Eddie Redmayne, who voices Dug, he's done this brilliant performance
which has quite a strange sound to it.
So when we make his mouth set,
we're influenced by that, the way he sounds.
No, not now, Hognob.
(grunting)
This is the lead character, this is Dug.
When Nick Park started working on this idea,
he was really keen on having a lot of plasticine
and lots of thumb prints and stuff,
because he thought it would work really well with the caveman idea.
So he started out with these huge characters all made of clay,
but he also wanted to get some fur.
So you'll see all these characters,
unlike Wallace and Gromit and other characters,
they have a lot more fur and hair and material on them.
We had to work really hard,
when we were developing these puppets for the film,
to find materials that would work.
So we've got plasticine in the face,
but then the arms and the legs look like plasticine
but they're actually made of silicone.
That means we can move them around
but they don't get squashed into all the fur.
So around the neck we have plasticine
and we've got to be really careful about it.
The model-makers have made them in a way
that means we can take them apart.
So when the animators are working on them,
they'll actually take the head off, they'll take it out like this,
and then they'll take the hair off like this.
We've got little wig stands to put those on.
Each of these are individually wired
so the animators can move them around.
- Wow.
And then what we do generally is
we spent ages concentrating on this area here,
which is the eyes and the eyebrows.
We had to make him really chunky eyebrows so he felt quite caveman-y.
And then all of this is plasticine, apart from the teeth and the nose,
so we can hold him by the nose.
We've also got a huge mouth set which we use,
so we've got different mouth shapes,
so the animators can take this mouth off
and put a fresh one on, a different shape.
So obviously, the way they look reflects their personality.
Do you think the way that they move also reflects their personality?
Yeah, absolutely. It does, yeah.
Does that mean that you'd have a different animator for each person,
or does every animator have to learn the style for each character?
It's really like acting, so all the animators have to be able
to perform all the different characters.
They're all quite unique and they're all quite individual,
the way the animators do the performance,
so we do have some people that are really good at certain characters
and we try and get them to lead certain scenes in the film.
Some of them are great at full-action stuff
and some are really good at subtle stuff,
but you might have one shot with all the characters in the film,
up to 20 different puppets, and one animator has to do all of them.
Sometimes we have special wigs, stunt wigs,
for when they're flying around through the air and stuff.
How would you animate that, them flying through the air?
Whenever they're off the ground, we use what's called a rig.
It's like the skeleton that's inside them but it comes out to the side,
and we have to paint that out afterwards.
But you'll see inside each puppet, at the bottom,
they've all got these plates and we're actually tying them down.
We drill a hole through the floor
and we screw the foot down so it can't move at all
because it's really important, when we're animating,
that they stay exactly in position.
The thing about stop-motion is you're constantly fighting gravity.
This is Nooth, Lord Nooth,
who's the ruler of the bronze town that Dug finds himself in.
He's evil, he's a villain.
I don't know if you can figure that out.
Yeah, he loves bronze, that's his thing.
He's surrounded himself in bronze.
We had a lot of fun with his design because Nick had this idea
that he'd have quite a big, rotund body
and then very small hands and quite small mouths,
and just generally try and make him look mean.
We had a lot of fun with his voice as well,
which is played by Tom Hiddleston,
who does a funny French accent for the film.
And then he's surrounded by these guys, the soldiers,
who are actually all identical
and they're very bad at their job, they're just awful.
How many costumes does each character have, then?
We saw in a video beforehand, he's not always wearing the same clothes.
Yeah, that's right, and we do have to basically remake the puppet.
We can't take clothes on and off, they're all attached.
For Nooth, we have this Nooth
and then we have the naked Nooth, which you might have seen,
who makes several appearances.
But he's quite different because we've got to have plasticine on him,
so the naked one, you don't have any of this detail
and he's all just plasticine,
which the animators have to then sculpt by hand.
Sire?
- Argh! - Argh!
Are there sometimes some problems with working with plasticine?
I know I've tried to make some plasticine models before
and I've literally gotten all my fingerprints over the body,
so how do you keep those fingerprints off while moving the puppets?
We really, sort of, embrace that plasticine look.
I think after Curse of the Were-Rabbit,
the theme was funny and thumby. That's what we wanted to do.
So all the animators had that. They were allowed to just-,
as long as it doesn't look really messy and dirty,
we really like all the fingerprints
and the fact it looks like it's actually moving around by hand.
But, having said that, we do have to fight against all the dirt.
Plasticine attracts loads of dust
and they're constantly cleaning the puppets with baby wipes,
which is what we use.
And then most of the sculpting we do with our hands,
so we try wherever we can to move things around with our fingers,
but we have lots of tools as well.
