A set visit inside Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget's puppet and animation departments

Animation Magazine's Rich Johnson toured Aardman during the final months of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget's six-year production (2023-12-06). In the puppetry department, head of puppets Kate Anderson explained how the flock's feathers are built: each rubber feather's size is randomized before the plumage is 3D-printed as a mould, with a week of hand-painting per puppet's full coat, and drew a direct contrast with LAIKA's approach -- "Laika uses color 3D printers, which enables them to play with different materials, but we remain traditionally 'Aardman' with plasticine heads and beaks."

On the animation floor, supervising animator Ian Whitlock described maintaining continuity across a large team using a "character bible" built from expression sheets and walk cycles inherited from Peter Lord's original 2000 film notes. Animator Laura Tofarides walked through her own process -- acting a beat out for director Sam Fell, then testing in Dragonframe with the test pass overlaid on the final take, including a hand-cranked mechanism under the animation table that lends loose secondary body movement to background characters. Director of photography Charles Copping demonstrated a low-tech in-camera flame effect: crumpled foil wrapped around a slowly rotating cylinder, catching light to read as fire without any digital assistance. Production scale figures given on the tour: roughly one second of finished animation per animator per day, a single puppet taking 30-50 weeks to build, and the Chicken Island set requiring two years to construct against one week to strike.

Folded into the Wiki's Puppet page as a sourced Aardman fabrication example alongside the existing LAIKA/Out of Words material.