On Kubo and the Two Strings (in theaters August 19), LAIKA launched an immensely powerful puppet – to scale. The result? The Giant Skeleton: 18 feet tall with a 24-foot wingspan from finger to finger. True to its nature as the most robust, fearless stop-motion studio in the world, artists, designers, fabricators, and animators gave life to the largest animatable puppet ever created. With real-world materials including dense CNC foam, paper, paint, and a steel armature, the Giant Skeleton was a massive undertaking involving LAIKA's notoriously collaborative crew. And when the puppet was completed, the challenges began anew, this time on the VFX front. The session also addresses complicated environments in the real and practical worlds using reference, scanned objects, and integration of LAIKA's plausible lighting system, as well as the interaction of set builders, puppet makers, a camera team, and the lighting and shading group.