The alien Rocky in "Project Hail Mary" usually came to life through a puppet operated with rods. James Ortiz, who leads the puppet team and provides Rocky's voice, said the original plan was to use an animatronic: a mechanical version of the character. However, he felt its movements could be too stiff. He suggested adding a puppet with the same design so the team could create smoother movements and try spontaneous actions during filming.
The mechanical Rocky still had an important job. Inside the spaceship's mental health room, screens played images of Earth, including an ocean and fireworks. Removing the puppet operators and their reflections digitally would have made it difficult to preserve those moving images. Instead, the filmmakers placed the animatronic inside a real ball on the set. A cable usually held it in position and was removed digitally afterward. This method was used only a few times. For most other scenes, Ortiz and his team operated the rod puppet, and visual effects artists carefully removed the people from the finished images.