The animators have sculpting tools and things they use to clean them.
I love his cape right here.
I can see there are little imprints on his cape.
Did you use a tool to make that as well?
Yeah, that's a really good development, actually.
The model-making department,
they're very good at using different materials
and making them look like different things.
Actually, what they would do generally,
everything starts with that sculpt that's all made of plasticine.
Then we've got real fabric on here,
but again, it's got to be stretchy fabric.
One of the things we struggle with is to find fabric that looks small,
because obviously when we've got our camera really close up to Nooth,
we don't want a massive weave to show up.
But with the cape itself, because it has to be animatable,
we have to make it from a material that looks like fabric but isn't.
So this is made of foam latex,
it's got wire inside it so we can pose it,
and then model-makers actually will press fabric into the plasticine
so it's got that texture on it from real fabric
before we make the mould.
So basically, when you pour that, it comes out looking like a fabric.
- That's very smart.
It's all made in different parts as well,
so this cloak is made separately and then everything's added,
put together.
Again, with Nooth, his head comes off if you need it to.
I think he looks better like that. (laughter)
Yeah, he's not a great guy.
He's not very nice to his soldiers or to Dino, who does a lot for him.
Sounds a bit like my headteacher.
Does he look like that as well?
I wouldn't go that far. (laughter)
But yeah, it's pretty cool. I love it.
This guy, he's one of the prologue tribe,
so right at the start of the film, we see this group of characters.
You can see what we've done here,
model-making have cut him down the middle
so you get a really good idea of what's inside.
It looks a bit horrible. - It's crazy.
But it shows you all the different materials we've got going on.
This is the metal skeleton.
We've got lots of different ball-and-socket joints here.
The idea is it replicates our human movement,
and the great thing is that it stays in position for us
but also we can change the tensioning.
So if a character's got to balance up on one foot,
we can make this really strong and then he won't wobble around.
And the silicone, so you've got a hand and an arm there,
all of this is cast, so the silicone is poured around the skeleton
so that it's all hidden inside and the animators can move it around.
It's got a cut straight through it,
so is that how you remove it from the arm here?
Yeah, so on this particular one,
this was a test one that didn't quite work,
they've cut it down the middle, but you can see inside
it's got the shape of where the armature would have been.
Without anything inside it, it's just really-, we can't control it at all.
It's wobbly.
So the animators really, really rely on all those wires and stuff,
so they can get really subtle movements out.
So much goes into it as well,
you have no idea when you're just watching it.
You just think it's made of plasticine or something.
And that's good, because we don't really want you
to be thinking about what the puppets are made of,
but just being involved in the story
and following what they're going through.
Also, we've got these big areas here which is coring.
What that does is it's quite heavy, this character,
so it does make it a little bit lighter
where you've got that to pad it out a bit, just so that when we grab-,
the animators have to physically grab these puppets in the middle
and move their arms around, they've got something to hold on to.
How much would all of this cost to make?
The plasticine, as you said,
you can literally buy from the shop and make it,
so how much would one puppet cost to make?
I think the biggest thing is the time it takes everyone to make it.
Each one, each Dug character, is worth many thousands of pounds,
but the thing is, you can animate any object.
So you can use plasticine just out of the packet to make it move around,
and you don't necessarily have to go to these lengths,
these complicated metal armatures.
The main characters are done with this.
The characters in the background, like the extras and stuff,
is just as much effort put into those ones as these ones?
We really focus on the key characters,
so we've got our main four characters that we put everything into.
There are some in the back,
like these guys are actually based on the main tribe,
but occasionally in the city, when you go into the bronze world,
you see a whole army of people
and they have less complicated characters,
so they've got wire rather than metal.
My understanding is that there's some type of tension between them,
so how were you able to create tension
but also make it very comedic as well?
Oh, that's a really good question.
It's very hard to get that balance
because we want to tell the story through the characters,
but like you say, we need it to be funny as well.
Everything starts out with the design that Nick does,
so even right at the beginning, when he was first drawing the cavemen,
he made them very big, very textured like this, with all the thumb prints.
And then the people in the bronze world,
they're a bit more refined and they move a bit smoother,
so they've got a different way of actually being animated,
and also they have a smaller mouth set, smaller teeth.
Everything about them is slightly different,
and so it's really to get that big contrast.
The other thing is the look of these guys, the fur,
the fact they live in the valley.
Everything's very natural with them, whereas in the bronze world
there's a lot more metal and that kind of thing.
It works really well, the correlation between what they actually look like
and their surroundings and their personalities
and it all combines, it's great.
Great.