The making of Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget

We sat down with the director, production designer and puppet team leader to find out just what makes Aardman’s poultry-packed sequel tick.

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This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #47

Sometime after the start of the global pandemic, an ageing movie star surveyed the ground far below him. In the world of the film he was just about to go from one death defying set piece to another. The fate of the mission, of his entire species was at stake. In practical terms, though, he’d been preparing for this one stunt for weeks. The star of a franchise renowned for ambitious practical filmmaking, this sort of thing didn’t come without risk.

The star, of course, was Fowler, the RAF mascot turned elderly rooster played by Benjamin Whitrow in 2000. The film, Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget. Much like Tom Cruise in the production of Dead Reckoning: Part One, Fowler had an impossible mission to take on: make a sequel to one of the most universally beloved films in British cinema.

“When [Aardman] finished Chicken Run, sequels weren’t a thing in animation at all really,” director Sam Fell tells us. “Toy Story 2 had just come out, that’s one of the only big screen ones I can think of… So, I guess it took a while to get this one made.”

Part of the first film’s charm lay in its simplicity. ‘The Great Escape with chickens’ proved to be such a slam dunk concept that coming up with an idea to match it took almost 17 years.

“The first film was so successful and so good, you can’t follow it up with something that can’t match up to it,” Fell says. “It’s been a big challenge. You don’t want to be the one to mess it up.”

Breaking in

Finally, though, the team struck gold with the equally simple premise that would form the film’s tagline: this time, they’re breaking in. Where Chicken Run was an authentically poultry-fied war film, Dawn Of The Nugget has its sights set on Tom Cruise’s patch with a Mission: Impossible inspired action heist movie. “The notion of industrial farming, of the nugget being this apocalyptic event for chicken kind, we really liked that as a comical idea.”

Though the idea might have sprung up more than six years ago, on a project like Dawn Of The Nugget the standard timescale of making a movie balloons in every direction. At times, the number of sets shooting simultaneously w-as as high as 45. Fell started work on the project all the way back in 2017.

“My son was a child when I started this film. Now he’s a grown-up living in Amsterdam,” he says. “You’re got to get all your ducks in a row before you start that ocean liner, because when you spin the wheel, it doesn’t change too quickly. With stop motion, it will bite you badly if you want to change your mind It’s a discipline and a rigour that’s good, I think, because in the end you have to really believe in your story.”

One scene early in the film, a montage of Ginger and Rocky’s daughter Molly growing from chick to small chicken, took six months to complete.

“Sometimes on a film you just need to spend your money,” Fell explains. “Each one of those little scenarios is a very particular set, and then we shoot in and out

in three seconds. But it’s a story that really resonates for me. I’ve been a parent, and a child grows so quickly. I wanted to show that sort of breathtaking speed on screen in a very short time.”

Stop-motion

Still, for the folks at Aardman, it seems like they wouldn’t have it any other way. Much of the team on Dawn Of The Nugget worked on the first film 23 years ago. Fell, since his directorial debut with the studio, Flushed Away, in 2007, has hopped between the British company and the Oregon-based Laika, but his passion for stop motion burns as bright as ever.

“Flushed Away was my first experience with an all-CG production,” he says. “I originally intended it to be stop motion actually, but the technology wasn’t there to augment stop motion, as we have here, to create that bigger canvas. You can keep editing forever, though the downfall of CGI is that there’s too much choice.

“There’s something about the stop motion technique. It’s like you’re in a giant toy shop you can see your movie everywhere you look. If you want to know how something’s going, you can just walk down there and have a look. And it’s a fabulous community; it’s got that same kind of slightly childlike enthusiasm for magic.”

Settings

Though many of the characters are returning from the first film, the sets in Dawn Of The Nugget are all entirely new. The first, the island paradise the chickens moved into after their escape from Tweedy’s farm, is the subject of a magnificent wide shot that shows Aardman’s signature creativity on full display. That set alone, one of the biggest the studio had ever produced, took a year to build.

”The island itself was a joy to work on,” production designer Darren Dubicki says, “because we were following on from the first film, going from this very formal, prison like environment into their own comfy idyll. It’s very much about the contraptions and the chunkiness of the sets.”

