Animating the motion control shots in Quarantine, balancing on a step stool to reach the puppets
Sometimes there’s only one way to reach a puppet on set
Model maker Hetty Bax turned her drill into a tiny lathe to make a badger-sized recorder
The village hall set in Quarantine, featuring the amazingly terrible rig we built to hold up the roof panels when the wall wasn’t there, fixed in place by a jar of pennies
Model maker Hetty Bax dressing in the mud floor on the tunnel set using a cocktail of paint and cork granules
A glimpse into the badgers’ rehearsal process
Model maker assistant Isaac Bolton gets to grips with the glamour of filmmaking, sticking bits of polystyrene together to make an embankment
Both of Frank’s arms broke in the last week of filming, so he had to go into emergency surgery for a very botched quick-fix to get through the rest of the shoot
Scenic painter Beth Walker at work on an 8-foot dawn sky for Quarantine
Animating the fight sequence on the boat in Squirrel Island
Just pinning some dead squirrels to polystyrene trees here, standardSuper hi-tech solutions to moving shots is how we roll at Mock Duck StudiosA squirrel drowning in a layer of plastic and a LOT of cheap hair gelOne of the many Squirrel Island vehicles in progress, this one was based on a 70s golf buggy designThe clay sculpt for the squirrels’ gas maskBunker lift buttons, seen for approximately one second in Squirrel Island, but each button has a symbol which corresponds to a different department of squirrelsHand-dyeing wool for the knitted suit in Squirrel IslandEyeballssssssssSquirrel armature in progressRed squirrel skullsModel maker and scenic painter Tiffany Monk painting one of the Squirrel Island sky backdropsSophisticated rig for a leaping squirrel, made from an old kitchen cabinet and held up by gaffer tapeCutting out teeny holes in squirrel-sized continuous form paper