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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hu, sharing the incredible breakthroughs at the intersection of art and science and why our brains can remember and attach to animated images and movement so clearly.
We spend great effort into trying to capture moments, freeze-frame memories.
Drawings paintings sculptures, photography and home movies are all our attempts to remember something after it's gone.
But did you know that your brain and eyes are already hardwired to do this?
I'm not talking about memory.
I'm talking about the fact that your eye continues to see an object for a split second after that object disappears.
I've been thinking about that fact for over 35 years.
Hi, I'm Brian McLean, and I'm doing the Science.org exam, Principle of Persistence of Vision.
Many of you are probably wondering, what is persistence of vision?
Well, it's really pretty easy.
Your eye is an amazing organ. but it has one little quirk.
It continues to see an object for a tenth of a second after the object disappears.
This principle is what makes movies, cartoons, and even TV possible.
Yep, that was me, 12 years old and going deep into the science of animation.
I didn't want to do my science fair project on the principle of persistence of vision.
I was forced to.
I wanted to do my science fair project on claymation, but my dad, he wouldn't let me.
He said, Brian, this is a science fair.
If you want to do claymation, you have to focus on the science that makes animation possible.
So I opened up my collection of encyclopedias, and I got to work.
It was here that I learned about this strange optical phenomenon called the principle of persistence of vision.
Of course, our brains play a huge role in this.
It's not just the quirk in the retina that allows us to see film and animation.
Our brains are hardwired to be imaginative, to take in reality, in this case, a series of still images and create something new and innovative out of what it was given.
But when I was in sixth grade, I wasn't thinking of any of that.
I just loved stop-motion animation.
King Kong, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, scenes from Star Wars, Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wallace and Gromit.
I spent my childhood wondering what types of tools these filmmakers used to create movie magic.
Artists technicians, cinematographers and animators were creating groundbreaking visuals using primitive tools compared to today's standards.
Audiences leaving the theaters wondering how the heck those geniuses pulled it off.
That was me.
So I went to school to study art.
When I graduated college in 1999, I barely knew how to write an email.
Computers were not something I was comfortable with, so I resisted.
Like many artists, I bounced from job to job.
My career path was not a straight line.
Eventually, I ended up at a design school running their model shop.
It was here the trajectory of my life changed.
I was introduced to a 3D printer.
This amazing tool was like science fiction.
It bridged the digital world and the physical worlds together.
And for me, it made the digital world far less intimidating and more approachable.
So I'd read the instruction manual at night and teach the students how to use it during the day.
I realized then that creativity isn't just about making things, it's also about reinventing how we make them.
So a 3D printer isn't as unusual as it was 20 years ago, but the potential impacts are enormous.
Humans love to work with our hands.
For thousands of years, everything we made was handcrafted and unique.
More recently, we've drifted towards making lots and lots of things.
Now, as we mass produce these objects, each object needed to be the same by design.
Innovation has built assembly lines and tools that can pump out thousands of widgets a day precise, but all the same.
With a 3D printer.
It takes a three-dimensional object and slices it into hundreds, if not thousands, of two-dimensional images, kind of like a CAT scan, and then those images are built up layer by layer.
A polyjet printer sprays down liquid resin, and a bright UV light goes and cures that resin.
It's a lot like your inkjet printer at your house.
Imagine printing the letter A on a piece of paper and jetting down the A in the exact same spot.
And between each pass of the printer head, imagine dropping the paper slightly.
Eventually, you're going to end up with an extruded A.
Now, just like your inkjet printer at your house, it doesn't take any longer to print a paragraph of Shakespeare or a rudimentary sentence.
The detail of what you're printing doesn't necessarily add more time.
We're so used to the equation.
The more detail, the more complexity to something, the longer it takes to make.
But with a 3D printer you can utilize the speed of a mass-produced object.
But each object can be unique, have their own bespoke design and personality, and they were about to have a fundamental impact on the way that stop-motion movies are made.
Starting in 2006, working with a small team at a fledgling animation studio outside of Portland Oregon called Leica, we pioneered the use of using 3D printers for stop-motion animation to produce replacement animation.
Our novel idea was to take this 100-year-old technique of replacement animation and fuse it with 21st century 3D printing technology.
We'd harness the power and subtlety of the computer animation, but instead of rendering out a model like a Pixar or DreamWorks would, we would send face geometry to a 3D printer and then have it become a physical object that would snap onto a stop-motion puppet.
Coraline was the first film to have 3D printed faces.
Over the course of the next 18 years and six films.
Leica has continued to pioneer what stop-motion is capable of, as well as really redefining what's capable in the 3D printing industry.
At first, we started printing faces out of a single material, and we had to hand-paint things.
But then, for our next few films, we started using color printing.
Now, color printing was different than the inkjet or the resin printing we'd used before.
Colored glue is sprayed down onto white powder.
Now, the science behind this printer is the absorption rate between the liquid and the dry powder.
Together, they came together to create the geometry as well as the mixed color.
Now, the problem is we live in Portland, Oregon.
I don't know if you guys noticed, but it tends to rain a little bit here.
So what that means if we printed a face in the summer and that exact same face in the winter, they would come out different sizes and different colors because of the humidity differences.
But it was the only color printer on the market, so for years we made do.
Now, we'd also design and engineer the entire head in the computer.
Computer modelers wore many hats.
They were first the sculptor that was sculpting the outside of the face, and then they would switch gears and become the engineer to engineer all the inner components.
