Gustav Hoegen's animatronic effects

November 1, 2011 1:12 PM

Dancing babies and robot squirrrels (YT) Gustav Hoegen is an animatronics and prosthetics technician - perhaps his most immediately recognisable work to a MetaFilter audience being the spider-centaur (and quite possibly queen of Mars) Rachnos from Doctor Who's The Runaway Bride, along with the clockwork robots which menaced Madame de Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace. He has also contributed to Hellboy and Clash of the Titans.

On a lighter note, he designed and built this music-driven, nightmare-fueling dancing baby, programmed by Josh Head (possibly NSFW) as a personal project.

Hoegen is currently working on Ridley Scott's not-an-Alien-prequel, Prometheus.

posted by running order squabble fest (13 comments total)

Pretty awesome. Ever since I was a little kid, and seeing videos of the animatronics down at Walt Disney World, I always fantasized about becoming an Imagineer. Clearly it requires a lot more engineering than I'd ever be capable of.
posted by crunchland at 1:21 PM on November 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

Can someone in the biz explain how animatronics remain relevant in a CGI world? I would have thought that so much of this TRULY AMAZING STUFF could be done more cheaply with computers then with some dude making eyebrows in a metalshop.

Man alive, I wish I understood how this stuff works.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 1:36 PM on November 1, 2011

I'm not in the biz, but I understand that a lot of it is made for 'mo cap, so that CGI can look more awesome and amazing.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 1:55 PM on November 1, 2011

Can someone in the biz explain how animatronics remain relevant in a CGI world? I would have thought that so much of this TRULY AMAZING STUFF could be done more cheaply with computers then with some dude making eyebrows in a metalshop.

When you have a film-ready puppet, it can truly act along with the primary cast and talent through the acting of the puppeteer. You can try out different things in real time right there on the set. You can try different cues, you can try different facial expressions or body language.

Which means you can actually get reaction/interaction shots with your cast, instead of having them pretend to interact with green styrofoam ball on a stick or something, which usually comes off a bit wooden. Even for really good actors it's hard to get into a role of, say, utterly terrified of being eaten by a dinosaur when the only thing in the room is some green paint and a dowel and a bunch of cameras.

But when it's a two ton metal and foam rubber monster that somehow slavering and drooling and it's this huge thing on the stage - it's a lot easier to interact with. As you can see from the video some of these things are huge and very realistic.

Which means you save a hell of a lot of money on retakes and post processing, where the actors might not mesh that well with the inserted digital characters.

Also, good animation is really hard. Especially realistic fur and skin/bone/flesh movements. It's still not easy to do well in digital animation. It still is really hard to get the lighting just right, to get it to match the shot footage. It's not a trivial task when you add up all the post production and animation steps - because it's not just about animation, it's synthetic film-making. You have to match frame movement and ambient light and actors' cues and then it still has to be realistically animated without falling into the uncanny valley. (See Final Fantasy.)

And if you look at the state of the art of digital animation, they're moving to really complicated motion capture and green screen chromakey sets where they're basically creating digital animatronic puppets that are controlled by a bazillion dollars of computers, networks, cameras and sensors - with a human being wearing a motion capture suit as the puppeteer.

Meanwhile... animatronics probably costs less than all that new technology even though they're making eyebrows in a metal shop. Yet still looks more "real" because, well, it is "real". It's not just bits and simulated photons on a render farm, it's something you can actually touch and light with different lights and so on.

Oh, and thanks to the same kind of digital motion control and capture technology, you can program and record puppets so they'll play a scene back exactly the same. They've been doing computerized motion control for a while with regards to puppets, props and cameras.

So, yeah. It's kind of counter-intuitive but digital effects and animation isn't nearly as cheap or affordable as you may think it is. And animatronic puppets are probably not as expensive as you think they are.

Many people who work in the physical effects industry work for less money than what you'd guess, because it's still an extremely competitive field. For every Stan Winston there's a few hundred thousand hungry kids with lifetime subscriptions to Fangoria who will PA for free just to smell the curing latex or get a chance to do production work.

I've mentioned this before on MetaFilter, but the people I've met who make physical props or makeup appliances work fast and cheap. Fast and cheap is generally the name of the game. Super high end and complicated animatronics are usually the exception to the rule. I've seen props or puppets that were nothing more than a couple of pieces of roughly cast latex with some bicycle brake cables stabbed into it through the back to make 'em wriggle or breath, and these were actually used on screen in some forgettable B-list horror movie, and all said and done the guy making them probably made less than minimum wage once you tallied the actual hours and material costs.

And there are some stunners in that reel linked above... more than a few of them are things I also assumed were fully CGI when I saw them in the films they're featured in. I had no idea how many of them were actually animatronics.
posted by loquacious at 2:11 PM on November 1, 2011 [11 favorites]

I would have thought that so much of this TRULY AMAZING STUFF could be done more cheaply with computers

I worked on the "painted world" effect in the film What Dreams May Come. It took the Academy Award for best special effects, due to the CGI depiction of Robin Williams placed inside a painting that was still wet. The reviews singled out one moment in particular, when he picks a flower and it oozes paint in his hand. "Masterful CGI!" The petals of that flower were made from dried paint, and it was stuffed with wet, acrylic paint. The rest was CGI, but that was a practical effect, and it made everything else seem more real.
posted by StickyCarpet at 2:14 PM on November 1, 2011 [13 favorites]

I worked on the "painted world" effect in the film What Dreams May Come.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have some very strong feelings about the wonderfulness of that movie, and much of them are wrapped up in its visual beauty.
posted by Rock Steady at 2:24 PM on November 1, 2011 [1 favorite]

Oh, I also meant to say -- those clockwork robots in Doctor Who were wonderful. The shape of the clear "head" encasing the complicated innards was just perfectly proportioned, and made you realize that a true artist was involved in their creation.
posted by Rock Steady at 2:29 PM on November 1, 2011

Youtube clip of the scene StickyCarpet just referenced.
posted by bettafish at 2:32 PM on November 1, 2011

nightmare-fueling dancing baby

Aggggh!
posted by Artw at 2:38 PM on November 1, 2011

On a lighter note, he designed and built this music-driven, nightmare-fueling dancing baby

It's a good thing you told me he does cool stuff, too, or I'd have to hunt him down.


But if you pull that shit again, Gustav, you're in real trouble.
posted by louche mustachio at 5:15 PM on November 1, 2011

Is there some place where his spider leg mechanisms are shown exposed? Because I have some questions.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 5:20 PM on November 1, 2011

The baby seal and gorilla are particularly impressive. The other nightmare stuff seems all the same. It's harder to create nature than distort it.
posted by stbalbach at 7:09 PM on November 1, 2011

Is there some place where his spider leg mechanisms are shown exposed? Because I have some questions.

You mean at 1:10? They're not functional. The body is on a counterweighted boom. The hinged legs just follow along. Or are you referring to the particular manner in which they flex as the body moves?
posted by CaseyB at 8:01 PM on November 1, 2011