Inside the Digital Skeleton: How Lead Rigger's Bring Visual Effects to Life

By Daniel Fusch

In today’s world of visual effects, the most captivating performances often don’t come from actors — they come from digital creations. Behind those moments of cinematic illusion is an invisible artist: the rigger.

At Ingenuity Studios in Los Angeles, Zhehao “Fred” Qiao leads the rigging team that builds the digital skeletons, control systems, and facial setups that make creatures, doubles, and machines move as if they were alive. His work lives at the intersection of engineering and emotion — the hidden structure that lets digital characters breathe, blink, and feel.

“Rigging is like creating the anatomy of a world that doesn’t exist yet,” Qiao says. “Every performance, every expression starts from the structure we build beneath the surface.”

Rigging rarely grabs headlines, but it’s one of the essential steps in filmmaking today. Before animators can bring a dragon to life or make a crowd of soldiers march across a battlefield, a rigger must first give those models bones, muscles, and motion logic — the framework that turns art into performance.

Qiao’s rigs have powered some of the most memorable visuals in recent years. His credits include Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour, The Sympathizer, One Piece, Black Mirror, and Horizon: An American Saga. From realistic digital doubles to complex mechanical designs, his work has quietly shaped the visual storytelling of major productions.

At Ingenuity, Qiao also developed the studio’s proprietary auto-rigging system, a modular framework that dramatically speeds up setup while keeping the fine detail required for high-end realism. “The goal,” he explains, “is to make rigging efficient without losing artistry. A good rig should feel natural to the animator — like a well-tuned instrument.”

With a background that bridges math, computer science, and animation, Qiao approaches rigging as both a science and an art. He earned his MFA in Animation from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) after studying mathematics and statistics — a combination that trained him to see motion as both expression and equation.

For Qiao, the ultimate challenge is making technology serve emotion, especially in facial work. His latest system for cinematic faces captures subtle human nuance — tiny twitches and micro-movements that give a digital character its soul.

“When an actor performs on set, their emotion becomes data,” Qiao says. “Our job is to turn that back into something that feels human again. That’s where rigging becomes storytelling.”

Each day at the studio brings new puzzles: a creature that must move with convincing weight, a machine that transforms mid-flight, or a digital double that needs to match an actor frame-for-frame. Qiao’s role blends artistic intuition with technical precision.

That mix has made him a vital presence not only inside Ingenuity but across the wider VFX community. He has built a suite of in-house tools that automate complex motion and rigging tasks — systems that let artists share animation between characters, manage detailed facial performances, and keep entire teams working in sync. These innovations have quietly become the backbone of production, saving hours while protecting the craft’s precision and elegance.

“A rig isn’t just a skeleton — it’s the studio’s nervous system,” he says. “Everything connects through it, from motion capture and simulation to rendering and real-time previews.”

Qiao has also begun experimenting with real-time rigging, exploring how film-quality motion can exist inside game-engine environments. “The line between VFX and interactive production is disappearing fast,” he says. “We’re heading toward a time when directors can manipulate digital performances live on set.”

Despite his technical depth, Qiao emphasizes collaboration over code. “Rigging is never a solo act,” he says. “Every department relies on what we build, and we rely on them to push it further.” Mentorship is a big part of his leadership style — helping younger artists understand how anatomy, movement, and storytelling fit together.

Outside of production, he shares that knowledge through talks and workshops focused on rigging efficiency and design philosophy. “A good rigger thinks like an animator and engineers like a designer,” he says. “That’s the balance that makes digital performance feel alive.”

As artificial intelligence and procedural tools begin to influence the industry, Qiao sees them as allies, not adversaries. “Automation will take over repetitive work,” he says, “but it can’t replace the human eye for emotion.”

He’s now expanding Ingenuity’s rigging framework to handle larger, more data-driven productions while continuing personal R&D into expressive systems for both humans and creatures. His philosophy remains simple: rigging should be invisible.

“When people watch a film and forget it’s CGI, that’s when we’ve succeeded,” he smiles. “We don’t just build skeletons — we build the space for emotion to live.”