Now, starting in 2016, something really exciting happened in the 3D printing world.
I don't know if any of you guys heard, but man, us 3D printing nerds were stoked.
Are you ready for this?
Voxel printing.
Thanks.
You've all heard of pixels, right?
The little 2D dots that make up 2D imagery?
Well, a voxel is basically a three-dimensional pixel.
A voxel is tiny.
There's something like 338 million voxels in a cubic inch.
So, unlike the inkjet printing we'd used before that were based on decades of 2D inkjet technology, where colors can overlap to mix, color Voxels cannot mix.
Each voxel has to occupy its own 3D space.
The printer jets down distinct voxels of cyan yellow magenta black, white and clear resin, layer by layer, in different patterns.
Now, because we're printing a three-dimensional object, the shape of that object and the way that light hits the surface and is either reflected off or absorbed in affects the colors our eyes see.
So what that means is the pattern of voxels of magenta and yellow to print an orange sphere are different than that of an orange cube.
If you were to take one of our faces and look at it under an electron microscope, you would not see smooth mixed color, but instead millions and millions of distinct voxels.
It's a lot like a pointillist painting.
If you stand back far enough, it appears as though the colors are mixed, but when you get close to the canvas you can see the individual colors.
This was groundbreaking in the 3D printing world.
Not only could you create sophisticated color parts, but you could start to control the interior as well.
Remember, there are voxels throughout the entire volume, not just on the surface.
By leveraging visual effects software packages typically used in big budget movies to render explosions, tornadoes or raging oceans, Leica has been taking super dense point cloud data and transferring them into 3D printed voxels and being able to precisely control voxels in a 3D space.
We're at the tip of the innovation spear in this area.
We can take hard materials and soft materials and combine them on a voxel level, producing a brand new material with unique properties in the process.
Remember how a 3D object is built up out of layers?
Well, it turns out, you can take the CAT scan data and you can 3D print a perfect replica of a patient's body part.
By taking voxels, you can create materials that are like bone, tissue, muscle, veins, and skin.
A surgeon can take real patient data and 3D print a perfect replica of a patient's head with the exact placement of their tumor and then do a practice operation removing that tumor.
Like his very own.
Rob Ducey, who was part of that original team in 2006, has helped write a research paper, along with Nick Dickinson and other researchers in the medical field, on this very subject.
It's amazing to see Leica Animation Studios, alongside other prestigious medical researchers, as the one pioneering the use of voxel printing in the medical field.
But we're like any other user in the 3D printing world.
Yes, we've won a scientific and technical Oscar for pioneering the use of 3D printing and stop-motion animation.
But most other users are creating prototypes.
We're using a 3D printer as a creative expression, in a way, bringing still objects to life.
Each face we print is unique.
Each one is a work of art that's hand-finished by artists.
For our latest film, Missing Link, we printed over 106,000 unique faces.
We have a face library run by face librarians who catalog and archive each individual expression.
We've also won a Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of 3D-printed faces in a stop-motion animated film.
I don't think anyone else is competing in that category, but it's still pretty cool.
So the geniuses at Leica have been trying to figure out a way in real time that I could demonstrate how we use 3D printers for replacement animation.
You see, stop motion animation is an extremely slow process.
The average animator working 40 hours a week can produce three to four seconds of footage.
I would be up on this stage for weeks trying to animate something for you guys.
And if any of you stuck around that long, you'd be disappointed, because I'm not an animator and it wouldn't look very good.
So at first, we thought about building the zoetrope.
It was invented 200 years ago before film cameras existed as a way to see still images come to life.
We thought about dragging one of these out here and having me spin it like crazy.
But the problem with this design is all the beautiful artwork is hidden behind large cylindrical walls.
So instead, we designed, engineered, and built something specific for this TEDx stage.
So this is Norman.
He's one of our typical stop-motion puppets.
Norman is about 10 inches tall.
He's got a metal armature.
Animators will move the puppet, and they will also remove his face.
This is one of those 3D-printed faces.
There are magnets on the back, and the magnets snap the face into position.
So when an animator goes out to set, they go out with their little character, little puppet, but they also go out with a box of faces.
We're delivering 24 faces for every second of footage.
This represents three seconds of Norman animation.
Think about this contraption this camera as your eyeball and this flywheel mechanism as your eyelid.
As I move slowly, it's like you're blinking slowly.
As I move backwards, I can move forward and backwards.
Now, you can also kind of probably hear some sounds, right?
Those are broken up sounds of words.
As I move faster, it's like you're blinking faster, right?
Now, once I hit the magical speed of 24 frames a second, Your mind's imagination will fill in the gaps and you'll be left with the beautiful and creative world coming to life before your eyes.
That kid you saw before in the video loved stop-motion animation.
That led me down a path of first discovery, then resisting something I feared, technology.
The artistic drive of the individuals that I have an honor of working alongside have built an environment where we get to bring imagination into reality and forge the path forward of not only inventing new things, but using creativity to reinvent how we make them.
Thank you very much.
That was Brian McLean at TEDx Portland in Oregon in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong.
This episode was mixed by Lucy Little.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo.
I'm Elise Hu.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
On the TED Radio Hour, computer scientist Francis Chance studies how the graceful dragonfly manages to be such a deadly hunter.
We know that they fly to intercept their prey.
They fly really fast, and they're very successful.
What AI developers are learning from natural intelligence.
That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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