Shane Acker’s ‘9’ is best of both worlds

Director Shane Acker always wanted to do the film “9” using stop-motion animation, but the camera limitations imposed by the physical sets drove him to computer-generated animation instead. But that didn’t stop his obsession with the look and feel of stop-motion. “The way I achieved that look was to make a lot of the objects physically, or I found them, then scanned them into the computer to capture the texture,” Acker says. For example, he stitched the burlap quilt of the villainous Beast’s skin together himself, and used a set of gardening gloves to create the characters 3 and 4. And the old soul of No. 2 was indeed an old sole -- created from a patchwork of old leather soles. “You create the characters in the 3-D world,” Acker says. “Then you basically project the texture onto the geometry. And it sticks.”

-- Patrick Kevin Day