rigging
Oversized puppet support systems
rigging / Mechanical puppet
Definition
Oversized puppet support systems are stage-scale mechanisms that carry the weight of a stop-motion puppet too large or heavy for a conventional self-supporting armature, while still letting an animator release, reposition and lock the character precisely for individual exposures.
Overview
Ordinary stop-motion armatures work because the puppet's own joints can carry the small loads produced by the body and hold a pose until the next frame. At very large scales that assumption breaks down. Limbs become heavy enough to sag under gravity, the internal skeleton becomes difficult to hide or stiff enough to resist the animator, and even the building can become part of the mechanical problem. LAIKA gaffer Tyson Carpenter describes this transition while discussing the Giant Skeleton from *Kubo and the Two Strings*: its scale forced the production to split the build, support the large arms from above, and give animators a way to release support tension for movement and re-lock it for photography.
Contemporary production reporting shows that the solution was not one giant conventional armature. The Giant Skeleton distributed its loads across several systems. A custom multi-axis hexapod carried and positioned the torso, while overhead cables and pulleys supported the arms. Other joints and large assemblies used purpose-built mechanical solutions appropriate to their load and range. The result behaved less like a tabletop puppet and more like a small stage machine whose final pose still had to be controllable at stop-motion increments.
The critical design problem is the handoff between support and animation. A support system that merely holds a heavy limb is insufficient if the animator must fight it on every frame. Conversely, a freely moving system is useless if it drifts during the exposure. LAIKA's Giant Skeleton workflow therefore used a release-and-lock interaction: the animator could temporarily free the supported mechanism, reposition it, then return it to a rigid state before photography. This preserves the basic stop-motion requirement—move, settle, expose—even when gravity is being carried by cables, actuators and the stage rather than by the puppet alone.
Oversized puppet design should therefore begin by separating three questions: what mass must be carried, what motion the animator must directly control, and what must become perfectly rigid during exposure. The support architecture can then externalize only the loads that would overwhelm a normal armature, while leaving the performance controls as direct and predictable as possible. Large scale changes the hardware, but not the animator's fundamental need for incremental, repeatable poses.
The surviving sources also differ on the Giant Skeleton's exact dimensions: Carpenter's later first-person account and contemporary production reporting use different height figures for the puppet or its constituent build. Those measurements should not be collapsed into one number without evidence that they describe the same configuration -- the rigging principle documented here is better supported by the sources than any single dimensional claim.
Workflow
- 1. Estimate the mass and torque of each major puppet assembly before committing to a conventional internal armature.
- 2. Identify which loads can be carried externally by overhead supports, stage structures, actuators or a motion base without obstructing the photographed performance.
- 3. Separate load-bearing support from animator-facing controls so heavy components do not have to be manually held in place between frames.
- 4. Build an explicit release/reposition/lock cycle: the mechanism should become easy to move during manipulation and rigid again before exposure.
- 5. Test the full support system under actual stage geometry, including ceiling height, access platforms, camera clearance and the positions of interacting normal-scale puppets.
- 6. Rehearse representative poses with animators and tune resistance, travel and locking behaviour until the support machinery disappears from the performance workflow as much as possible.