How the “Electric State” team has created a world of improbable robots

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

Directed by the Anthony brothers and Joe Russo (who had previously directed two Avengers, “Infinity War” and “endgame” blockbusters) for A declared budget of $ 320 million“The electrical state” takes place in an alternative version of the 1990s, where sensitive robots have existed for decades. It is long enough to rebel against their human masters, lost the war and found themselves exile in an area in the southwest – an area in which the heroes of the film (played by Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt) must sneak.

Especially for the supervisor of the Matthew E. Butler visual effects, in terms of design, these robots are “deliberately the antithesis” of the robots that exist today.

“Most of us have seen modern robots … and are used to these conceptions,” said Butler to me. “If you look at the Boston Dynamics robots, you will notice that they concentrate the mass of the robot in the center of the robot, then when you go out at the ends, they become less and less massive, because it is just a defensible design.”

On the other hand, the Cosmo robot of the film has “a giant head on a small neck”, which Butler described as “the worst design for a robot”.

Like the film itself, this design is based on the illustrated novel by Simon Stålenhag of the same name. But Butler explained that there is an explanation in film for Cosmo and the other original robots which are often taken from real and imaginary pop culture: they were created to be “non -threatening”, which is why they all look “a little cute and clumsy and fun”.

All this meant that the butler team should start with a design which was intrinsically impracticable but which ended up creating something which seemed “physically credible and real”. He said that to do this, they decided to honor Cosmo’s design with “silhouette fashion”.

“If you fold your eyes and keep him away from [the] The camera, he looks like Cosmo, the way he is in the book, “said Butler. “But if you get closer and examine a shoulder, you will see that there are stems of push in there, and you can see the motors, you can see the circuits, identical with the ankles and the feet.”

The goal is to convince the public that “the thing can really work”. Once they are convinced, they will accept the design of Cosmo and the design of other robots, without seeing all the details.

And yes, there are many other robots. Butler said that his team had to give life to “hundreds and hundreds of unique robots” – unique not because each robot in this alternative world is unique, but because “in the film, we generally present individuals”.

And unfortunately, there was no shortcut.

“We scraped our heads so many times – like:” How do we do we do that? “” He said. “If you have 100 different robots and they all move, they must be able to move, which means that you must be able to compete them, so someone must design them, someone must paint them, someone must animate them.”

To give life to these robots, Butler said that the team had used a traditional optical combination motion capture And a more recent system using combinations based on the accelerometer. This allowed a troop of seven interpreters of motion capture to work with live action players on site and on the set, with their performance, then providing the basis of animated robots – whether human, gigantic or adapt in the palm of a character.

Butler stressed that the process was much more complicated than simply transposing the movements of an actor on a robot body.

“Take little Herman as an example,” he said. “You have the [motion capture] The interpreter, and he adds his flair, his performance, and he is someone with whom Chris Pratt can now act. Then you say: “Well, ok, but the real robot cannot do a lot of things that this guy can do.” So now you have to change it according to the limits of the robot design itself. »»

And it’s not over yet: “And then you talk to the directors, and there is a particular change of characteristics, which you now need to honor, so you change this, then you have your fabulous voice actors who add so much, and now it’s like,` `well, if the character [sounds like] that then the pace must change. “”

Butler said that the robots that we finally see on the screen were created by the work of all these artists who come together: “And that is why we really found our sleeves and we are doing it.”