LAIKA's Craft in Motion series shows how animators fake motion blur with hand-built smear frames

LAIKA's official "Craft in Motion" video series published a new entry, "Craft in Motion: Smear Frames in Stop-Motion Animation" (LAIKA Studios YouTube channel, 2026-07-03), explaining the studio's approach to reintroducing motion blur into puppet animation -- an effect ordinary frame-by-frame stop motion does not naturally produce, since each frame captures a puppet held perfectly still. The video walks through smear frames, an in-between technique borrowed from traditional hand-drawn animation (in use since the 1940s) and adapted to LAIKA's replacement-part puppet pipeline: rather than redrawing a pose, animators sculpt or 3D-print a stretched or duplicated version of a moving part -- the video cites a duplicated skeleton hand as its example -- and swap it in only for the frames where a fast gesture would otherwise stutter. The video draws its examples from ParaNorman, Coraline and The Boxtrolls. The durable technique fact is folded into a new Wiki page, Motion blur and smear techniques in stop motion, alongside Aardman's very different camera-driven approach to the same problem.