Designing the sets of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl at Aardman Animations

Tools used

No room for guesswork

Stop motion is a one-shot process. No additional takes, no pickup days, no figuring things out once the cameras are rolling. For Darren Dubicki, designer and director at Aardman Animations, that means every location, every set, and every construction decision has to be understood by every team before a single piece of clay gets moved.

On Vengeance Most Fowl, that challenge was amplified by scale. The script called for dozens of locations: foggy street scenes, a basement modelled on the breeding pits of Isengard, a penguin enclosure, a submarine navigating the city sewers. Expanding the film that far beyond the studio walls meant directors, art directors, storyboard artists, lighting, and camera teams all needing to understand the same vision at the same time.

The old way of bridging that gap was concept drawings and 2D renders. They worked, but they left room for interpretation. “Everyone has a different idea in their mind of how it’ll look at the end,” Darren says.

"I'd put the director in my virtual studio and it immediately opened his eyes to visualising his film through the eyes of a director. You can try it out as many times as you like; and it was happening way in advance of anything actually being made or constructed in the studio."

Darren Dubicki, Concept Designer, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

A virtual studio that runs ahead of the real one

Gravity Sketch became Darren’s pre-planning tool: a virtual studio where sets are blocked out, shots are found, and key decisions get made before anything is built. He starts each location by pulling reference images and storyboards into the VR space, then works in broad strokes: shapes, dimensions, general structure.

What it changes is who can be part of that process, and when. Directors come into the virtual studio to find their shots. Art directors pull out dimensions for construction drawings. Storyboard teams get a consistent spatial reference so their work stays aligned; all happening before anything is touched in the studio.

Gravity Sketch also feeds directly into color scripting: screengrab exports get colored up in Photoshop to map the film’s emotional arc through light and tone. On Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, half the images in the color script started as Gravity Sketch models.

From reference board to construction drawing, inside the headset

Step 1: Research and virtual reference board. Location references, tone references, and early storyboard frames are pulled into the Gravity Sketch space to build a spatial overview before any concepting begins.
Step 2: Set concepting in broad strokes. Shape language, key dimensions, and spatial relationships are blocked out loosely. This is enough to establish what a set needs to do and feel like, not how it’s built.
Step 3: Director and creative reviews in VR. Directors and key creatives come into the virtual studio to explore the sets, find camera angles, and refine shots that feed back into the storyboards. Construction concerns and spatial issues surface here, before any physical work begins.
Step 4: Color concepting and color scripting. Screengrab exports from Gravity Sketch are colored up in Photoshop to create color keys and, on larger productions, a full color script — mapping the emotional arc of the film through light and tone before anything is made.
Step 5: 3D handoff to the art department. Art directors take the dimensions and geometry as the basis for foam core mockups and set construction drawings. On films with CG set extensions, the same models serve as blueprints for previs and virtual production.

Every team aligned from the very beginning

Giving every team a shared spatial reference early means fewer rounds of reinterpretation, and more time for the work that makes it to screen.

On a film the scale of Vengeance Most Fowl, that early alignment translates directly into saved time across every department, fewer late-stage revisions, and more creative bandwidth for the work that ends up on screen.