‘Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget’ director Sam Fell on the challenges of making a new–and even more bold–Aardman stop-motion film.
More than 20 years since the release of Aardman’s Chicken Run, the stop-motion studio is back with the sequel, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, from director Sam Fell.
This time, the chickens are no longer breaking out, but instead breaking into a massive chicken nugget facility. Aardman upped the ante with traditionally made sets and puppets for the film, while also taking advantage of newer technologies like computer generated characters and environments, VR set scouting, virtual production and digital compositing.
At the recent VIEW Conference in Turin, befores & afters had the opportunity to sit down with Fell to discuss some of the key challenges in making the film.
These ranged from dealing with chicken/human scale differences (both in terms of animating the puppets and in how these characters appear in the final frames), to using new tools to still retain an old-school feel to the film.
We also chatted about what Fell thinks is at the heart of stop-motion for audiences and filmmakers alike, despite the often laborious build and animation process involved.
b&a: In your talk, you mentioned the ‘pain’ of stop-motion, but as a reason you love it and perhaps why audiences love it. Can you explain what you meant by that? Because, I love the phrase.
Sam Fell: Well, it’s the pleasure and the pain, there are two sides to stop-motion. The pleasure side is, well, it’s handmade and it’s like being in a big toy shop when you’re making it, you’re surrounded by the movie. But the pain comes in with just the sheer physicality of it. It’s funny how you forget that. We spend most of our time on screens, actually, and we’ve lost a sense of scale. I think we spend quite a lot of our time out of our bodies, in our heads or on screens or in virtual places chatting.
So it’s quite surprising when you start getting into making a stop-motion film because everything’s really heavy. The sets weigh a ton, and if you want a great set that really works, you’ve got to order it up three or four months in advance. There’s no quick turnaround, or there’s no ways to pivot quickly from one thing to another.
It doesn’t quite have the flexibility that I’ve found in CG where it’s possible to redo things more or change things more or get started on something when it’s not quite locked in story. The pain comes in just making that early commitment to the creative vision. You are having to lock and load earlier and commit to it and stick with it. That’s the difficulty.
That goes all the way through to the shoot. When somebody animates a scene in stop-motion, everything’s together. The lighting’s in there, the design’s in there, the set dressing–the whole thing comes finished in that one go, and you can’t change any of it. Well, you can, but it would be a redo. And you can fix things a little bit in post now, and you can do a tiny bit of re-timing if you’re lucky. But generally you have to love what you get.
b&a: I guess with that pain, the benefit is the physicality, this tangible handcrafted thing that people seem to love about stop-motion, of course.
Sam Fell: Yes, from the human hand. You can see the thumbprints and you can feel the presence of the human hand in the whole thing. And especially with Aardman and the way they do faces.
b&a: I’m so glad you mentioned that. I was going to ask you about that later. The replacement faces approach at Aardman is a little bit different than some other big shops that might use 3D static face shapes, but thousands of them. But Aardman’s replacement faces are malleable and still plasticine, is that right?
Sam Fell: Yes, they are all still made by hand, in fact. Plus the assistants are making mouths constantly and cleaning mouths and fixing mouths. The 3D-printed system that we used in ParaNorman, on the other hand, really meant that we animated the faces in CG before the stop-frame happened and it was set and prescribed and given to the animators. But here, the beauty of the clay is that it’s still malleable. The mouth sets are something like 15 to 20 mouths to start off with, but then the animators even do their own in-betweening and they can improvise. They can come up with an asymmetrical version or try a little something else.
The top half of the face is all in-camera, that is, it’s animated clay and sculpted. I think it’s the perfect blend of a replacement system that gives you the consistency of design across the team, but with the individual ability to express yourself and improvise in your own way.
b&a: It also seems like the physicality and tangible side of Aardman’s work and your work is still aided by the latest tech. An example you gave in your talk was how Gravity Sketch was used in 3D and VR to plan out set designs, and help find storytelling moments. Can you talk a bit about that?
Sam Fell: Organically, stop-motion has evolved ways to be augmented with digital technology. Not just by the addition of CG characters–which we do have with some digital doubles for the chickens–but also in the design process. Here we had the challenge of the chickens breaking into a giant chicken nugget factory, which is like a Bond villain’s lair, with humans in it. Meaning, we had a scale difference between the characters. The humans are big and the chickens are, well, chicken size.
The problem with this is that puppets in stop-motion are all based around the human hand. The puppet’s scale must relate to the human hand. So our chickens had to be a certain scale to be animated, and our people had to be at a certain scale. similarly. However, there were different scales in the final frames required. Which meant we were going to have to be constantly combining these scales.
The further challenge is that there isn’t a layout phase generally or traditionally in stop-motion. In 2D animation, the storyboard kind of grows into the movie. In CG animation, the layout department works out so many of the jokes, beats and rhythms and you can do that directly with a cinematic camera in layout which becomes a rough layout which becomes the movie.
