Case Study 02: "L3.0"
"L3.0" - ISART Digital
"L3.0" (Making of 2014)
This short (5 minutes) follows the story of a child-like robot in a port apocalyptic Paris. The reason I have chosen this short is because its main character is a robot, and it will be interesting to analyze how they have animated this non-humanoid character.
I have always really been of the opinion that robots are mechanical and therefore should usually remain so in their movements. This animation though uses some interesting methods of blending human and robotic movements.
There is a scene at 0:49 seconds where the character is playing Monopoly with a teddy bear. We can see its whole body and under the table its legs are swinging off the end of the chair much like a child's would. I would normally perceive this as maybe the character has weak hinges at the knees but this character performance is clearly trying to mimic a child and it works because of the design of the character itself. Usually a robotic character would move very stiff but this robot seems to have a minimal amount of follow through which works. In the image below, the character and their child like proportions, and if you've watched this animation then you know that the characters performance also goes with it. I suppose every non-humanoid character can be characterized by human standards.
The character also has eyebrows, which I don't think I should go into my thoughts on why someone has given it eyebrows. They do helps define the characters facial emotions since it doesn't have skin which obviously makes it more difficult to convey complex emotions to a human audience, maybe a robot audience would experience this better? Anyway, the maker of this robot (or the character designers) were probably thinking about how they could help convey the emotions that they wanted in this animation without making the character too human. I should also point out the massive eyes...just like a child's. This is a quick design trick to help them portray emotions easier though its eyes.
I would say that they have been really successful in portraying the characters performance as I felt like the character knew what emotions were but perhaps still didn't understand them and (based on the narrative) couldn't understand how living creatures worked and I definitely got that feeling by watching the characters performance. It looked inquisitive.
My conclusion on this animation is that you can definitely add human qualities to a robotic character. There are many animations that tackle robotic animations but this is one of the better ones I have seen. Some have made the robot move exactly like a human which works in the context of the story and some move exactly how we think a robot should move, which again, works great for particular narratives. I have noticed that when robots are being used as guards or are intended to be evil then their movements are more robotic which helps distance them from the audience so the audience know that its not a character to get attached to. On the other side of things, good robot characters tend to be given more human qualities to help the audience relate to them and to get emotionally attached.
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