Those contraptions also found a home in Mrs Tweedy’s new compound, which looks for all the world like a Bond villain’s lair. Like much at Aardman, designing such a detailed set was a team effort. “It was a case of anything goes, really. We work with some amazing story artists who come up with some really funny gags, so we would gather all these ideas together and decide what was most suitable.

“A lot of those aspects in the compound either came from me, Sam or the board artists. There were so many ridiculous ways that chickens would try and break into this fortress, but at the same time we had to think about the physicality of it and the simplicity of what’s required.”

Reinvention

While Molly presented a chance for the team to create an entirely new character, the sequel sees plenty of familiar faces coming home to roost. After a fire ripped through the Aardman building in 2005, though, the original models had to be rebuilt from scratch all except for one.

“Sam had the idea of completely reinventing Mrs Tweedy for the film,” Anne King explains. “She’s just reinvented herself into the ‘6os, so we looked at a lot of designers: Barbara Hulanicki, Pierre Cardin, we gave her a beehive… “

“I really liked the idea of getting into the fun, poppy colours of the ‘6os,” Fell adds. “It gave us the opportunity to bring a different palette to Aardman. Chicken Run was based in the more muted colours of post-war Britain, but you look at the record covers of the ’60s they’re brightly coloured, fun, optimistic. We wanted to make the chickens’ paradise as lush and verdant as possible. We knew there’d be a lot of details, so we had to reduce the palettes as much as we could.

“Moving into the compound, it’s a very menacing, austere environment, but we wanted to have colour in there too. And then Fun Land is just off the scale pastels very saccharine, Disney, Butlins in the ‘6os kind of look. So everything felt like it was going to struggle to feel cohesive, but we wanted to get a sort of colour that would run throughout. So it would be things like the colour of the control panels in the main control room, the graphics around the compound, right down to the Rats’ Yard, we used the same palette to try and get as many of the same bright colours in as possible.”

Puppet power

Nowhere is the technological change at Aardman felt more keenly than in the puppet department. Material sciences have improved so much in the last two decades that what was traditionally known as

‘Claymation’ now uses hardly any clay at all.

“We use quite a lot of silicones, now,” King tells us. “On the first Chicken Run the wings were all press-moulded in clay. We’d have people just doing that all day because they get mashed, come back in to get cleaned up, go back out again. The silicones we had back then weren’t as good as they are now; they’d break and tear, and suddenly the chicken would just fall apart.

“This time the silicones are a lot more durable. We’ll have some really soft, stretchy ones for the legs, then for shoes or boots, we’d go for slightly tougher ones. We have a ball-and-socket steel armature inside to make things move, then we use quite a lot of resins for the inside of the head. When we made the first [film], we made all the head cores by hand and then built and moulded around them. This time, we created all the interiors digitally and 3D-printed them, which saves a lot of time. There’s fabric work on some of them as well, and then all of them are hand­painted. It’s quite a bit of work.”

To allow for different scales, scenes and – in the worst case – complete puppet incapacitation, once a chicken’s made, the team has to do the whole thing over again… And again… And again…

”We make about 16 of all the main characters. We can reuse the moulds, but there needs to be a paint reference – so if you’ve got something like a scarf, you have to know exactly where all the flowers go so they’re all exactly the same.”

Read more: Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget review | Poultry in motion

Home-grown

But despite their new partnership with Netflix, their global ambitions and the changing face of puppet technology, Aardman remains proud of its very British, garden shed roots.

“At other studios, they take one picture for every frame of the animation,” Fell explains.

“At Aardman, we take a picture every two frames. I don’t think we’re lazy; it just makes the animation a bit chunkier. There’s a texture to the movement that feels very British to me.”

For the puppet team, there’s nothing that says this better than the thumbprints which, if you look close enough, are still visible on nearly every Aardman puppet. Something the team consider to be a feature rather than a flaw.

“It’s very easy to try and make things smoother and smoother and tighter and tighter,” King says. “But we try and keep some of that ‘thumbiness’ in there. It’s really nice. I think it fits in.”