Trollfilm Receives FORREGION Support to Rethink the Multiplane Camera – Together with Volda University College
Dovre, October 16, 2026
Trollfilm has been awarded up to NOK 400,000 from FORREGION Innlandet, administered by Innlandet County Municipality. The grant is for a one-year research pre-project, Digitally Controlled Multiplane Camera Stand for Stop-Motion Animation. Our research partner is Volda University College (Høgskulen i Volda), and this week we held the kick-off meeting that started the work.
An old idea, a new machine
The multiplane camera stand dates from the 1920s. Animators layer artwork on several planes of glass, one above the other, so the camera can look down through the scene and give a flat cut-out world real depth. The principle is beautiful, and it has barely changed in ninety years. Every move of every plane is still done by hand, one frame at a time, with a great deal of patience.
At Trollfilm we want to keep the hands and lose some of the guesswork. Our goal is a stand whose glass planes and camera are moved by precise motors and controlled from Dragonframe, the software stop-motion animators already know. The animator still decides everything. The machine just remembers it, and can do it again, precisely, every time.
Why research, and why Volda
Before we build, we want to know what animators need. That is what the FORREGION grant is for. Over the coming year, Trygve Selnes Nielsen and the animation team at Volda will interview professional cut-out and stop-motion animators, map current working methods, and test ideas in practice: ergonomics, precision, efficiency, and what becomes possible on screen when the camera can finally move freely through the layers. The results will feed into the design of the stand, into teaching material at Volda, and into an academic article.
Volda has taught cut-out animation for many years, and the team’s experience in studio practice and animation research is exactly the outside view a small studio in the mountains needs. Alongside the research, we are working with Almli Drift AS, our neighbours here on Dovre, on the design and the mechanical side of the stand.
Coming full circle
There is also a longer story here. In the late 1980s, when Volda was getting ready to start its animation programme, they needed someone to try it out first. That test pilot was a young Anita Killi.
Around the same time, at a seminar at the Swedish Film Institute in 1989, she “fell in love with a hedgehog”. It was Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog, and above all the layered technique behind it. She has stayed with the multiplane ever since. She specialised in it at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and used it in films such as The Hedge of Thorns and Angry Man. Today she is one of the world’s most experienced practitioners of the technique, and since 2020 she has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisation behind the Oscars. The new stand is, in many ways, her long-held dream.
In her own words: “I dream that the old cowshed at Dovre, now converted into a large animation workshop and studio, will get its own newly designed multiplane stand - one that will attract exciting stop-motion artists from all over the world.”
So when the researchers from Volda come to Dovre, they are visiting one of their very first animation students, who now has some questions of her own for them.
Craft, not shortcuts
Much of the conversation in animation today is about automation and AI. Our stand will be automated too, but in service of the hand, not instead of it. The motors take care of precision and repetition, so the animator can spend more time on what only a person can do: timing, feeling, and the small decisions that make a film come alive. We believe hand-made animation of high artistic quality has a future, and that the tools behind it deserve the same care as the films.
The stand is being built with Anita’s coming feature film, Christmas Survivors, in mind. In time we also hope to offer it, along with our experience, to other studios.
A word of thanks
We are grateful to FORREGION Innlandet and Innlandet County Municipality for believing in the project.
No application writes itself, and this one had good help along the way. A special thank-you to Maren Lundhaug at Skåppå, the business development company for Gudbrandsdalen, who was our competence broker in the application process. When we brought Volda to the table, Maren helped us confirm that it was the right partner, both professionally and within the scheme’s requirements. She was a sharp sparring partner throughout, asked the hard questions early, and kept the process moving when the paperwork got thick.
We look forward to a year of curious questions, careful testing and, hopefully, a few beautiful camera moves.
Regards from Team Trollfilm
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