It was an enormous task, especially since the plates had been photographed without motion control.
As a result, about 80% of the Sonny shots ended up being Tudyk plates, which implied painting him out in more than 200 shots. However, it turned out that the actors performance was often better in the plates featuring Alan: the intensity was there, the eyelines were correct It was obvious that the scene worked better whenever Alan had been part of the action. Initially, the plan was to use his performance as a guide to animate our CG Sonny and integrate the character in the plate in which Will Smith had been shot alone. The final pass was a clean backgound plate of the empty set.Īlans performance gave us the outline of what Sonny should be doing, which is a similar technique to the one that was used for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, Jones comments. The third pass featured a full-size Sonny puppet built by Patrick Tatopoulos Design that was moved around the set on a dolly as a light and texture reference. Then, Smith repeated his performance without Tudyk. In a typical Sonny shot, the crew first photographed Will Smith playing the scene with actor Alan Tudyk completely dressed up in green as the robot. Plate photography of the robot scenes required a minimum of four passes in order to provide the necessary elements. Actor Alan Tudyks performance is featured in 80% of Sonnys screen time.
Sonny follows in the digital footsteps of Gollum. We did more than 500 shots in 14 months, including about 460 shots featuring CG robots, recalls Andy Jones, DDs animation supervisor. Nelson thus decided that the robots would be created via computer animation, a task awarded to Digital Domain and in-house visual effects supervisor Erik Nash. The thin bodies of Tatopoulos robots excluded the use of a man in a suit, while the range of movements that the characters had to be able to achieve was far beyond the realm of what animatronics could do. To put robots on screen, overall visual effects supervisor John Nelson had three options: animatronics (the solution of choice for Terminator and A.I.), a man in a suit ( RoboCop, Bicentennial Man) or CG animation ( Red Planet, Tomb Raider). The soft features of the face were inspired by the traditional imagery of angels. So, I came up with the idea of combining half-transparent shells and a thinly mechanized armature. It just hit me: everywhere, from architecture to consumer products, the current trend in design is transparency. We couldnt have a Terminator standing at the stove in a kitchen! After trying a lot of different approaches, I nailed the concept when I noticed my assistants transparent iMac. Tapped with the task of designing Sonny and friends was French production designer and robot creator Patrick Tatopoulos, who had previously worked with director Alex Proyas on Dark City: We knew that they should look sleek, attractive and harmless and that they had to blend in everybodys home. Patrick Tatopoulos, production designer and robot creator, was inspired by the transparency of his assistants iMac while designing Sonny and his fellow robots. Although built-in security programs make it theoretically impossible for robots to do harm to a human, could the impossible have happened? Set in the year 2035, I, Robot follows an investigation by Detective Spooner (Will Smith) of the murder of a scientist.
#DID ARCANE USE MOTION CAPTURE SERIES#
Artificial Intelligence The task of adapting The Robots, Isaac Asimovs classic series of short stories, was thus a daunting one, as robots would this time be the focus of the whole film. Dozens of other movies have featured robots, but the design of these machines never left a lasting impression in the viewers mind: The Black Hole, Lost in Space, Red Planet, A.I. Whenever one thinks about robots in the movies, the images that come to mind are flashes from Metropolis, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Star Wars, Terminator or RoboCop. All I, Robot images and © 2004 Twentieth Century Fox. Digital Domain completed more than 500 shots of the robots, including 300 of Sonny (above left).
0 kommentar(er)
