With three months to
go until its premiere, it is hard to predict how audiences will react to BB-8. Will
he join R2-D2 and C-3PO in the pantheon of great Star Wars characters? Judging
by the reaction he got from fans when he first rolled onto the stage at Star
Wars Celebration back in April I would say yes.
BB-8 started life as
a sketch Abrams drew of "two circles atop one another, with a tiny dot for
an eye". From there it was up to senior animatronic designer Joshua Lee to
bring the character to life.
"I made a little
puppet version," says Lee, "because there was a lot of talk about how
this thing could move and whether it needed extra parts, like an extending
neck, to allow for greater movement. I had this feeling that it didn’t need
anything else, and so to prove that, I built, in half a day, a little
polystyrene puppet with the main movements. All the head movements and the ball
rolling around, and handles on the back. I remember as soon as I picked that
up, it was just so expressive. You could see that there weren’t any other fancy
movements needed, that there’s so much expression and character actually in the
shapes and in the way the head sort of arched over the sphere. Neal was working
in a different office at the time, in another part of the studio, and I
excitedly ran down and showed him this thing. We both thought, that’s it,
there’s really something there, and a puppet version would be one way of
achieving it on set."
Ultimately, the
success of the character comes down to who is playing it. Kenny Baker perfectly
infused R2-D2 with fun and irreverence, while Anthony Daniels portrayal of the
scared and polite C-3PO offered fans something completely different. As for
BB-8 it will come down to puppeteers Dave Chapman and Brian Herring to give the
otherwise technical achievement a "soul".
"We had, I
guess, two weeks to ourselves on an empty soundstage, just figuring out how
this character moved,” Chapman says. “[Head of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens creature shop] Neal Scanlan
came in and advised and directed us. We did camera tests and recorded it for
ourselves, and just found every parameter of this character’s movement."
The personality of a droid — and discovering it — is something that audiences
usually don’t even think about. But that was Chapman and Herring’s job, and it
meant not only figuring out how to manipulate BB-8 the puppet to convey joy,
sadness, curiosity, and fear, but defining how BB-8 the character would convey
those emotions consistently. "BB-8 can cock his head over and look away,
he can double take, he can look scared, he can look angry," says Herring. "We
managed to find a whole vocabulary of movement for him, if you will. We worked
out a whole bunch of stuff. What would he do if you turned him off? What
happens to his head if you power him down? Does he go down stairs? Does he go
up stairs?"
As with any non-human
practical character, several versions had to be built for a variety of
situations.
This model of
function would then serve as a springboard for a small army of BB-8s, all with
their own specialty, designed by Lee and Matthew Denton, the electronic design
and development supervisor. There was the "wiggler," which was
static, but could twist and turn on the spot and was used for close-ups. There
were two trike versions, which had stabilizer wheels, allowing them to be
driven by remote control without a puppeteer in the shot. There was a version
that could be picked up by actors and controlled via remote for specific
reactions and movements. There was the “bowling ball” version, which could
literally be thrown into a shot and never fall down (like a Weeble toy).
Finally, there was the rod-puppet version, which was operated by Chapman and
Herring — one controlling the head, adding nuance and attitude, and the
other the body — who would then be digitally erased. It was this version
that would be key and able to act on set. Lee and Denton did all their engineering
without seeing the script, though they were told of certain BB-8-has-to-do-this
benchmarks they needed to hit. It all worked out in
the end.
Star Wars: The Force
Awakens opens on December 18.
Source - Star Wars
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