Using a robot as the main character in a movie is always a gamble, especially if you want the audience to make a genuine emotional connection to your inhuman android. Still, director Miguel Sapochnik has put his all into his sci-fi drama. Finch by making the robot one of the three main characters in the film, alongside the adorable dog and two-time Oscar winner, Tom Hanks.
Set in the year 2030, Finch follows titular engineer and inventor Finch Weinberg, one of the few survivors of an apocalyptic solar flare that has turned most of Earth into an uninhabitable wasteland ravaged by deadly ultraviolet radiation. Dying from radiation exposure and forced to leave his lab, Finch embarks on a cross-country journey with his dog Goodyear and an android he has created to care for his canine friend. .
While Hanks gives a great performance as a scientist facing his own mortality, an android named Jeff delivers a lot of heart and humor in Finch, thanks to actor Caleb Landry Jones’s brilliantly nuanced take on motion capture and the combination of practical elements and visual effects. Digital Trends spoke with Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk (spider man 2, the hollow man), to learn how the film made Jeff the robot such an incredibly human character.
Digital Trends: It’s always hard to know where performance capture ends and visual effects begin with a character like Jeff, so how much of Caleb Landry Jones’s performance do we see on screen?
Scott Stokdyk: That’s a tough question to answer. I see every frame of the movie and I feel Caleb in every frame, because I’ve seen him in his deformable suit for a long time. That’s what we call it, by the way: it’s a lycra motion capture suit. Legacy Effects created the pieces that were attached to the velcro to give it volume, physicality, and lighting reference, and they also created an actual robot that could have been a puppeteer. He was part animatronic, part puppet, and that was our starting point.
When I got to the movie, I was very interested in the concept of artificial intelligence and machine learning and what it would mean in 2030. Artificial intelligence is based on collecting large amounts of data. So Jeff always takes care of Finch. He gets data from there. After all, there is no one else around.
And that’s why we see so many scenes where Finch tells Jeff to imitate him and copy him…
Exactly. He is very mechanical at the beginning and we had to show his growth. We talked to Caleb early on and told him, “Throughout this movie, you’re going to start with a very restrictive range of motion, and as you see Finch, you’re going to learn more and more, and your movements will get better.” become more fluid.” There’s this notion of AI style blending that we thought was important to show here.
So we said to Caleb, “Basically, if you’ve seen Finch do something, you can do it. If you want to scratch your head, you have to do it Tom Hanks-style playing Finch, not just Tom Hanks in any movie, but as Finch.” “. We also filmed Tom Hanks on the move.
Have you planned the Tom Hanks performance?
Yeah, initially we thought that at the end of the movie we would start off with Caleb and the physical robot, and end up with what is essentially Tom Hanks. But we steered away from that because we saw Caleb doing his thing. We tried to shoot in story order as much as possible to help us understand that evolution, but when we saw Caleb perform, we thought, “Okay, this guy embodies this role. He was born for this role.”
He was a great physical actor in the role. We put him in this crazy costume and sometimes he would wear a mask and he couldn’t act with his face, so he had to be physically physical. In the end, he worked a lot with his hands, especially his fingers. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but…
Wait, that’s where you got Jeff’s finger movements?
That! That came from Caleb. It was just him. I loved him so much that I said, “Okay, we’ll use his real hands.” Caleb wore these gloves which were designed to be gentle on the dog so it would connect to something soft instead of a metal robotic arm. And when I saw him doing those things with his hands, I was like, “Okay, we’re going to paint everything except the gloves that he’s wearing, and then we’re going to trace the gloves and create the rest of him in CG.”
Caleb had such subtle interactions – the way he touches Finch and the dog, for example – and we wanted to keep that connection. It made life difficult for us to do that, but I think it was worth it. I feel like he added a bit of warmth and realism to everything we did.
In that sense, what was the evolution of Jeff’s overall visual design?
I came into the project after the production designer and director, Miguel, had already been down that road a long way. They did some research at the University of Oregon, and the idea that runs through the movie is that this robot was made for a dog. So what will the dog react to? It will respond to touch and voice. They won’t read lips. You will see the physicality of the silhouette.
