Making puppets seem alive: Wallace and Gromit’s handmade studio resists AI

At Aardman’s Bristol studio, making a clay sheep blink can take more patience than the finished moment suggests. Animator Ed Jackson leans over a miniature harbor set and gently lifts a sheep’s eyelid with a hook. He adjusts the figure by a fraction, then takes another photograph.

That is how the studio creates its illusion of life. The third Shaun the Sheep film, “The Baa-ttle of the Bands,” took three and a half years to make and required about 106,688 individual shots. It will be released in British cinemas on September 18 and in France on October 21.

The magic happens in the basement of an industrial building in southwest England, where around 40 blue-screen units sit behind curtains. Each contains a puppet-sized set, including Shaun’s autumn-colored farm, a scientific laboratory and a large red-and-black trawler. The studio was officially founded in 1976 and is known for Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run and its retro British humor.

Claire Rolls, the animation director, says few places in the world still make stop-motion on this scale. The technique, she explains, must “give the impression that the puppets are alive.” Jackson needs roughly two days to capture 48 images, equivalent to two seconds of film. The animators work in concentrated silence, while the jokes and sound effects are added later. Rolls describes them as the studio’s actors, performing live through every tiny movement.

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Give the impression that the puppets are alive.