How ‘The Electric State’ team created a world of unlikely robots

The new Netflix “The Electric State” is filming a world full of robots – but not robots as we know them.

It was directed by the two brothers Anthony and Joe Rousseau (who previously performed two veiled films, “Infiniti War” and “End of the game”) for a budget of $ 320 million, “The Electric State” is running in an alternative version of the nineties, where emotional robots were present for decades. This is long enough for them to rebel against their human masters, lost the war, and found themselves exiled to a region of southwest – a region whose heroes must (Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt) to infiltrate it.

It is very important for the optical effect supervisor Matthew E Battler, design, these robots “intentionally” the opposite of the robots present today.

Bater told me: “Most of us have witnessed robots in the modern era … and they used in these designs.” “If you look at the Boston Dynamics robots, you will notice that it focuses the robot mass in the middle of the robot, and then when it goes to the ends, it becomes less and less large, because this is just a defense design.”

On the contrary, the Cosmo Robot of the film has a “giant head on a small neck”, described by Pater as “the worst design of the robot.”

Like the film itself, this design depends on Simon Stolhj, a video of the same name. But Beller made it clear that there is an internal explanation for Cosmo and other strange robots that are often extracted from the real and connected pop culture: it has been created to be “not threatened”, and this is why they seem “somewhat of speech, fun and fun.”

All of this means that the Bater team must start with a design that was invisible in an innate manner, but in the end it creates something that I felt “can be believed physically and real.” He said that to do this, they decided to honor the Cosmo design in a “silhouette” style.

“If you worry and put it away from the distance [the] “The camera looks like Cosmo, the way in the book,” said Pateler. “But if you get close to and check a shoulder, you will see that there are payment bars there, and you can see engines, you can see circles, with the ankles and feet.”

The goal is to persuade the masses that “something can really succeed.” Once persuaded, they will accept Cosmo design, and other robots design, without seeing all the details.

And yes, there are many other robots. Bater said that his team had to bring “hundreds and hundreds of unique robots” to life-unique not because every robot in this alternative world is a unique type, but because “in the movie, we usually show individuals.”

Unfortunately, there were no shortcuts.

He said: “We have scratched our heads several times – like,” How do hell do we do this? “If you have 100 different robots and they all move, they must be able to move, which means that you must be able to manipulate it, so someone must design it, someone should draw them, on someone to move them.”

To bring these robots to life, Pater said the team used a mixture of traditional visual movement and a new system that uses acceleration allowances. This allowed a team of seven proxies to pick up the movement by working with representatives of direct work on the site and on the group, with their performance and then provide the basis for animated robots-whether they are the size of the human or the giant or commensurate with the comfort of the personality of the personality.

Bater emphasized that the process was much more complicated than just moving the actor’s movements to a robot body.

He said: “Take a little Hermann as an example.” “I got [motion capture] Performance, adding his taste and performance, a person with which Chris Pratt can behave. Then she says, “Well, well, but the actual robot cannot do many things that this man can do.” So far you need to change it based on the Robot design restrictions itself. “

It has not yet ended: “Then you speak to the managers, and there is a special change in the characteristics, which you now need to honor, so you can change that, then you have great audio representatives adding a lot, and now it is like,” well, if the character is [sounds like] Then the rhythm needs to change. “

Bater said that the robots that we see in the end of the screen were created through the work of all these artists and performance artists gather: “That is why we really recycled our arms and continued with them.”