Unit 6. Practice as a Laboratory Part 3: Animatronic

THE ANIMATRONIC PROJECT:

MAKING A BLINKING EYE

by Adam Paloczy

The last project of Unit 6 was, to produce either a single eye or pair of eyes with blinking eyelids and optional swivelling motion. Eyes can have hard or soft eyelids. The eyes need to be set with a face/context so are not just free-standing eyes.

The eyes will be servo-operated with a programmable chip such as an Arduino with coded ‘performance’.

Wow, what an exciting task! I saw this kind of moving eyes before, and I thought straight that I don't want to place them just into "something". I have to make these eyes for something more interesting than just an item, maybe an old toy from the local charity shop. I saw this kind of animatronic eyes before, they can be quiet robotic, it would be a good idea to make some kind of robot head with blinking and moving eyes I thought.

Before we would start anything I have watched a BBC documentary film 'Mechanical Marvels Clockwork Dreams'. In this film Professor Simon Schaffer tells the story of automata, extraordinary clockwork machines designed hundreds of years ago to mimic and recreate life. Moreover, he said that the human body works like a machine and the animatronics machines are copying how the body works. It was fascinating! After the film, I did some research on how the human eye actually moves.

Well, this looks like just an animatronic eye mechanism. In real life, the muscles are responsible for movements instead of wires and servos. But the structure is the same. Fantastic!

Another movie was Alice (1988) on my watchlist, dark fantasy film was written and directed by Jan Švankmajer. It is a loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll's first Alice book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The film combines live action with stop motion animation and is distinguished by its dark and uncompromising production design.

I think the best word to describe this production is 'sick'. In a good way. It was very disturbing, and I have no clue who was the target audience.

https://youtu.be/NcPA0jvp9IQ

https://youtu.be/ME29wn4PW68

I started to think of the robot design before the first meeting with our project technicians William Waterhouse and Grzesiek Sedek.

The first robot what came into my head was Yul Brinner from the original Westworld.

I was keep thinking and researching. I wanted to make my own design. Something with a human face, with lots of wires and other mechanical parts.

After more research, I decided to build a female android and I started to draw my own design.

I decided to use a foam mannequin head, it gave the base of the android head model.

For the face, I made facial life casting with alginate, and plaster bandages. When I had the negative mould, I casted into silicon rubber.

Poor Nikki could not really talk for a while...

One of the negative moulds

The silicon casts

Well, I wanted to do some kitbashing and use old electrical elements for this model, but simply I could not get anything around my area due to the second Covid-19 lockdown in the UK. I decided to make some mould from some of my old Star Wars spaceship models instead and use they parts.

When I had all of the casts, I started to make the sculpture.

I have used this foam head, first things first I cut off the face and I started to install the rubber facial features. The previous project inspired me to do this way, So I placed the silicon pieces just like prosthetics.

I wanted to follow the human anatomy, therefore placed some pipes just like the muscles on the neck.

I Used my casted elements, moreover I bought bought some items from my local hardware store,

ANATOMY

I designed the had with enough space for the animatronic eye. On this point, I stopped working on the sculpture, and in the meantime, we started to build the Arduino circuit at the Uni. I never done anything like that before, It was a bit challenging.

With the coding, Grzesiek Sedek helped me at the studio. He was very helpful.

After that, I wanted to make the eye mechanism straight due to the fact that we had a very short time for this project. I asked for help from William Waterhouse who came into the studio and showed us several hand made eye mechanism from wires. That was a big help to actually see it in real life how are these mechanisms work.

After this, I watched back the videos what I previously made from Williams models than I watched more and more on Youtube. Then I started to think trough how actually I will build this blinking eye mechanism. I am a very visual person, so I started to draw my plans. At this point a wanted to make a blinking and horizontal moving eye mechanism, later on, I decided to make a blinking only eye.