Chicken Run 2 Director Reveals How Stop-Motion Animation Has Gotten Easier

When it comes to mediums, animated projects typically take much, much longer than live-action to produce. Within animation, stop motion is one of the most strenuous methods of animating. According to Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget helmer Sam Fell, however, recent accomplishments in technology have made stop-motion films a bit easier to make.

"With digital cameras now, you can see the work straightaway immediately, but with film you used to have to send it off to the lab and you'll get it back the next day," Fell tells us. "So it's really like any kind of digital studio now with stop motion, it's just like you can make scales you can composite things you use green screens you can create a bigger scope movie, you know, it's easier to create scale, which we needed to do because that was the story kind of demanded it."

Fell adds that the use of digital cameras and editing helps when multiple stop motion figures are needed in crowds and masses.

"We made 40 Chicken puppets, which is a lot of puppets, and we animated them to create crowds and that filled a lot of the frame with with chickens that way but we needed to kind of feel like right back there. We scanned those chickens and turned them into digital chickens, so there's some digital crowds in a way in the background," the filmmaker adds. "But our main thing though, is still stop motion, where the process is still the same old processes or live performances of some animator, bringing the puppet to life one frame at a time over days and weeks."

Fell says animators are able to shoot four seconds of a stop motion film per week, which is a considerable sum considering the film he just directed has a runtime of 101 minutes.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget's voice cast includes Thandiwe Newton as Ginger, Zachary Levi as Rocky, Imelda Staunton as Bunty, Lynn Ferguson as Mac, Bella Ramsey as Molly, Jane Horrocks as Babs, Josie Sedgwick-Davies as Frizzle, David Bradley as Fowler, Romesh Ranganathan as Nick, Daniel Mays as Fetcher, and Nick Mohammed as Dr. Fry.

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is now streaming on Netflix.