For this very special project, brilliantly directed by Philippe Tempelman and photographed by Benoît Debie, we had the pleasure to bring to live a 1.3T robot in front of the camera.

In Collaboration with our friend at Superposition_ch and the great people at EventRobotics we were involved early in the pre-production process. We provided the director with a casting of different robot to choose from and advised the art-direction department about the differents industrial tools the robot had to carry and the overall creation of a custom look for our acting robot.

Later, in the preparation phase, we created 3D previz of the different robot movement and then had several session of rehearsal with the director. We also solved a wide range of physical challenge. For ex: Building a custom 1T metal flat base for the robot to rest on during shoot and figure out how to rig the whole front grille of the Renault Austral to the robot.

This preparation time and the very nice communication we had with the different team allowed for a great and very fluid shooting experience on the day of the shoot.

As the plan was always to have only one real robot on set and then duplicate it digitally; one of our task was also to provided post-production with enough animation data to allow them to mix the real robot and the CGI one as easily as possible. Thanks to our Maya based workflow this was really a breeze and we were happy to see that quite a bit of our animation work was used on to drive the CGI robot in the final film.

A big thanks to all the team involved for this special one.

Lead Motion Control - RobotKopp
Motion Control on set animator - Superposition_ch
Robot Handler - EventRobotics