Welcome to DennisDupuis.com

Hi, this is Dennis Dupuis, creator of RoboPrize (tm)

It's been 16 years now, and I am still searching for
an "autonomous android" capable of taking on a
remotely controlled, heavy-weight BattleBot (tm)
and winning in the ring.

To speed things up, the original RoboPrize (tm)
of $5 Million has been increased to $16 Million!
(and it will continue to go up by $1M every year)

The prize money will be funded by a PayPerView 
event, and the prize money is guaranteed
to be paid to the winning team (and even
the losing team) by a pre-fight contract. 

This site will be redirected to our new RoboPrize
site in the near future, with updates and new info
on how your team can enter your android to win.  


          And, be sure to see the movie 

       R E A L   S T E E L 
 

DreamWorks’ Real Steel is loosely based on the short story “Steel” by Richard Matheson, which was previously adapted by the author into a 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone. Last September, Spinoff Online was invited to the film’s Detroit set, where we met director Shawn Levy and star Hugh Jackman, who discussed how their vision of the near-future world off robot boxing differs from the source material.

“In Matheson’s short story, boxing’s been banned because there’s been a series of people being killed,” Jackman explained. “What Shawn, I think, smartly did is not base it on tha,t but more that it’s just evolved. There’s still boxing. There’s actually no money in it.”

Levy elaborated on that evolution from human boxing to the mech mayhem seen in the movie.

“The world is 2020. The world is recognizably linked to the one we’re sitting in right now, but this one sport has evolved,” Levy said. “With the rise of UFC, mixed martial arts, the decline of conventional boxing, the thirst for spectacle, for carnage, we’re already seeing the effect of it.”

He also noted how the real world is subtlety embracing robots as substitutes for humans. When Levy’s Night at the Museum 2 was coming out, so too was Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. “The entire ad campaign … they literally were skipping the humans. I said, ‘I can’t believe it. They literally don’t give a shit about people any more,’ and clearly it worked. Neither did the audience,” Levy mused.

The world of Real Steel has taken that notion to the next level. “Where this movie goes … it’s people’s desire for spectacle, unhindered by the frailty of the human body, has given rise to this sport,” Levy explained. “We’re building machines so we can pay our money and watch them completely wail on each other.”

In a nod to Matheson’s 1956 short story, and The Twilight Zone episode, the earliest bots in the league are vaguely human-looking. Over the years, the robot designs become bigger, more powerful. “The desire for an anthropomorphized fighter waned,” Levy said. “The desire for a demolition derby with operatic scale violence grew.”

Jackman’s character Charlie Kenton was a boxer struggling to make his name during the sport’s decline. He retires with a shabby record of 24 and 19. “But as Evangeline Lilly says in the movie, ’24 and 19, but every fight a knockout,’” Levy said. “With this guy a fight wasn’t over until someone was on the mat. [Charlie] has no illusions about what he is, but he’s a scrapper and he’s gonna keep swinging until he can’t swing no more.”

And while Charlie and the sport of boxing were going down, tech geniuses like Tak Mashido (played by Karl Yune) were on the rise in the new pugilistic order of the World Robot Boxing (WRB) league.

“Tak Mashido is the god of this WRB,” Levy said. “When he was 22, he was like this wunderkind out of Japan who designed an early league robot named Noisy Boy. [After a few years] he’s a millionaire artist-designer. He both designed the aesthetics of the robot and the program. Crazy, crazy genius.”

And if you’re not a crazy, crazy genius, you can still get into the robot fight game.

“There are two tiers in the movie: underworld and league,” Levy said. “WRB … is the bigs. It is NASCAR, NBA, global, corporate-sponsored, big money. But that ain’t the world [Charlie] lives in. He lives in the underworld, which is county fairs, old, abandoned car factories, the post-industrial detritus of the American landscape. No rules. Fight until one robot is done moving.”

And Charlie is far from a genius.

“He’s limited. He does what he has to do. There’s no passion for him involved. He knows what he needs to know in terms of being able to buy a good robot — how much it’s worth, how to operate it,” Jackman elaborated. “But the brains in terms of robotics is [Lilly's character] Bailey, who is sort of his partner. She’s someone who genuinely understands and knows this stuff.”

Charlie and Bailey are barely scraping by in the underworld of boxing, and it takes all of the fighter’s resourcefulness to keep the wolves from his door. Levy points out that the feeling of desperation in the leading man comes directly from Matheson’s story.

“Charlie is desperate,” Jackman said. “He is down and out. He’s also quite a charming character in his way and he’s got a little bit of the huckster to him. He’s got debts here and there, this person, that person, and he’s conning this guy and conning that.”

Needless to say, when two strangers show up on his door, he assumes the worst. “What I presume are guys coming to get money that I owe from them,” the actor said, “and I actually get in a fight with one of the guys, turns out to be these guys appointed by the courts. [They're] coming to tell me that … I have to turn up in court to deal with custody.”

