Feature Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
There’s a healthy tradition of sequels reaching screens many years after their progenitors and doing so with a real creative kick and vigour. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is now among that company.
The original Chicken Run film, released in 2000, was Aardman’s first feature-length project, and in the years since other features have been produced by the studio. Now, 23 years later, Dawn of the Nugget showcases the studio’s embrace of digital tools in the production of a stop-motion film.
An in-depth conversation with Dawn of the Nugget’s director Sam Fell, the film’s production designer Darren Dubicki, and modelmaker Anne King begins with an observation from Fell. “I wanted Dawn of the Nugget to feel like a constructed world, but not feel photoreal,” he says. “Nowadays the technology that we’ve used to augment the beautifully timeless technology of stop-motion has allowed us to move on to a bigger canvas.
“Stop-motion went digital in about 2001, so Chicken Run was the last one shot on film, really. Ever since Corpse Bride (2005) it’s been digital. As soon as we started shooting in digital cameras, the greenscreens came in, and layers and separate passes came in. A little bit of post fixing and perhaps a little bit of retiming.
“It’s still pretty much
