In Netflix’s “The Electric State,” the sci-fi adventure from Anthony and Joe Russo, Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt help renew a robot rebellion in an alternate version of the ’90s. The robots themselves are not exactly new, at least not in terms of looks. They share the kitschy design of the robots in the graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag on which the film is based. But there are 175 of them — which meant the film needed a prodigious ensemble of motion capture performers.
Led by motion choreographer/actor Terry Notary, the mo-cap team actually outnumbered the principal actors. “It was like a great casting call, trying to find the right characters for the mood of the film,” production designer Dennis Gassner (“Blade Runner 2049”) told IndieWire. “ And it took a lot of trial and error with the visual effects team to make it work.”
Mo-cap performance became critical to conveying the emotions of the sentient robots. Principally, there is Brown’s companion, Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk), based on a cartoon character with a painted face; Pratt’s motormouth utility bot, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), who is able to change size; and Mr. Peanut (voiced by Woody Harrelson), the animatronic-looking leader of the rebellion.
However, the biggest challenge for production VFX supervisor Matthew Butler (“Ready Player One”) of Digital Domain was selecting the most appropriate capture technique. “ Because of the speed and adaptability that the brothers wanted to have, it made more sense to go with accelerometer-based sensor motion capture [from Xsens] instead of the more traditional optical motion capture,” Butler told IndieWire.
The performers wore suits with inertial sensors that provided acceleration to compute velocity and position. This allowed the filmmakers the freedom to capture the actors’ movements in real-world environments. “ That frees you up so that now they can be on the set without any complicated photogrammetry systems in place,” added Butler.
Digital Domain (supervised by Joel Behrens) was the primary VFX studio, with ILM (supervised by Russell Earl) handling much of the epic battle at the end between the robots and industrialist Stanley Tucci’s army of drones. The most complex robot, though, was Cosmo, with his oversized head and unrealistic form. He needed to be solved before anything else, so Butler arranged an early traditional mo-cap test at Digital Domain for the Russo brothers with the help of animation director Piotr Karwas.
Fortunately, Karwas had a young daughter who was willing to act as Cosmo on the mo-cap stage. “ We wanted to have this innocent performance conveyed [by] Cosmo,” Butler said. “So we basically had her do some childlike performances, and we got that motion captured and applied it to a fairly crude proxy of Cosmo rendered through Unreal Engine. You had this crazy-looking object that now has all this beautiful performance and everybody was happy.”
But when they finally got the green light, panic started to set in about Cosmo. “There was still somewhat concern about his lack of dexterity,” continued Butler. “Not only has Cosmo got a big ball for the head but he can’t talk [though he conveys a projected consciousness] and he can’t gesticulate with his face because of a permanently painted grin. Everyone goes, ‘Maybe he should have eyebrows.’ We decided to honor the painted face, knowing a lot can be done with pantomime to express emotion, and the animators took that limitation as a challenge.”
Attention turned to the robot design, which was cartoony right down to the clunky boots. Butler told the directors that they needed to find a way of making him mechanically feasible. They consulted with UCLA and Boston Dynamics and learned how to keep Cosmo’s giant head from toppling over by sizing it down and adding pushrods, pistons, and stepper motors to his neck and elbows.
In one of the opening shots in Brown’s room, there’s a closeup of Cosmo’s feet, where you see counter-rotating ankle motors. “And we did this sort of gratuitous use of little LEDs everywhere and electrical cables,” Butler said. “You start with that and the sounds and the blinking light, and you go, ‘Now I buy that you’re doing the most ridiculous things.”
Then they found a way of adding emotion to the painted face when Butler pitched designing the pupils of his eyes as dark smoked glass with a camera behind them. The green light ring in the camera allowed them to then animate a twinkle. “Like a Tesla, if you look at the side cameras, they’re hidden behind a smoked glass,” added Butler.
As for Herman and Mr. Peanut, they had their own limitations to overcome. Herman boasts a unique design in the movie: His face looks like a Cathode-Ray Tube display. “The fun part was doing the screen and figuring out how that sort of decay of the pixels and the look of that classic television screen could be in the form of pseudo futuristic,” Digital Domain’s Behrens told IndieWire.
“And we took Dennis’ designs and made them feel like they could actually exist in the world of robotics,” Behrens continued. “They had proper joint structure and mechanics that would allow him to do what he does [sizing up]. So he had a lot of pistons around his waist to give a pretty impressive range of motion for a little guy.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Peanut was a challenge because they tried to figure out what level of complexity his facial expressions and animation could have. Digital Domain ran a series of tests from being puppet-like to completely elastic like a human.
“We found that it started feeling a little cartoonish and a little creepy,” added Behrens. “So we took inspiration from those old animatronics from Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza. We assumed that there was an understructure that allowed Peanut to have certain expressions and movements like his mouth.
“But we also wanted that to feel limited like he’s a mechanical base with a sort of elastic, latex shell wrapped around it with some sort of capacitors and pistons that would allow him to do a slight pucker or a slight smile. For the most part, we tried to make him feel as robotic as possible with the exception of his eyes, which we wanted to keep as human as possible. You’ll notice he can do eye darts and looks around at people. That was actually a pitch from Jeff Ford, the editor, and everybody agreed that it was a smart move.”
“The Electric State” is currently streaming on Netflix.
