 So, grab a seat, make yourself comfortable, the screening will start soon. Right, so I know what robots you are looking for, you're looking for. Animatronics and robots in the movies with Matt Denton, please give him a very warm welcome. Thank you very much, thank you. Oh, that's loud isn't it? You should try standing up here, I feel like I've been at the bar all day. So I'm a bit of a lean. Yeah, so I'm here to talk about control systems and techniques and a little bit of behind-the-scenes stuff in films. I've worked in the film industry and television industry specialising in control systems for animatronics for about 25 years now. And a bit about my background, how I got into electronics in the first place. I came out of school and I started an apprenticeship in electronics engineering with Marconi defense systems. So that was a four-year apprenticeship where I learnt basic skills and there was a lot of practical element to it actually which was very good. And we did like an ONC and an HNC in electronic software engineering. And I think towards the end of my apprenticeship I could see that software engineering was much more interesting to me so I kind of diverted slightly halfway through. I then started a degree at Portsmouth University in electronics engineering again. And rather foolishly I was offered a place in the second year and I said, no, no, I'm going to do the first year with my mates, idiot, and got bored in the first year and left to join the film industry and I'm not saying anyone else do that. Certainly kids who did a finish a degree because I never went back to finish my degree and it's always bugged me. But I got a job, I basically bugged some people at a television show and said, you know, I want to work in special effects, how do I get into that? And they said, well, you've got to build stuff, what can you make? And I couldn't really make much at the time but I did used to make models in my spare time just as a hobby. And I was really into Star Wars and so I scratch-built this model scout walker in my shed and I took it back to them and said, like, I'll make things like this. And they were like, oh, OK, we might give you a job and they did give me a job over the summer, this was after my first year at uni. But I wasn't a very good model maker. And they were like, what else can you do? That didn't last long. So I said, well, I do electronics. And they were like, oh, OK, and they had loads of stuff that needed things like lights and bowels and whistles and actuation. So I kind of ended up being their electronics boy. Which suited me just fine because I was suddenly an expert in their company because they had no one else who could do it. But I was still learning a lot at the time. And when I started with this kind of stuff, this was about mid-90s, I mean, 93, 94, something like that. It was much more traditional control techniques for animatronics within film and TV commercials. And I'm sure most of you know, but an animatronic is effectively a robotic puppet. So it's a robot. It has motors and actuators inside of it. But it's usually electronically controlled or hydraulically controlled. And quite often there's a team of puppeteers in the background making it look alive. Of course, there's no real intelligence in it other than the people that are controlling it. So to find a robot, it's not really a robot. It's a creative piece of robotic art. Your washing machine is more of a robot than probably what I do. But so anyway, we got into this animatronic control systems. I started by taking traditional methods such as like the controller you see on the screen is a very old one. These were great controllers. Some people might remember them. But I used to hot rod these. So the little LCD screen in the top left corner was my own modification to the controller to expand its functionality. And then soon after that, we were getting into stuff which needed maybe 14 or 15 channels of control, which was unheard of in radio control these days. They were stuck at about eight channels. And they were all servo-based controls. So like hobby servers you use now, that's most animatronic heads still use them today. So anyway, there was motion control systems were out there for camera control. So what I basically did is took an existing motion control platform, a well-known one at the time, and adapted it for animatronics. So then we could do, on this particular advert, this is a Lloyd's Bank advert from the 90s of a giant that roller skates down a hill. And his head had about 14 servos, actuators in it, which at the time blew me away. I was like, oh, wow, how are we ever going to do this? And you can tell, as you'll see these slides progress, you can tell the age of the photo by the size of my monitor. And the size of the computer system in the monitors sat on. So that was a 386 DX33 blisteringly fast with four megabytes of RAM and a 140 megabyte hard drive. I thought I'd won the lottery. So yeah, so the systems were big, chunky, and adapted. And it was fairly simple control techniques. It was more or less signal conditioning, input to output, and scaling. It's a tiny bit of mixing in there. And we could do, actually, on this system, you could record and play back and do some basic editing features. And then basically, I'm doing this, some skipping through and chunks, because I usually do this talk over about 45 minutes to an hour. So coming out of working for this company, the dream at the time is to work for Jim Henson's Creature Shop, because they are the creme de la creme of all animatronics. And I got there at about 1996. And I worked on a film called Buddy to spend a few weeks on Buddy. And I really enjoyed it. And I walked in there thinking I knew everything. And after three weeks, I knew I knew nothing, because their level, their game was up here somewhere. But by that point, I had developed my own control system, because the motion control system we were using, the camera one, was fine, but it