Digital Domain completed more than 500 shots of the robots, including 300 of Sonny (above left). Photo Credit: Digital Domain. All I, Robot images ™ and © 2004 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.

Whenever one thinks about robots in the movies, the images that come to mind are flashes from Metropolis, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, Star Wars, Terminator or RoboCop. Dozens of other movies have featured robots, but the design of these machines never left a lasting impression in the viewer’s mind: The Black Hole, Lost in Space, Red Planet, A.I. Artificial Intelligence… The task of adapting The Robots, Isaac Asimov’s classic series of short stories, was thus a daunting one, as robots would this time be the focus of the whole film. Set in the year 2035, I, Robot follows an investigation by Detective Spooner (Will Smith) of the murder of a scientist. His only suspect is a robot named Sonny. Although built-in security programs make it theoretically impossible for robots to do harm to a human, could the impossible have happened?

Patrick Tatopoulos, production designer and robot creator, was inspired by the transparency of his assistant’s iMac while designing Sonny and his fellow robots.

Tapped with the task of designing Sonny and friends was French production designer and robot creator Patrick Tatopoulos, who had previously worked with director Alex Proyas on Dark City: “We knew that they should look sleek, attractive and harmless and that they had to blend in everybody’s home. We couldn’t have a Terminator standing at the stove in a kitchen! After trying a lot of different approaches, I nailed the concept when I noticed my assistant’s transparent iMac. It just hit me: everywhere, from architecture to consumer products, the current trend in design is transparency. So, I came up with the idea of combining half-transparent shells and a thinly mechanized armature. Alex bought the concept right away. The soft features of the face were inspired by the traditional imagery of angels.”

To put robots on screen, overall visual effects supervisor John Nelson had three options: animatronics (the solution of choice for Terminator and A.I.), a man in a suit (RoboCop, Bicentennial Man) or CG animation (Red Planet, Tomb Raider). The thin bodies of Tatopoulos’ robots excluded the use of a man in a suit, while the range of movements that the characters had to be able to achieve was far beyond the realm of what animatronics could do. Nelson thus decided that the robots would be created via computer animation, a task awarded to Digital Domain and in-house visual effects supervisor Erik Nash. “We did more than 500 shots in 14 months, including about 460 shots featuring CG robots,” recalls Andy Jones, DD’s animation supervisor. “On Sonny alone, we had almost 300 shots!”