>>ERIC FIEDLER: Hey, I'm Eric Fiedler
and I was on the Animatronic crew
at Stan Winston Studios
for AI: Artificial Intelligence, the movie.
I remember this. This is a blast.
All right.
This is the Insecurity Guard.
That sculpture was a likeness of Stan himself,
actually.
It was primarily
a kinetic rod puppet
 
where all the joints articulated like normal human joints.
It had a cable-operated neck.
The head was silicone.
The armature for the body was
aluminum rods, bearings,
torsion springs,
all nicely machined.
And then we put vacuform shells over the
top of it,
and had little posts that would stand out
to keep them stood away
from the actual mechanical armature inside.
The legs were on rods. This is a completely
kinetic puppet
that we built,
except the head was RC and the neck was cable.
That's fantastic.
Took about six people to operate this effect.
One on the neck;
one, at least one, on the head;
one on the main body part;
two on the arms;
and one on the legs.
You count that. [Laughs]
So here we are on this actual set.
Now you see they covered it with dirt.
Down in this pit, we were underneath the set.
We could just stand in it
at the top. At the top of this hill,
and there was myself,
Mike Elizalde,
Rob Derry, and Bob Mano for sure were down
there.
And we were watching either on monitors,
we had headsets on, and
I was running the body.
I remember I had a
five gallon bucket on my head to keep the
dirt from falling on me.
And a pair of heads up goggles so I could
see what the camera was seeing.
As we climbed up, we got rained on
in dirt, and they had
actually buried us alive in there. They
had to cover the trap door,
and cover all the slots.
I think we took the head off just to protect
it while we were rehearsing in the real set.
This was at the robot dump. Basically all
the robots would go to this place
to find spare parts.
Put themselves together.
It was a huge set.
It was down
by the Queen Mary, where they kept the Spruce Goose in the Spruce Goose dome.
Oh, there's the running rig. Now this is
cool too. The Insecurity Guard
running away from -
you can see the guy in the back, that's Scott Millenbaugh
has the teeter totter. He's giving the
kind of the bounce to it.
There it is.
That's awesome.
Very nice.
And then they push us on a cart,
and then we dollied with the camera.
And here we're rehearsing, getting warmed
up,
you get the cadence going before we start
pushing the cart, and then they say, and action.
And then we'd all take off on the cart.
Here it goes.
And he looks back like, oh my God, what am
I running from?
This is awesome.
>>SPEAKER 2: And, run.
>>ERIC FIEDLER: Hey, this is Eric Fiedler
once again.
I hope you enjoyed this peek behind the scenes of AI: Artificial Intelligence
as much as I enjoyed working on it.
