IN Netflix’s “The electrical condition,” The sci-fi adventure from Anthony and Joe RussoMillie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt help to renew a robot rebellion in an alternative version of the 90s. The robots themselves are not exactly new, at least not when it comes to appearance. They share the kitschy design of the robots in the graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag as film is based. But there are 175 of them – which meant that the film needed a wonderful ensemble of movement catch starts.
Led by exercise choreographer/actor Terry Notary, the Mo-Cap team actually exceeded the most important actors. “It was like a good casting call, who tried to find the right characters for the film’s mood,” said production designer Dennis Gassner (“Blade Runner 2049”) to Indieview. “And it took a lot of tests and wrong with the Visual Effects team to make it work.”
Mo-Cap performance became crucial to conveying the feelings of the sensitive robots. First and foremost, there is Brown’s companion, Cosmo (expressed by Alan Tudyk), based on a cartoon character with a painted face; Pratt’s Motormouth Utility Bot, Herman (expressed by Anthony Mackie), which can change size; and Mr. Peanut (expressed by Woody Harrelson), the animatronic appearance the leader for the uprising.
But the biggest challenge for production Vfx Supervisor Matthew Butler (“Ready Player One”) by Digital Domain was to choose the most suitable catch technique. “Due to the speed and adaptability that the brothers wanted, it was more meaningful to go with accelerometer -based sensor movement capture (from Xsens) instead of the more traditional optical capture,” Butler told IndieWire.
The artists wore suits with inertia sensors that provided acceleration to calculate speed and position. This allowed the filmmakers to capture the actors’ movements in real environments. “It releases you so that they can now be on the set without any complicated photogrammics system in place,” added Butler.
Digital domain (supervised by Joel Behrens) was the primary VFX studio, with ILM (supervised by Russell Earl) which handled much of the epic battle at the end between the robots and the industry Stanley Tucci’s army of drones. However, the most complex robot was Cosmo, with its large head and unrealistic shape. He needed to be solved before anything else, so Butler arranged an early traditional MO-CAP test at Digital Domain for the Russian brothers with the help of animation director Piotr Karwas.
Fortunately, Karwas had a young daughter who was willing to act as Cosmo on the Mo-Cap stage. “We wanted to get this innocent performance to convey (by) Cosmo,” Butler said. “So we basically got to make some childish performances, and we got that movement captured and used it on a rather raw proxy by Cosmo made through Unreal Engine. You had this crazy object that now has all this beautiful performance and everyone was happy.”
But when they finally got green light, the panic began to insert Cosmo. “There was still any concern about his lack of skill,” Butler continued. “Not only has Cosmo got a big ball for the head but he can’t talk (although he conveys a calculated consciousness) and he cannot gesture with his face because of a permanently painted grin. Everyone goes,” maybe he should have the eyebrows. “We decided to honor the painted face, to know a lot can be done with Pantomime to express emotions, and the animators took that limitation as a challenge.”
The attention turned to the robot design, which was drawn down to the clumsy boots. Butler told the directors that they needed to find a way to make him mechanically feasible. They consulted with UCLA and Boston Dynamics and learned to keep Cosmo’s giant head from overturning by dimensioning it and adding pushrods, pistons and step engines to his neck and elbows.
In one of the opening images in Brown’s room, there is a close -up of Cosmo’s feet, where you see counter -rotating ankle engines. “And we did this type of satisfactory use of small LEDs everywhere and electric cables,” Butler said. “You start with it and the sounds and the flashing light, and you go,” Now I buy that you do the most ridiculous things. “
Then they found a way to put emotions in the painted face when Butler knocked out and designed the students in their eyes as dark smoked glass with a camera behind them. The green light ring in the camera allowed them to then animate a glimpse. “Like a Tesla, if you look at the side cameras, they are hidden behind a smoked glass,” added Butler.
As for Herman and Mr. Peanut had their own limitations to overcome. Herman has a unique design in the film: his face looks like a cathod-beam display. “The fun part was to make the screen and find out how that kind of decay of the pixels and the appearance of the classic TV screen could be in the form of pseudo futuristic,” Digital Domain’s Behrens said to IndieWire.
“And we took Dennis’s pattern and made them feel that they could actually exist in the robot world,” continued Behrens. “They had a proper common structure and mechanics that would enable him to do what he does (size up). So he had many pistons around the waist to give a rather impressive range of motion for a little guy.”
At the same time, Mr. Peanut a challenge because they tried to find out what level of complexity his facial expression and animation could have. Digital domain ran a series of tests from being doll -like to completely elastic as a human being.
“We found that it started to feel a bit drawn and a little scary,” Behrens added. “So we took inspiration from the old animatronics from Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza. We assumed there was an under structure that allowed peanuts to have certain expressions and movements like his mouth.
“But we also wanted it to feel limited as if he is a mechanical base with a kind of elastic, latex shell wrapped around it with some kind of capacitors and pistons that would make it possible for him to make a small pucker or a small smile. For the most part, we tried him to feel as robot as possible with the exception of his eyes.
“The Electric State” is currently flowing on Netflix.
