Hot Chip

Eleanor for Hot Chip was one of our biggest undertakings to date, six weeks of full-service production under director Alice Wong, covering direction, art direction, every puppet, set, prop, and miniature, filming, post-production, effects, and the final edit, all handled in house.

At the heart of it was one of the hardest techniques in stop-motion: sculpt-through animation. Rather than swapping between pre-made expressions, every puppet's face was sculpted fresh in clay, frame by frame reshaped by hand for each individual moment of movement. It's slow, painstaking work, and there's no shortcut through it.

But it's exactly that technique that gave the piece its signature look: seamless, almost liquid melting transitions between expressions that simply aren't achievable any other way. The result speaks for itself, the piece has since racked up around 100,000 views.

It's a project that shows what six weeks of genuine craft, patience, and technical risk-taking can produce and why, sometimes, the hardest way to do something is also the only way to get it right.