work carried out by Legacy Effects on the Iron Man movies as a key milestone. The company used Stereolithography to prototype the Iron Man suit for the first movie, before producing a pair of customised gloves for lead actor Robert Downey Jr during filming for the sequel. Ten years on from the first Iron Man film, Black Panther turned to Selective Laser Sintering to produce pieces for Queen Ramonda’s costume, after Guardians of the Galaxy had applied an Objet500 Connex printer to produce Star Lord’s mask. More recently, LAIKA deployed 3D printing to produce 102,000 different animated character faces for Missing Link – a 5x increase on its first movie Coraline.
During the writing of this article, Formlabs announced its Form 3L machine was used by the makers of HBO Max series Raised By Wolves to produce moulds, end-use props and make-up effects for the show’s second season. During Small Soldiers, when the decision had been made to push ahead with a set of toys manufactured using missile technology, a deadline of three months to get products on shelves is given – half the time that would usually be set. In the real world, Hollywood is renowned for such demands being made, and at this stage, 3D printing is no stranger to meeting them. Rob Wiggins, who was introduced to 3D printing technology while working as a Concept Artist and 3D Sculptor for Hasbro, now ‘almost exclusively’ uses 3D printing to make props through his own business Get It Done Dudes. The reasons, he and others with knowledge of both 3D printing technology and the movie industry say, are plenty.
“With 3D printing, you’re able to get finer details and it’s repeatable,” Wiggins said. “If you’ve got a part that you’re making from scratch, you’re making a bespoke product. If they say, ‘hey, we need two of these again,’ or ‘hey, it broke,’ you’ve just doubled your entire process time for doing a prop. Whereas with 3D printing, if they come back to us and say, ‘hey, remember that prop you made us, can you make another one?’ you’re cutting down on so much money and time that otherwise would have been spent trying to reproduce that asset over again.”
“Clients change their mind all the time,” Lopes added. “If you’re doing a traditional sculpture and a client changes it, that’s weeks. [Also], symmetry, for us, was amazing. Being able to work on symmetrical things and just mirror to the other side so amazingly fast – time is money. Projects accelerate from project to project to project. This one was six months, the next one is three months, the next is one is two months, faster, faster, faster, more iterations. Just being able to keep up as much in near real time as possible to support their decision making [is a big benefit of 3D printing]. In a traditional world, when it takes a lot to change, the more you’re asking someone to do that the more they’re losing their passion for doing that. It’s going to slow them down. It’s a psychology play too. Everyone likes to do better, faster.”
“It is the definition of a limited production run,” Graves offered. “We’re making ten of these suits, they all need this body armour, we’re not going to make a mould for it, 3D print the parts. It’s limited production, so it totally makes sense.”
Graves believes that Lopes implementing the technology at Legacy Effects and then sharing his insights across to the digital manufacturing and 3D printing conference circuit ‘opened our eyes to what was being done and what could be done.' In the hands of Lopes, Wiggins and their peers at the likes of Legacy Effects and Hasbro, the technology has facilitated the quicker development and approval of designs, while also allowing props, costumes and even animated faces to be manufactured in low volumes and/or with customised designs. 3D printing is being tasked with standing up to the rigours of movie stunts, conveying the story through character clothes and expressions, and the tight deadlines set by production execs. And there is more to come.
“A lot can be done with CGI,” said Graves, “but where you need a practical prop that an actor has to hold, as materials improve, they’re going to be more functional, so you could have weapons that people could use against another actor and not be afraid that it wouldn’t break, because speaking for [Covestro], we’re working on more durable and functional materials. We’ll see more flexible materials [too] and it could be, for the stop motion stuff, you could print a material that you could bend and move. We’ve gone through a steep curve and now we’re flattening out, but I think there’ll be incremental improvements as there are in regular industry.”
“It’s everywhere, and I feel like it’s expanding and expanding,” Wiggins finished. “One thing that we have coming up is the next Transformers film. We have some designs in there that I’m super excited to talk about as soon as I get the green light. I know they’ll be mad at me if I say anything [but] it’s some stuff I’m really proud of. We’ve been working on that for years, so that’s going to be super exciting once that comes out.”
