The Birds are Back with 'Chicken Run 2'

Co-founder Peter Lord has turned Aardman into an employee-owned studio. JOE KLAMAR / AFP
Co-founder Peter Lord has turned Aardman into an employee-owned studio. JOE KLAMAR / AFP
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The Birds are Back with 'Chicken Run 2'

Co-founder Peter Lord has turned Aardman into an employee-owned studio. JOE KLAMAR / AFP
Co-founder Peter Lord has turned Aardman into an employee-owned studio. JOE KLAMAR / AFP

A sequel to the hit animated film "Chicken Run" was inevitable, its makers told AFP, for the simple reason that chickens are just too funny.
"We don't exactly have a list but there's a clear understanding at Aardman that some animals are funny and some aren't," said Peter Lord, co-founder of the British studio behind such beloved stop-motion creations as "Wallace and Gromit" and "Shaun the Sheep".
"Chickens are fundamentally funny creatures, aren't they," Lord told AFP.
"But horses aren't. Sorry, horses, but you're just too beautiful to be funny."
"Chicken Run 2: Dawn of the Nugget" streams on Netflix from Friday, more than 20 years after the original hit about a group of chickens trying to break out of their farm.
This time, the task is reversed as heroes Ginger and Rocky must break into a nugget factory to rescue their headstrong daughter, voiced by "The Last of Us" breakout star Bella Ramsey.
"'Chickens' is just a funny word, too," said director Sam Fell.
"You can add it to anything -- 'The Great Escape' with chickens, 'Mission: Impossible' with chickens... it always works."
The new film does indeed take inspiration from the Tom Cruise franchise, as well as James Bond, as the chickens try to infiltrate a ludicrously over-the-top, high-tech nugget factory that resembles a Bond villain's lair.
It's all "spectacularly weird", promises Lord.
Are there any ideas that were too weird even for an Aardman film?
"There was a cock-fighting sub-plot at one point. It was a funny notion. I did a drawing of Rocky wearing Rocky Balboa's shorts. I thought it was funny, but it was a bit weird even for us," said Lord.
Employee-owned studio
As always, it has been painstaking work.
Each animator -- the film used up to 30 at a time -- can only shoot about four seconds per week.

"If we get two minutes done in a week it's a massive celebration," said Fell.
Animation technology has improved immensely since the original in 2000, but Aardman likes to keep the handmade feel and "build as much as we possibly can".
The exception was for scenes with lots of chickens at once, where they used computer effects to create the background poultry -- "otherwise, we'd still be filming it now", said Fell.
Asked what makes a good animator, he said they tend to be "patient and insular".
"At heart, they're actors, but they're very shy actors, and they'd rather do it quietly in a small space with a puppet, away from everybody else," he added.
One thing that helps create a sense of community at the Bristol-based studio is that it was recently turned into a trust owned by its employees.
"We could have sold it to some media giant and made a shed-load of money," said Lord. "But then what? They'd sell it on, and eventually the thing that is so precious to us would become a commodity for other people to asset strip."
"Chicken Run 2" was the first film made under the new arrangement, and Fell said the feeling was tangible.
"I did feel there was that spirit in the crew every day of pride, of showing what we can do and giving it to the world," he said.



Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
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Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)

Hollywood's video game performers announced they would go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the two sides remained split over the regulation of generative AI. A spokesperson for the video game producers, Audrey Cooling, said the studios offered AI protections, but SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee said that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a "performer" is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

"The industry has told us point blank that they do not necessarily consider everyone who is rendering movement performance to be a performer that is covered by the collective bargaining agreement," SAG-AFTRA Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. He said some physical performances are being treated as "data."

Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.

"We strike as a matter of last resort. We have given this process absolutely as much time as we responsibly can," Rodriguez told reporters. "We have exhausted the other possibilities, and that is why we’re doing it now."

Cooling said the companies' offer "extends meaningful AI protections."

"We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations," she said.

Andi Norris, an actor and member of the union's negotiating committee, said that those who do stunt work or creature performances would still be at risk under the game companies' offer.

"The performers who bring their body of work to these games create a whole variety of characters, and all of that work must be covered. Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me as I sit here, when, in truth, on any given week I am a zombie, I am a soldier, I am a zombie soldier," Norris said. "We cannot and will not accept that a stunt or movement performer giving a full performance on stage next to a voice actor isn’t a performer."

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion dollars in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said.

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.

The last interactive contract, which expired in November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began in October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 "off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers," according to the union.

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered independent and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected. Games signed to an interim interactive media agreement, tiered-budget independent interactive agreement or interim interactive localization agreement are not part of the strike, the union said.