The new movie Netflix “The Electrical State” features a world full of robots – but not robots as we know them.
Directed by brothers Anthony and Joe Russo (who previously helped two Blockbusters of Avengers, “Endless War” and “Endgame”) for Reported budget of $ 320 million“The Electrical State” takes place in an alternate version of the 1990s, one where insensitive robots have existed for decades. It is long enough that they rebelled against their human masters, lost the war and found themselves exiled to an area of the southwest – an area in which the heroes of the film (performed by Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt) must be hidden.
Reportedly for visual effective supervisors Matthew E. Butler, design-wise, these robots are “deliberately the antithesis” of the robots that exist today.
“Most of us have seen modern robots … and are used to these projects,” Butler told me. “If you look at Boston Dynamics robots, you will notice that they concentrate the mass of the robot in the center of the robot, and then as you go out to the extremes, they get less and less massive, because that’s just a defensible design.”
On the contrary, the film’s robotic cosmos has a “giant head on a tiny neck”, which Butler described as “the worst design for a robot.”
Like the film itself, this design is based on the illustrated novel by the same name by Simon Stålenhag. But Butler explained that there is an in-film explanation of Cosmo and the other strange robots that are often drawn from real and imagined pop culture: they were created to be “unpleasant”, which is why they all look “kind and nasty and funny.”
All of this meant that Butler’s team had to start with a design that was unnaturally impractical, but eventually creating something that felt “physically credible and real.” He said that to do so, they decided to honor Cosmo’s project in “Siluette Mode.”
“If you squeak and you remove him far away [the] Camera, he looks like Cosmo, as he is in the book, “Butler said.” But if you go close and you explore shoulder, you will see that there are push sticks there, and you can see the engines, you can see the circuits, as well as the ankles and feet. “
The goal is to convince audiences that “the thing can really work.” Once they are convinced, they will accept Cosmo’s project and the other robots project, without seeing all the details.
And yes, there are many other robots. Butler said his team has to bring about “hundreds and hundreds of unique robots” -unika not because every robot in this alternate world is one-type, but because “in the movie, we usually only show individuals.”
And unfortunately, there were no shortcuts.
“We scraped our heads as many times – as,” How the hell do we do this? “He said.”
To bring these robots to life, Butler said the team used a combination of traditional optical Movement capture and a newer system using accelerometer-based costumes. This allowed a troop of seven moving captive performers to collaborate with the actors of live performance locally and fixed, with their performance then providing the basis for the animated robots-are they human, giant, or enter into the hand of the character’s hand.
Butler emphasized that the process was far more complicated than simply transferring movements from an actor to a robot body.
“Take a little Herman as an example,” he said. “You have the [motion capture] A performer, and he adds his desire, his performance, and is someone with whom Chris Pratt can act now. Then you say, ‘Well, well, but the actual robot can’t do many things this guy can do.’ So now you need to change it based on the limitations of the robot’s design itself. ”
And it’s not over yet: “And then you talk to the directors, and there is a separate change of features that you now have [sounds like] that then the cadence must change. ‘”
Butler said the robots we finally see on screen were created from the work of all those artists and performers joining: “And that’s why we really just rolled our sleeves and continued it.”
