The chickens have textured and colored feather patterns on them and feathery bottoms, but you couldn't touch them, because every time you did, they'd all squidge together. So the puppets had to be built in a special way to allow us to touch them and move them around while still keeping their structural integrity. But the important part is the face, because that's where all the acting takes place. And that's actually technically quite simple, because it's just Plasticine. There are lots of different ways of designing that, but we've kind of developed this style with the eyes right together in the middle and a big wide mouth, just because that plays well.
People find that incredibly funny for some reason.
Just the still image makes them laugh, so we have to go along with that. We've got a character called Angry Kid that we put on Atom Films. It was almost targeted for that kind of distribution, really. We had a young guy at work named Darren Walsh who had this idea for Angry Kid, and he just wanted to do one-minute films, nothing more. That's very hard to sell for conventional TV, so we thought we'd try it on the Internet.