Well, stop-motion’s not like that. We do make storyboards, and then we build sets and then do the filming. But storyboards don’t help you shoot the movie where you have to think about different scales. When we had chickens and humans in the same frame, every shot was a new headache. How were we going to combine chicken scale and human scale in this environment?
So, our production designer, Darren Dubicki, used Gravity Sketch really early, sketching out the environments in 3D. Even before we were storyboarding, we were able to get in there and we were scouting the locations, looking at the angles, figuring out all of the combinations of scales. We were able to create a 3D blueprint of the movie that every department could come in and see what their bit would be and then work on it.
Then when we got to shooting, every shot was a different kind of conjuring trick using a different kind of combination of scale models, scale puppets and scale props. All of our props were built at two scales. There was a chicken version of it, and then the human version of it. When you see the finished film, you won’t think about those two scale sizes at all, I think.
b&a: There’s one particularly great scene in the movie where Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) descends those glass stairs for what seems like a crazy amount of time. Can you talk about how that came together?
Sam Fell: Well, I really wanted to make them glass stairs, and that just instantly makes it harder to work out the rigging for the Mrs Tweedy puppet. We used some previs to figure the room out. I loved the way they broke the set out digitally and then sent it to be cut on the CNC machine and they ended up with just this brilliant 3D jigsaw that they put back together again for real. That all came from the Gravity Sketch sketching.
The stop-motion animation on that was also brilliant. The stairs had a concrete spine. Her feet do actually step in front and land in front of each other. She was literally moving down the stairs with tie downs. On the kick through moment when her foot is being kicked forward, all of her weight was held from one tie down on one foot. That shows you how strong that armature is underneath that that can hold that position.
b&a: Another phrase you mentioned apart from the pain of stop-motion that I wrote down from your talk was about marveling at the animators, and how they make the audience care. It was almost as if you are not quite sure how they do it yourself?
Sam Fell: No, I don’t know how.
b&a: Really? Is that true?
Sam Fell: It is true, yeah. But the thing that I didn’t say, the thing that really amazes me is that I can see an animator in a particular puppet. There’d be certain gestures or a certain mannerism or a certain way an eye dart happens. Today we’ve lost touch with real magic, right, but 300 years ago, they would call these animators witches for doing this.
b&a: Well, I think of the animators as really the actors.
Sam Fell: Yes. A lot of credit is given to the voice actors, which is good. It is true that the voice is the first thing there and it informs so much of the performance. But the other performer is the animator, as equally important in that performance.
b&a: Can I ask you more about the relationship you have with the animators. How do you prep them, how do you give notes to them while they’re animating?
Sam Fell: Well, it’s all about a plan. I talk about performance with them in the storyboard. And I redo storyboards and really grind away at the board artists with that. Then we do the acting, which we do on video. It’s not really about copying the actual vid-ref, I just like to have a conversation about it and what the scene means.
Then, the animator will own the scene. We do one rehearsal where they do a rough version of the shot. It is rough, but it’s got the key moments that we would have discussed in there. Like a particular smile, a particular frown, a particular pause, they’re all there. That’s our last chance to have a conversation about it. I might recut the rehearsal with the editor. Then off the animator goes.
Once they go behind the curtain, I really have to accept what they do. I mean, I can visit. I can go and visit them while they’re shooting, but I don’t really like doing it because to me, there’s an aura in there. It’s almost like an unexploded bomb they’re working on, to my mind, so I tend to leave them alone.
b&a: Also in your talk you referenced some live-action films that tended to have great miniatures and scale work, such as The Thief of Bagdad. What did you like about those films that you wanted to implement in this one?
Sam Fell: We looked at a whole lot of stuff. There’s a very early Daryl Zack production of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn where they were meant to be outside, but they were obviously on a sound stage. I used it for the island in our movie. It didn’t feel real, but I rather like that kind of thing in those old Hollywood fantasy films where they’d be on some raft in the water off an island and you can tell it’s a big matte painting and optical compositing. Just lovely looking stuff.
We also referenced Jerry Anderson’s work. It came into play again with the island and with water. Now, we have CG water in our film. But what I said to the CG guys was, imagine it’s a tank in a Jerry Anderson film. The splashes would all be the wrong scale. And that’s what I wanted, an old-school look to the VFX–make it look like a cheap tank. Plus I got them to throw a load of crap on it, so there’s a load of crap floating on the surface of it just to kind of mess it up. Because that’s what we always do in stop-motion. You always just mess things up a little bit to make it feel more tangible.
Right at the end there’s also a big explosion, again based on Jerry Anderson. We did it as a CG explosion but I kept sending it back to make it messier, to make it a bit cheap looking. It’s funny when something just kind of falls wrong or goes flying off, or if you feel the scale’s off. It was all about trying to make everything feel handmade.
