VFX Voice: how Aardman's animators physically support puppets through Early Man's toughest poses

VFX Voice's making-of feature on Aardman's Early Man (2018) describes how the studio's animators keep a puppet steady through demanding, off-balance poses on set: "animators make use of specialized rigs to hold up the puppets, keep them still, make them appear to be in mid-air, and so on." Where earlier productions had to keep those rigs invisible in-camera, the article notes that "now they can be front and center in the scene and simply painted out" in post -- the article's specific example is animator Claire Rolls using a rig to hold the puppets Dug and Hognob in place while she animated, with the rig digitally removed afterward. The physical rig hardware described matches Aardman's own documented ball-joint support-arm system, sold commercially as an "industry standard design."