So Finch, as a designer, thinks about the dog. Even the fact that Jeff is tall means that if he walks away from the dog, the dog can see him from afar. For feet, Jeff has something like Crocs. Finch wears Crocs, so it’s like the scent of a glove and the Crocs are part of the design of him. Miguel is an extremely thoughtful director. He doesn’t just jump into things. He thinks carefully. I feel like it was worth it as he is unique and has a well thought out design.
I was really surprised by the amount of expression and emotion we got from a character with minimal facial features. How did you find that balance of bringing out the emotional elements of Jeff while keeping the inhuman appearance of him?
I think it’s a little magic trick in any movie, whether it’s a real actor or a CGI character, to make the audience care about them. I attribute a lot of that to Miguel’s direction and Caleb’s performance. But we’ve worked hard to make it something that’s very human and less mechanical. We wanted him to believe first that he was really there, and also to believe that he was evolving. Once you force yourself to not rely on your usual emotional sources and rely on the rest of your body, you have to work hard and that connection is earned. But you don’t make money all at once. That is over many takes and a lot of care.
It’s tempting to say, “Oh, we’ll just use motion capture for that,” but here’s the thing: It’s not always a one-to-one translation. Caleb gave an emotional performance and we tried to hold on as much as we could, but the scale wasn’t always the same. We tried to keep the hands and head position and other things that read strongly and emotionally to the audience, and everything else there were a lot of choices we had to make. How quickly the movement needs to happen, for example, or whether your silhouette can be read differently with just a few small movements or adjustments of the shoulders.
It’s interesting that you mentioned shoulder movements, because I noticed that Jeff started to “breathe” as the movie progressed, his chest subtly rising and falling…
I’m really glad you noticed breathing, because in the campfire scene we decided to start showing some breathing with Jeff. A robot would not normally do this, but mimics and becomes somewhat human-like, or pretends to be human, in this case.
Was there one scene in particular that was more challenging than others with Jeff?
In the Ship Rock location towards the end, when they park the RV and go on a picnic, that was the hardest part to pinpoint, because what would become of Jeff at that point? Is he Tom Hanks now? And then we realized: “No, he actually made the decision to become something else.” This is reflected in the film’s dialogue, in which he dismisses Finch somewhat in some of the conversations they have. This is where Jeff separates into another entity.
So when you breathe, it’s because you like some aspect of that action. It’s partly because of the dog and partly because of Finch, but it’s actually a hybrid of him. There is also a parka that he finds and puts on. At the end of the movie, he accepts it as part of his identity. He first took it because Finch had it, then he put it away for a while and finally came back, not because he wanted to be Finch, but because he has this new identity drawn from different parts of his experiences.
So those emotional scenes with Tom Hanks were tricky because we had to know where he was at that point in his evolution, and also because he’s playing alongside Tom Hanks. It’s every actor’s dream, but also a nightmare, because how do you act in front of a legend like him? For us, we had to put in a performance that was based on Caleb, but could handle Tom Hanks in those moments.
No pressure or anything…
Law? So I think earlier we can be forgiven for Jeff being more robotic and not really connecting, but in that last scene, you absolutely have to connect with him.
Besides Jeff, what other elements of the film were you proud of?
Well I want to give credit to Legacy Effects who made a physical version of Jeff that we could all pull and push and work with. And there was this little robot, Dewey, who was a real robot that worked. You can go online and find robots that work, but Dewey also had to have a personality. He had a cruder AI that basically consisted of five or six puppeteers, so he’s as smart as five or six of us. By comparison, Jeff is as smart as 60 or 70 of us by the end of the movie. I am very proud of the work they did.
We also had to be very judicious and smart about how we use our resources. This is actually a drama where we’re allowed this big CGI performance, so it’s not a giant Marvel movie. We had to think about where to invest the money. Shooting on location in this beautiful New Mexico desert definitely helped. We didn’t bluescreen unless we really had to, and we took that VR on the road like it was a road trip movie. We tried to treat this like a big buddy trip movie and I hope it felt that way.
Directed by Miguel Sapochnik, Finch is now available on the Apple TV+ streaming service.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn