All of these features come together to make a film of incredible emotional depth. This is supported by the writing of Goodyear, creating a dog that was probably more intelligent than the norm. There is a bond both in the good and the bad which feels genuine, and this bond comes from performances that immediately feel right. Tom and Caleb work effortlessly together in this odd mentor/mentee, creation/creator, father/son, dynamic. This means the film has nowhere to hide, but because of this, they make every moment work. For all intents and purposes, there are only ever three characters in the movie. Where this film works, the best is in its intimacy. The fact that there is not stemmed from a lot of work from a lot of people across the runtime of the whole movie coming together. There would generally be extreme tonal whiplash in films like this. So even when you are having humorous moments between Finch and Jeff, this undercurrent is always here. Everything in this film is a last-ditch effort on his part to provide a future for Dog. A sorrow not from the fact that literally, everyone else is dead, but that it is apparent very early on that Finch is dying. There is a real odd tone with this film in that there is this deep undercurrent of sadness underneath everything. Tom Hanks gives a great performance of someone seeing the time drawing to a close. So they all have to make a trip across the country to safety. It will last for over 40 days, 40 days too long. Things were going well until a supercell arrived. He has one mission, to finish building Jeff (Caleb Landry Jones) an android, so there would be someone to look after Goodyear/Dog (Seamus) after he was gone. One of the last people alive is Finch (Tom Hanks), who has survived in St Louis in the basement of the robotics company he worked at. This baked the planet, killing nearly all the plants, animals, and of course, humans. So to set the scene, in the not-so-distant future, a solar flare wiped away Earth’s ozone layer exposing the globe to a massive surge of radiation and also setting off a global EMP. Indeed, Tom Hanks is famous for playing a similar situation in Cast Away, so you knew it had to be an exciting premise to get him back into this realm. Fighting against the elements and even time to survive. Why they were left alone could be from them being forgotten, marooned, left behind, well, anything. The result was a 20+ page animation bible which defined what they wanted from the character’s evolution in each part of the movie and how much of Finch’s body language it had assimilated by then.įor their work on Jeff, the MPC team received the VES Award for Outstanding Animated Character.One genre I have always found interesting is that of the lone survivor. Inspired by machine learning work and SIGGRAPH research, the MPC team collaborated with the filmmakers to make an animation plan for the progression of Jeff’s AI. All the while, matching the incredible performance of Caleb Landry Jones (the actor who played Jeff), and refining it with an appropriate level of robotic feel, always making sure Jeff feels like a 200kg robot rather than a 70kg human. The robot would be constantly recording Finch’s motions and behaviours and abstracting his own from them – from very robotic, uncoordinated, and ungainly at the beginning through to being significantly more controlled, and finally ending up with very human-like nuances to his movement, such as subtle eye saccades during pauses for thought to mimicking Finch’s breathing motions as his behaviour takes a final turn to becoming very human. The brief from the filmmakers was to make sure we always had awareness of what stage we were at in any given scene or shot along Jeff’s development arc.
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