(piano theme)

(electronic music)

Okay, so we're just gonna plot this out, full scale,

so the guys can start building the mechanical extensions

for the arms.

We still have some more design to do,

but this just gives them a jumpstart on the basic scale.

Once that design silhouette was set in stone,

Wired loved it, YouTube loved it,

we loved it, Legacy loved it,

it was time to go into the prototyping phase.

And what we like to call the prototyping phase

in the creature effects industry,

and this started way back on Alien,

is we'd do a garbage bag test.

You don't literally have to use garbage bags.

It just means bringing together the idea

in three dimensions as quickly as possible,

using cheap materials, just to see that it's possible.

That it creates the silhouette you're looking for,

that the underlying mechanical approach is a sound one.

When you look at what our restrictions are,

because we knew that we wanted it to be human-operated,

as it's cosplay, we didn't wanna have to rely

on film trickery, rod puppetry.

We couldn't get into hydraulics or pneumatics.

It had to be lightweight and movable

and so that limits what you can do in a traditional suit.

So in my research, and literally, at 1:30 at night,

I came upon a little organization,

a little group of guys in Japan called Skeletonics.

That had built a pretty amazing, you know,

lightweight, stick-puppet character.

But what I was really amazed with was how mobiles it was.

And what they embraced was a panograph technology.

It's basically a slave mechanism that they were using.

They have a very good idea.

Geometrically moving your arm

to actuate the big arm up there.

And it was very, you know, promising that we could do,

make it better, performance-wise.

What's the range of movement?

Where do things start to crash?

Lots of questions, because it's not

a technology that we've used before.

So we had to look at their, there wasn't a lot of footage,

so we had to reverse-engineer, try and figure out

what they probably spent months developing and perfecting.

In a matter of days.

We all, including me, questioned this many times,

along the way, but that's also part of the fun of it.

You're like, looking at it, going:

is this really, really, really gonna work in the real world?

We've got this thing that worked on a video tape,

but it's not exactly what we're after.

Are we gonna be able to make it better?

Or different enough that it's gonna work for our purposes?

So, Jim Kundig and Pete Clarke got together and they built

the first prototypes in a matter of two or three days.

They put together a working prototype that translated

the suit-performer's arm movement, up two or three feet.

We then could determine how far we wanted to go.

If you boil it all down, it's what we call

a parallelogram mechanism.

Basically, what it results in is the creature's forearm

is always, no matter where it is in space,

is always parallel to Bruce's forearm.

The first parallelogram is his bicep

to the creature's bicep.

So when he goes like this,

the creature goes like that.

And that parallelogram is on a pivot,

so he, when he swings his arm like this,

the creature's bicep does that, too.

And then the second and third parallelograms

are at his elbow, so when he does this,

the creature does this, and then the third one

is this move.

And it's challenging, because you get to these points where,

like, he'll move his arm just a little bit too far,

and then the whole thing is kind of, like,

frozen in one spot, and he has to learn

how to get himself back out of it.

Each suit has its own unique challenges.

And stuff like this, the robot suit's more rigid.

You've gotta an exoskeleton that you're limited to move

within, so there's gonna be a lot more lock-off points.

In a more fabric-driven suit, you can stretch more.

This is gonna have hard points

that I'm gonna lock against.

There's certain things in the geometry

that you always find out are kind of, you can't throw out.

You can't cheat, you can't cut a corner.

One, in this case, was having a pivot point

in line with his shoulder.

Because if you don't have it in line with his shoulder,

and he tries to move, you're basically then moving,

like, three axis points and things start to bind up,

and bad things start to happen.

(overlapping chatter)

Relax.

It's not easy.

Better than it was?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah, we're not looking at easy.

The weight is tremendous, and it's all above my shoulders.

It's anchored to my shoulders, but it's very top-heavy.

And then I'm on stilts.

Well, from the very get-go, having a guy up on stilts

and trying to keep the suit as light as possible,

and be at that scale, was really the main challenge.

Having someone, you know, it's not like you're on set,

where you get to cut and nobody sees what's happening

after the cut and the guy can take a rest

and everybody can hold his arms up.

So this performer has to be in a crowd,

working live, and having everybody see

something that could go wrong.

You know, it's just refining the frameworks, more.

You know, kind of, refining the materials.

You know, refining the performance, even.

You know, it's all a big package,

and you just have to balance it all out.

It's kind of like wrapping a Buraku around you,

instead of, you know, being outside of it

and performing with it.

So the trick then was, you have human arms

manipulating giant arms right above it.

What do we do with the human arms?

We could either, you know, minimize them,

a la Lion King, or a stage show where you just dress them

in black and you just ignore it, or we embrace it as part

of the character and dress it out like robotic arms.

And that seemed the most logical way to go.

So we dressed his arms in as small as we could get,

but extra appendages.

So, the end result is this four-armed robot,

with synchronized movement, that's really just stunning.

And it's such a cliche to say it's nothing

that we've seen before, nothing that we've done before,

but it's true; we've never done that before.

It's one-to-one movement.

And true mirroring, which was remarkable.

It was really fun to watch, and for Bruce,

really fun to operate.

(electronic music)