This is a shot I animated for The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, directed by Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt. Be careful, it’s a shot from the climax sequence, so it’s very short! Action, action!
I want to show it to talk about rigging. Disclaimer: I don’t have access to the raw footage, so I will not be able to show you the rigging before the shot was cleaned up, but hopefully I can describe things well enough. The character was rigged in the conventional way, with a ball-and-socket fly rig. The strings of sausages that were flying alongside the character were a little bit of a puzzle though. How to keep them up in the air and also allow for the animation of their individual flying movements? The props department built in some aluminium wire along the string of sausages but it proves insufficient to sustain the weight, what with the maximum size aluminium wire that would be acceptable for these items and the leverage weight of the length of sausages. I asked the rigging department to provide me with a metallic plate, that could be placed above the entire course, like a ceiling because it was not disrupting the lighting of the scene, and to provide me with magnets. I then tied a few fishing wire lengths to the strings of sausages. The fishing wire connected the sausages to the ceiling-metal plate and the magnets were catching that fishing wire and kept it in place on the plate. Ta-dah! Rigging was done! All that was left for me to do was to adjust the length of the fishing wire while advancing the magnets along the plate for each frame.
Here is the flying part of the shot, frame-by-frame: