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He was such a great physical actor in the role.
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We tried to shoot in story order as much as possible to make it easier to wrap our heads around that evolution, but when we saw Caleb perform, we were like, “OK, this guy is embodying this role. But we went away from that as we saw Caleb do his thing. Yeah, we initially felt that at the end of the movie, we would start from Caleb’s interpretation and the physical robot, and end up with what was essentially Tom Hanks. You mapped out Tom Hanks’ performance, too? Image used with permission by copyright holder Image used with permission by copyright holder If you want to scratch your head, you have to sort of do it in the style of Tom Hanks acting as Finch - not just Tom Hanks in any movie, but as Finch.” We actually motion-captured Tom Hanks, too. So we said to Caleb, “Basically, if you’ve seen Finch do something, you can imitate it. We had that discussion with Caleb early on and we were like, “During the course of this movie, you’ll start out with a very restrictive range of motions, and as you watch Finch, you’ll learn more and more, and your motions will get more fluid.” There’s this notion of style-matching with artificial intelligence that we felt was important to show here. He’s very mechanical at the start, and we had to show his growth. There’s nobody else around, after all.Īnd that’s why we see so many scenes of Finch telling Jeff to imitate and copy him …Įxactly. Artificial intelligence is all about accumulating massive amounts of data.
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When I came on to the film, I was very into the notion of artificial intelligence and machine learning and what that would mean in the year 2030. It was part animatronic, part puppeteered, and that was the starting point for us. Legacy Effects built pieces that were Velcroed on to it in order to give him the bulk and physicality and lighting reference, and they also built a real robot that was able to be puppeteered. That’s what we call it, by the way: It’s a lycra motion-capture suit. I look at all the shots in the film and feel Caleb in every shot, because I saw him for so long in his displacement suit. Scott Stokdyk: That’s a complicated question to answer. How visual effects created Snowpiercer’s frozen world How the Thanos VFX team brought The Quarry’s characters to life (and then killed them) The result was a 20+ page animation bible which defined what they wanted from the character’s evolution in each part of the movie and how much of Finch’s body language it had assimilated by then.įor their work on Jeff, the MPC team received the VES Award for Outstanding Animated Character.How jellyfish and Neon Genesis Evangelion shaped the VFX of Jordan Peele’s Nope Inspired by machine learning work and SIGGRAPH research, the MPC team collaborated with the filmmakers to make an animation plan for the progression of Jeff’s AI. All the while, matching the incredible performance of Caleb Landry Jones (the actor who played Jeff), and refining it with an appropriate level of robotic feel, always making sure Jeff feels like a 200kg robot rather than a 70kg human. The robot would be constantly recording Finch’s motions and behaviours and abstracting his own from them – from very robotic, uncoordinated, and ungainly at the beginning through to being significantly more controlled, and finally ending up with very human-like nuances to his movement, such as subtle eye saccades during pauses for thought to mimicking Finch’s breathing motions as his behaviour takes a final turn to becoming very human. The brief from the filmmakers was to make sure we always had awareness of what stage we were at in any given scene or shot along Jeff’s development arc.