Gustav Hoegen: 2012 Animatronic Showreel
All we can say is Wow! One thing to consider, are some of the benefits of using animatronics vs. cg. What do you think?
Here, we agreed that an animatronic character, if done well, would be a better costar for an actor. The actor has the ability to react in a realistic fashion to a character that he sees right in front of him because the character has volume, one can make eye contact therefore creating a better connection. There are ways around this, but its usually up to the vision of the director to make sure that the connection is believable.
In CG, the character is added in post, sometimes the reaction of an actor is not as believable. We wonder however, if it's cost and time effective, other than that we believe this work to be top notch.
Nice job Gustav. Keep firing it up!
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When I post demo reels on my blog, my students will often have questions for the artist, and as their instructor, in order to make the post a meaningful learning experience, I'll try to make contact with an artist, and will share questions that arose during a class viewing of the reel.
ReplyDeleteThis week, we had these questions for Gustav, and we were lucky enough to have him answer them. Thank you for making our learning experience more rich. The questions are below, we hope they give you insight into what its like being an animatronic artist.
1) Where do you do most of your work?
2) What is your background and how did this start for you?
3) We see puppeteers working the creatures, are these the engineers of the animatronic as well?
4) Where do you get the parts to create such custom rigs?
5) How long does it take on average to make a head rig?
His answers....
1: Most of my work is done in the various film studio's in London
2: I moved to England from Holland when I was 19 to pursue a career in movie effects, something I wanted since an early age.
I started of doing design modelmaking
and then specialised in Animatronics.
3: Yes in some clips the puppeteer is also the maker.
The guy operating the Vogon head is a professional puppeteer, he doesn't build Animatronics.
It's often a good thing to get a professional puppeteer to operate the creatures, they give it that little bit extra.
I puppeteer all my own mechs though.
4: I build all the parts from scratch apart from the servo motors and bearings.
I still hand machine all my parts.
That depends on the deadline or the complexity.
The human head took me 15 days to build.
The Engineers head took 5 weeks to build.
I'd say 4 to 5 weeks is enough time to build a fully Animatronic head.