You're gonna want to punch that full screen button...
Otis is vintage, steady, slightly old fashioned. Feels like a kind maintenance robot who's been part of the crew forever. Gentle and grandfatherly with excellent (old style lead-acid) battery life.
MEET OTIS!
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| Otis, Mark's Favorite Bot |
RECORDING THE SONG
Mark King Radio recording superstars Rob and Theo basically dropped an almost done live song track (after about 26 tries). We overdubbed a few things, Rob worked his magic massaging the drum track and then it took a couple of weeks of mixing to create the final music. Regret is something you can end up with when you commit to effects too early in the recording process. I was trying hard to control and capture an extremely vigorous and excited live recording session with lots of experimenting - in the process I leaned-in a little too hard on one of the bus comps. This track has too much bus compression recorded in it (hind sight is always crystal clear). This one special live performance sounded too good to not use it, dealing with all that compression recorded on the track made it much harder to mix. While working on the mix I took the opportunity to do a lot of EQP A-B testing and experimenting, the boost & cut bass-trick really brought out the bottom end on the synthesizers.
HUMANS AND ROBOTS
Working around all these robots was an eye opener too. In spite of having state of the art handling we discovered that the human race is not ready to mix with robots in day to day life. A single wrong move meant one of these "very strong" guys (or girls?) might accidentally whack you hard enough to break a rib, arm or leg easily. Losing WIFI connections was a duck and cover signal because the AI controlling them relied on wireless for its connection. Heavy storms here knocked out our satellite internet and that means LOOKOUT, Robots gone wild.
Training the robots was A LOT of work and took a lot more time than we expected. We discovered that most modern robots are simply not compatible with water in any shape or form. We had planned on a lot more water scenes but after robots ignored their "training" and marched straight into the pond the handlers said we had to pivot to different themes.
We borrowed the robots so we can't complain but there were some problems along the way.
Ants got into the tool box making repairs challenging on more than one occasion (wrenches and socket set waiting to bite back). Somebody thought they could store Heath candy bars in the toolbox to get them away from the raccoons and opossums - nobody told them about the little red fire ants which are plentiful here in Melbourne, Florida.
SINKING THE POND PRINCESS
We originally had big plans for the "Pond Princess" which we found on Craigs List for free (but we had to haul it). Hauling and crane lifting fees ate up all the savings, and then we found out it barely floated. Mary King (Goddess of fire and explosions) supervised rigging pyro on the boat but it went off prematurely and down she went (the boat not Mary King :-). Then the handlers told us no more robots and water.... oh well. Back to the Story Board. Anybody want a boat?
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| Raising the Princess after she sunk |
Meet AL the gentle giant of the robots (who definitely has a future in car sales ;-)
His LED panel-face was so expressive, he's like a walking cartoon and really nice.
Whenever AL leapt into action everyone on set laughed uncontrollably. Everybody wanted a selfie with AL. At over 7.5 feet in height he makes his presence known, he was always smiling. Rotoscoping him into his video scene was a lot harder than we anticipated but we could not afford to rent a real Lambo even for a day.
Florida weather was hard on everyone shooting outdoors, the humans (locals from the tech college) were all very tolerant of the heat 93+F and humidity 88%+ but the robots were often sad and went on strike (quit working lol).
WIFI OUTDOORS
Another challenge was getting WIFI distributed into the great outdoors. I rigged this Starlink node/expander on a stand to beam the signal outside to our production area. The connection only choked when we had heavy rainfall and torrential downpours. Dozens of cellphones and A LOT of robots shared our unified WIFI network connection without any problems, STARLINK satellite-internet rocks, we could not have accomplished everything without it!
This video would not have been possible without Da Vinci Resolve Studio editing software from Blackmagic Design. This is where we rotoscoped images and using eight video tracks were able to pull all the pieces together, surprisingly quickly. Keeping shots carefully logged and tagged made it easy to fit the pieces together. Having the Fairlight integrated audio editing boosted speed and productivity. Volume changes and EQ function with familiar DAW controls. Starting the video production with a tight audio mix-track from Apple Logic made the video editing go quickly but having integrated DAW controls which function like contemporary counterparts is genius.
COST
This was not a low-budget production, this was a NO BUDGET production powered by Gorilla film-making techniques. Still, there were expenses nobody planned on (somebody was supposed to do that planning?) - there was no budget for a budget planner.
I wrote the lyrics of the song to tell a vivid story that would be EASY to edit to. Recording the song was an 11 hour day plus another day of overdubbing, then the two weeks of mixing struggles trying to get it right. I added explosions right in the Resolve video editor to keep timing tight between image and sound.
U-Haul rentals for transporting the robots were not cheap so we were fortunate that they did not have to travel very far. The crane was $1,000 dollars a day and that was the low priced rental. We got it done with just two, one-day rentals.
Weather is always a challenge here in Florida and summer time heat and humidity (93+ degrees F and 88% humidity) did not let us down. We were popping "Electrolytes" like candy.
Fortunately there were only a few minor injuries to robots (arm or leg falling off here and there), no humans were hurt seriously.
I've always loved making videos and today we have such amazing tools for telling a story. 30 years ago I built a custom Radius Mac Clone with a NuBus Targa video board and an external 16GB raid drive setup. That whole rig cost over $14,000, it was very finicky requiring constant tweaking and very careful file management, not too mention it was not HD (but it did do broadcast quality, uncompressed component video, like a Betacam without rewind or fast forward time). Today I'm using editing on a tiny M4 Mac mini with 32GB of DRAM and a 2TB internal SSD plus another external 1TB SSD (around $1200 new off the shelf model for the Mac mini). I'm using the paid version of Da Vinci Studio ($300 one time purchase) for editing and it's like a dream come true.
Thanks to everyone, we could not have done this without you.