wasn't dedicated to animatronics. And there's lots it could do we didn't need, and there's lots it couldn't do we did need. So I'd redeveloped my own system. And I got into Henson's, and I was young and brash. And I was like, you want to use my system, not yours, because they had their own. I've been developed it for years. I mean, they were the head of their game. And for some reason, I thought mine was better. I have no idea what I was thinking. But amazingly, they did use it. And we were doing a film called Lost in Space. And we built these two hydraulic, massive robots for the Lost in Space 1997 film. And at the time, their control system wasn't really geared for this kind of stuff. It was for small animatronic heads. And they were actually going to use the camera system that I'd based mine on. And I said, well, I've got a system that's dedicated for robotics. And it's based on the camera system you're going to get. So use mine and convince them to, and they did. So that was the kind of start of my control system's career. And these robots were really another step up. I'd never done hydraulics. I'd never done this level of control. That's me with a ponytail. There were various phases of hair in this talk as well. Very complicated. And we didn't have much time to build them. The control system, as you can see, the bottom right there is a massive desk of computers and racks. And the monitor is still about the same size. There's a puppeteer in front of it who's in a control rig. And basically the robot would copy whatever he does. So he'd have a slave input device he was wearing. So whatever moves he made, the robot would make. And this taught us a lot about safety as well, because we had a very, very near miss on this job. We built two of these machines. And they were hydraulic powered. We had a guy outside of the stage on a hydraulic pump starting and stopping the pump for us. And he had a set of comms on so we could talk to him. And they'd keep the pump outside the stage because of the noise it makes. And then we had these long cables coming into the stage, the robot on stage, the computer system. The robot is on a platform there and those cables dropping down through the platform and I'm underneath. So that was my control station. And one day I hear this second unit were running. It wasn't my machine. And it's a horror story of the robot going out of control and flailing its arms around and stuntmen screaming and running and horrible. And it turns out that someone had walked along the wall where we'd plugged our computers in and gone, I need to charge my drill up and just pulled our plug out and plugged his drill in and then he hears the screaming. And what happened is they were the computers shut down but they weren't interlocked to the pump. And the pump's still running so it's got full hydraulic power but no control. Which is terrifying. And our comms were also on the same main system so we're shouting at the guy on the comms to kill the pump and he's just like... It didn't realize the comms have gone very quiet and then someone comes running out and hits the pump stop button so we learned to put in interlocks after that point. Steep learning curve. So anyway, control systems evolved and when I was at Henson's they were doing something called expression-based control and that's really where my systems evolved rapidly after being there for a while and it really started when I was on Harry Potter so this is now about 2003. The pony tail still exists but look I've got a flat screen monitor. Check that out. That cost me £800 at the time and it was £800 by £600 resolution. Yeah, and the PC is set underneath of it. Look how small it is. That's incredible. That's Buck Beak, the Hippogriff from Harry Potter that I'm working on there and at this point, like I was saying, I'm into expression control so rather than controlling a single motor with a single input drive expressive control basically is like if I want to make the animatronic face look happy that uses usually about 12 of the motors in the face if it's a good face. Both corners, bottom eyelids, eyebrows they all have to move together and rather than trying to puppeteer that with expressive-based control you just create morph targets and you morph into a shape and everything in between. With this system I then had 32 output channels 32 expressions but all of those expressions can control all of those motors and they all have multiple morph targets so you could go from an expression from happy to sad to something else all on one joystick but add on top of that everything else you want to do so on a normal character we would have like a jaw movement and the reason why I'm doing this is because you'll see in a minute we use devices called walldoze which will track your hand and we'd have a jaw movement and we'd have an ooo and an e-shape on the thumb because if you can go ooey ooey ooey with an animatronic face with most dialogue and that's mostly all we can do so ooey ooey and then bit of jaw and then you'd have some other twist stuff here you could do stuff with the face and you'd have another joystick which would do all of the eye control and the brows and everything else and then the computer basically would tie all of these expressions together and summon them all together and a big mixer squirt them out to the head and suddenly you get this really life-like animation out of it one person doing the eyes up and down or one joystick doing the eyes up and down there were other techniques to do this but it was mechanical techniques complex mechanical techniques it also took a lot of the previous models we worked on would take teams of puppeteers to work together and this would bring it all down to one puppeteer he could drive an entire animatronic face on his own rather than three people trying to coordinate together so we used lots of input devices to help us with this one of them is called the Waldo as I already mentioned and that comes from a short story a short sci-fi story from 1942 if you want to look it up I think it's Robert A. Heinlein someone might correct me no good got away with it so if you're looking in that picture there's some of my colleagues here this is on Harry Potter again we were filming Buck Beak at this point and he's holding on to one of the joysticks in his left hand in his right hand you can't really see it but he's got a Waldo on which is that device so it basically puts his hand into an electronic glove and it can track all his finger movements and his palm movement and that came about because Jim Henson wanted a way of going from a sock puppet to an animatronic and he said well I can do this so you just figure out how you get this onto the animatronic and that's where it all came from and the reason it's called a Waldo is because of that sci-fi book and the character in it is called Waldo and he creates devices to make his body stronger because he's a weakling in the book and that's apparently where it came from so never read it or here say so anyway this is input devices we make specific ones, we change them there's a device in the background there which are the legs of the hippogriff I think the guy was sort of made a set of legs so we do custom controls as and when needed then one of the things about control systems and computers is that quite often you're in hideous locations so there's Buck Beak under its cover we turned up in Scotland in their summer time and it rained for six weeks and then when it didn't rain the sun came out and the midges came out and bit you to death so it was pretty grim and that's actually the guy holding the umbrella was my boss at the time it was Nick Dudman who was the head of the creature department and that Buck Beak was entire feather coat made by a team of incredible, I think they were all women then actually and they literally hand cut those feathers hand dyed them, stitched them into a suit and it's raining on it so every time the rain came out someone had to run in with an umbrella to save the suit and then most of it got replaced with CG so and I've got a little video here actually let's hope the sound works it doesn't matter if it doesn't just to show you the kind of conditions day one there's a lot of cuppa tea and this is my little shanty town so I had to build my computer underneath the tarpaulin hidden over the back of the set and me and my mate basically spent about six weeks under this tarpaulin because we weren't very prepared for rain because it's supposed to be summertime and so yeah so it's not always, everyone thinks the films are glamorous it's not that glamorous most of the time and then a lot of what we're trying to achieve is actually we build robotic structures but we don't want them to look robotic half the time because we're making creatures not robots or droids so a lot of the processes that I've spent in control systems is trying to hide the fact that it's a robot and it doesn't move robotically this is the werewolf from Harry Potter with my good colleague Josh Lee building the mechanism there and this was a beautiful mechanism again a guy on stilts and really a beautiful, beautiful thing to watch in performance and one of the best animatronic wolf type faces I've ever seen and I spend a lot of time on it so I use a lot of filtering like mathematical filters in my control systems you can turn on a first order filter might mean something to a lot of people it's just a maths filter that makes things very all kind of organic in their movement it dampens things down because you don't want things to do juddery and stuff so I filter stuff a lot and we use acceleration and deceleration curve to try and make things more natural and we did this a lot on the werewolf there's the guy practicing on his stilts and he hasn't got the full costume on there he's got the head on he's got a cable tether so the hippogriff we nicknamed the heap of grief the werewolf was nicknamed the wywolf because we should never have built it so basically we got him on set it was lovely it worked great and he was doing really well we had two guys in this and this guy was a ballerina six for eight ballerina and the other guy that played it was a kickboxer they're both very similar build in a way get him on set and put the face on and if you shut your eyes and try to balance it's quite hard your eyes shut shut your eyes try to balance on stilts on rough terrain with a werewolf head on ain't gonna happen and we have a nickname in the industry for animatronic jobs that go wrong they're called animatrocities that was one of them anyway I'll move quickly on because this is forks again from harry potter and by this time I've got a laptop yay and it's a panasonic tough book these things were like 4000 pounds when they came off these were second hand on ebay for like 300 but I'm always somewhere down the line in technology but forks was a beautiful thing and I've got a quick video clip of it here this is stop frame animation just because it's a time lapse but it does go into full animation at the end and bear in mind this is 2004 so we're quite a way back here at this point this is the most complex thing I think we've done to date so now we're real time so we made this guy's face shift up the perch it's just an illusion because he's just sliding along the perch really but it kind of worked quite nicely again another lovely feather suit done by our rest of the creature effects department and barely used in the film so I'll move on a bit faster I've been giving my 10 minute warning this hexapods I've been building hexapods for years you might have seen the mantis today hopefully the last back do I get that minute back right thank you I can't get the staff anyway so the hexapod yeah basically I built dozens of these things this is this was the most complex before the mantis and it got me the job on Harry Potter and we did dress this one up to look like a creature and it was in the back of Hagrid's hut and