Thursday, January 14, 2016
Extremely realistic animatronic head built for "The World's End"
Boing Boing: Matt Denton says, "This is test footage and images of the animatronic head built for Edgar Wright's The World's End. This is a fairly simple head with only eye and jaw movement but has just enough functionality to sell the gag!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
This is, without a doubt, one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen. That aside, I think the strides that have been made in animatronics in even the past few years are astonishing. This head is only used for part of one scene, and yet it looks like it could be part of a real person. I think this conversation is especially relevant at a school like Carnegie Mellon, since it's an example of taking the overlap of art and technology to an extreme new level. I think it's interesting to see all the different applications of such a field. The most obvious one to me is themed entertainment, such as the audioanimatronics at Disneyworld, but this video proves that it also has a direct application to film and possibly television. I'm also curious about the overlap between this kind of robotics and artificial intelligence research-- obviously AI technology takes it in a very specific direction but the dedication to authenticity (at least in outward appearance) is common to both.
This is honestly extremely terrifying. Without the skin it looks like Sasha’s puppet she made for arcade last year- Alfred. And with the skin it just looks completely like a real head laying there. The advances we have made with prosthetics is amazing. You can see every hair punched into the skin and the skin itself is sweaty and dimpled with pores. Seeing it used to cover a robot is new to me. The result is fascinating because my brain tells me that it has to be a CGI head because its a video and that’s how it’s usually done, but I also know that it is a prop. The way that they linked the eyebrows to the movement of the eyes leads the most realism to the head because we all can remember times in old movies before CGI who use fake heads where just the eyes move and it looks really fake. I cant imagine walking onto the set and seeing that lying there moving. There are going to be a lot of pranks on that set.
Without the fake skin its hard to believe this head could live up to the article title. It looks more like a kind of off putting/creepy manikin head. But with the skin it looks so real it took me a moment to figure out why there was no blood coming out of a severed head. As real as the hair and skin look some of the other parts of the head look less real. The mouth’s movement isn’t as believable, something about it seems stiff and unnatural and the path it travels just looks a little off. The eyes are better but not quite as good as the skin and hair. Much like the mouth there’s just something that seems a little wrong with them. The way they move looks real enough but the eyes themselves lack some of the subtleties and imperfections of real eyes, for example there aren’t any veins in the eyes.
This is amazing. It looks so incredibly real: not only do the eyes move, as expected, but the skin around them shrugs and wrinkles just as it would on a live person. That the eyebrows moved with the eyes is a wonderful subtle touch that I think is often forgotten when fake heads and eye-area prosthetics are made. Though without the skin it looks like something from Sasha Mieles's arcade project, the addition of the skin and hair, complete with tiny imperfections in the skin, wrinkles, and fullness, it is a masterpiece. It looks like some of the apparatus sticks out of the back of the head, though? Which maybe explains why it is only viewed laying on it's side. In the clip from the movie, it becomes apparent why the animatronic head was necessary and couldn't just be substituted with animation. I don't know what the movie is actually about, but the fight scene makes it clear that the head was needed to look just as it does in the video in the article. Very cool!
So, projects like this are why I love theatre and entertainment. It has an amazing balance of artistry and ingenuity, that head looks incredibly realistic, and I’m sure that the context of the film would make it even more so. It’s also very cool because it is the first animatronic head that I’ve seen on one of these articles that exists on our side of the uncanny valley. That really weird grey area where things look just real enough to be horrifying, but not real enough to look normal. Yeah, seeing the head is eerie, but not nearly as much as some other androids.
On another note, animatronics like this make me look forward to seeing androids as realistic as Data from TNG. I know this project was for a movie, but still, it looks as if we are coming very close to having the technology to build an anatomically convincing human replicate, at least from a hardware point of view.
Post a Comment