Concept and creative process
Steve Cope recalls the making of the 'Robot Wars' trail: "As a director I’ve always loved using very organic effects, by that I mean making things look very real. There was talk originally of a CGI ‘Terminator’ based execution for this idea, liquid metal under the skin type of thing. It could have been a neat way to go, but because we didn’t have the budget for CGI, I thought we could still get great results by keeping the effects in-camera. At the time I loved the pop promos of director Chris Cunningham, especially Aphex Twin 'Come to Daddy', which gave me the idea of using compressed air to literally make our actor’s skin ‘crawl’. We got the actor to deliver the dialogue straight to the camera and then in the same set-up or framing I got him to wear a pair of protective goggles while someone from the BBC Special Effects Department blew compressed air onto parts of his face to make his skin move and crawl. We shot these skin crawling elements and then finally filmed the actor shaking his head dramatically, turning over the camera one frame at a time using 1 second exposures, (similar to the way you would film light trails on cars driving down a road at night). The idea of the head blurring effect came from the film ‘Jacob’s Ladder' by Adrian Lyne, with Tim Robbins as the actor. When these frames were played back at 24 frames per second it created these terrifyingly animated head blurs, which we edited and stitched back into the footage of our actor. This created the impression of a humanoid robot losing control. We filmed in a small animation studio in Battersea where Clive Norman, the Director of Photography, had an old Mitchell 35mm cine camera, which belonged to his Dad who was also a cinematographer. This was great for me because shooting on 35mm was quite extravagant at that time as most trailers were usually shot on super 16mm film or video. It meant that we could achieve a much more cinematic look to the promo."
Producer - Richard Gort.
Director of Photography - Clive Norman.
Post-Production Effects - Steve Cope.
Directors - Steve Cope and Andy Poyadgi.
Winner of Design & Art Direction Wood Pencil for Promotions 2000
Winner of USA Promax & BDA Gold Award 2000.
Winner of International Monitor Awards 2000 for Best Special Effects.