it was in the back of Mad Eye Moody's classroom with a skin on obviously not looking like that I think it looked a little bit like that in one of them so yeah but that's a much more complex control system and we'd never really done anything that actually walked most of our stuff is fake you know it's smoke and mirrors because we can use filmed and trickery so that was quite interesting to do a real walking animatronic and fully self-contained sometimes less is more so a film we worked on called the world's end this was a head that we did which was a copy of Greg Townley who was a stunt guy and there's a scene in a bathroom he's basically a plot spoiler he's a robot gets his head knocked off and ends up with a head on the floor and they just needed it to look alive and so I was in charge of this particular project and I said it's just 12 servos it's the eyes the brows the blinks and the mouth that's it and the guy who built it wanted to put more in I said no no it's that shot this is it and this video went viral and I don't know how many hits it's had because lots of people nicked it and posted it up but I'll just show you what you can do with a minimum amount and a very good skin painting job I have to say the artist who painted the silicone skin on this was stunning the number one YouTube comment on this you can see on a big screen I can tell that's fake the number one on YouTube comment is fake it's not an animatronic it's a guy on his side with a white t-shirt on because nobody wants to believe that it we actually built it so yeah so that's kind of you know that's a really lovely thing you can do and it's using the bare minimum you don't always have to make it massively complicated it's a very skilled team on the art finish on that one so we're moving to Star Wars and when I joined Star Wars my first job was to create a simulation of a version of BB-8 and this was a version which used stabilizer wheels and I've got a video of it here so basically I built this in a virtual environment you could drive it around the environment using joysticks you could perform the head we left the wheels on so we could show the director what he's going to get and how he could shoot it so you could shoot it quite clean from this angle and then we drove it up a ramp which was going to be the millenium fulcrum ramp to make sure all the torque in the motors would work and is it going to handle it and then this video should move on a bit and you'll see oh there we go a little bump off the top and there's the final product once we built it we imported some of the finest sand from Jussons and stuck it in a container and drove it around in the sand because it was going to go to Abu Dhabi and this is us trying it in the back lot of Pinewood there's some of the set in the background there for episode 7 so it was really nice it was the first time I'd ever actually simulated something before we built it and this was like a game changer for us it saved us a huge amount of time and obviously it helped because it was robotic rather than creature like it's quite hard to simulate creature texture but when it's a robot or a droid should I say yeah it's much better and this was our first day on set getting ready for the very first shot of episode 7 we were the first shot terrifying so we're trying to combine technologies a lot as well so that was the trike our radio control one but we have puppet versions we have a lightweight ones that people can carry and I've got a quick shot of the film here and I'll try and point out what's what because there's three in succession they're all different technologies so we've got puppet and coming up trike and now we carry so three different technologies and that keeps people guessing because they're not sure what they're looking at if you keep switching the technology even with CG and animatronic it's a really good way of stopping the eye fooling the eye and just incidentally that was the very last shot we filmed with BB-8 was John Boyega at the bottom of the pit there and we got wrapped like an actor which has never happened to me in my career with BB-8 was such a big deal to the crew by that point when they wrap an actor they go oh well done you've got paid loads go by and we got wrapped the same way so I picked up BB-8 and lofted my head and walked out with him and John Boyega started singing The Lion King so I'm like eeeeeee so it's kind of fun and then of course we went on to build this guy this came after the film and this is probably my most technical achievement with the colleagues I built it with which is Jocely who did the mechanics and that was the real BB-8 we rolled him out on stage Star Wars Celebration and the crowd went wild because they thought it was CG they just assumed it couldn't be done and I've got a friend here who helped me today James Bruton who was also starting his own version of a real BB-8 at the time and we didn't know we lived in the same town and some guy said oh he's building there's a guy here building one and I said well it's not me because I've not said anything because I'm signed by an NDA and so it was James and we met up and there we go I was still dragging him around with me he's holding me back I tell ya so anyway that particular droid took me on a great adventure and I went to war me and my colleague Josh who built it with me we built it so we could go to a premiere it's not a joke we built it so we could go to a premiere because people behind the camera never get to go to a premiere so of course they wanted BB-8 there so they invited us and we are the only people who can operate it so there's some more advanced techniques procedural so software based so like auto blinks auto breathe cycles things like that kinetic animation a new one that we're playing with motion capture and I'll just show you this video clip of kinetic animation because I'm running out of time this was a K2SO test head for Rogue One we never used it because it was CG but this is basically all the animation on the head is based on the movement of my hand so if someone is wearing this head imagine it's a creature and they're wearing it if they look down the eyes look down if they look up the eyes look up when they change position the eyes throw a blinking it's a nice cheat whenever you move the eyes when you're puppeteering you blink blink blink blink as you move and this just does it all automatically for you so you can augment this with live puppeteering as well so the processor in the head does all the auto but it feeds in a mix from the puppeteer so he can take control at any time and it worked really nicely this was just a test and you can squint the eye if you lean over and stuff and from that we went on and took it there was a character in solo if you've seen solo as soon as I saw the concept art I was like we've got to use the system on this character and it was possibly the it was made for it basically and this is a really short clip because it's the only one I have but that's with the extra minute right he's giving me a two minute warning so blink and you'll miss it but here it is this is not puppeteered ready he's behind him there boom that's all live so that's based on the actor's motion of his face all those eyes and it was beautiful and we had people coming up to us whilst we were on set filming that character and people were back behind the camera watching a monitor saying how are they doing that live CG on set and then we're like ha got your CG guys walk on set and you can touch it so we got into face tracking I'm going to move on a bit faster now this was working lovely as well unfortunately this company this was called face shift and I adapted it to plug into my animatronic system you can't really see it there but the eyes on the animatronic were some of the best eye movement we'd ever seen because your eyes jitter all the time and I have filters to do this but you can't beat a live capture and the blinks were beautiful and we took this a lot further and then the company that made the software got bought by Apple and now those Apple phones with those bleeding character things that track your face I can't use that anymore because Apple bought it so that was the end of that and it was the best software on the market there's nothing else that could compete with it so that was a bit of a shame more recently we're into motion tracking this is another test for a character we were working on so I basically try and adopt any new technology into the control systems we use just to try and get the best performance out of anything it's not always the right technology if you can do it as rods or just someone holding something or a stick or whatever it's fine but there's certain things that you know work really well and there's certain characters you have to use this kind of technology on it it just helps so we never try and push things to make things complicated in fact if anything I'm always trying to dumb things down so yeah it's been a great journey for me so far in my career I couldn't have ever imagined working on a character that ends on Time Magazine and none the less we also got an award a visual effects award from VES society and again as an engineer you'd never expect to get an award in film industry because everything that all goes to the people who sit in front of camera mostly so I've been very lucky and another high point in my career was getting to work on Jurassic World last year and this was another big hydraulic rig so it was really nice to come back to our hydraulics after not doing it since 1997 and other than the Mantis and yeah I'm very lucky to do what I do and I hope you've enjoyed that brief talk I've got someone staring at me already thank you very much I don't think there's time for a Q&A I don't know oh yeah he's getting the mic out he's getting the mic out there's time for a Q&A okay cool there we go if you do have any questions let me just start now and say I can't answer anything about episode 9 so two quick sorry two quick questions and quick answers please two quick questions so it's not working who do you want to work for next who I'd like to work for oh I'd quite like to go and work in the States for a bit and see what I've worked there a bit through traveling and there's some really interesting work going on out there with companies like Spectral Motion and Stan Winston's company which became something else legacy effects anything really I'm almost considering moving completely away from film I've done 25 years of it I loved it but I quite like pure robotics I'm not clever enough but I think I've got something I can add possibly I don't know thank you last question how do you avoid the sound of the servos moving interfering with things have you got a quiet actuator very good question we don't and there sound guys hate us I mean literally hate us we have this constant we'll start doing a take and six eyes the thing with six eyes has 62 servos in it the system I have now will do 500 servos so I sort of said that's progressed through the years they hate it and we'll do a shot and they'll literally come over within about the second take and go can you turn it off and we're like well if you don't want to see it move and then it's a back and forwards between the director and the sound guy does he want it to move or do you want the sound and then what they usually do at the end of the day is they do ADR dialogue so everyone's on set and they'll just do all the dialogue again whilst everyone's been quiet and they'll overdub it if it's that bad it's a problem thank you very much that's all we have time for unfortunately are you at the village or somewhere where can we find you if anyone's got any questions maybe I'll hang out a bit here I've got some giant I was asked to bring some giant lego with me he's one of my side projects and I've got some here but we could hang out outside or whatever and yeah thank you very much once more Matt thank you very much