Custody, that is, of a 10-year-old son he abandoned at birth. Max, played by newcomer Dakota Goyo, has no place in Charlie’s shady existence. But as you might expect, they begin to find a new start.

“They’re kind of forced together,” Jackman said. “Neither of them really want to be with each other. They’re two damaged souls and, together, by luck really they find this junk-yard robot, literally in the garbage.”

That robot is Atom, the lead mech in Real Steel. Although he’s made of steel, he’s the heart of the humanistic tale that Levy set out to tell.

“The boy, the father and the machine are cast-offs. They’re forgotten,” the director said. “They’re either on the margins of society or they’re literally – this robot they find buried in the earth of a junkyard. So you have this trinity of forgotten beings, who having met each other, come back to life.”

And while Atom is a character in the movie, Levy cautioned that these robots aren’t intelligent, artificially or otherwise.

“Robots don’t have personality,” he said. They all have very specific individuated aesthetics. They don’t talk, they don’t express feelings. They are controlled by humans. They do not walk around in the street. It’s not A.I. They are not servants or butlers. It’s not a mechanized society.”

Still, Max, and most likely the audience, will sense something more to Atom as he helps Charlie to build his comeback around the robot.

“Where the movie, I think, hopefully gets some of its magic … it’s that this robot Atom, who is a piece of shit, who is obsolete compared to most of the other robots in the league, [yet] there’s something about this robot that the kid believes,” Levy said. “It’s like, ‘Are you in there? Is there something in there?’ The robot doesn’t talk, doesn’t move, doesn’t express anything, but when you meet him, when you see his face, you understand it. There’s something in this bot, in the design of this bot, that hints at maybe something resembling a soul.”

But Atom will face some formidable opponents in the ring. Levy told us they designed some 20 robots for the fight scenes in Real Steel. The reigning champ of the WRB is Zeus, who was groomed for the belt by Farrah Lenkova (played by Olga Fonda).

“She’s the daughter of a Russian oligarch dynasty. Dad’s a billionaire. They wanted to build the first super-bot, the bot that couldn’t be defeated. So the Lenkovas went to Tak Mashido,” Levy explained. “The Lenkovas brought Tak Mashido out of retirement – open checkbook, bottomless pockets, ‘Build us and design us a bot that can’t lose.’ And he designs Zeus.”

Sitting in Detroit’s Cobo Arena, Levy and Jackman talked in between takes on the massive WRB ring that inhabits the exhibition center’s floor. As they laid out the storyline for the film, we couldn’t help but recognize that the scenes we were witnessing are part of that climactic confrontation between the leagues alpha and omega, Atom and Zeus.

To describe what we saw would certainly be a spoiler, although Jackman might insist it’s not the boxing matches that are important to them movie.

“It’s a bit like Rocky,” he said. “It’s a lot less boxing then you all might imagine. It’s not wall-to-wall robot boxing. Really, it’s relationships.”

Shawn Levy’s tale of loss and redemption through robot boxing opens in theaters Oct. 7.

Related: High Tech Meets Classic Film on the Set of Real Steel

In our previous reports from the Detroit set of DreamWorks’ sci-fi drama Real Steel, director Shawn Levy and star Hugh Jackman emphasized their aim is to tell a story that’s “humanistic and emotional.” Still, there’s no denying that this is a movie about enormous robot boxers pummeling each other in the ring, and as such, a lot of creative energy was devoted to creating the mechanical players.

Levy stressed that the robots of Real Steel aren’t autonomous or sentient – their every move is controlled by humans.

“They’re robots and they’re given personality by their aesthetic,” Jackman said. “They’re also given personality by their owners and handlers, the way they fight ‘em and the place where they fight.”

Production designer Tom Meyer met with us on the set to discuss the process of developing the film’s robots. “They are characters. I think that was what Shawn Levy and I talked about as a core idea,” Meyer said, adding that there was freedom in working from a fresh slate, rather than a comic book or toy design. However, that didn’t mean he could just crank out designs that he though looked cool.

“I approached it as I would approach any design for any aspect of a film,” he said. “It’s driven by the story and it’s driven by the characters in that story. If you identify those characters, and you understand the plot and the driving arc of that storyline, the characters will fill out your world and your world will become self-evident.”

Although Real Steel is a science fiction movie, Levy, Jackman and Meyer refer to it as a fable. For Meyer, that meant incorporating future tech sparingly while keeping a sense of timelessness. “A blade of grass is a blade of grass. It was the same a million years ago, it’s gonna be the same a million years from now,” he said. “So if I put a robot in a field, who’s to say that’s the future, the past or the present, or any time?”

Meyer’s task was to make the robot fighters seem plausible without being obsessive about creating the future technology that made them work. “One of the things we wanted to do is give them arms, legs, a kind of humanoid, because it’s an extension of a human sport,” he said. “But then I wanted them to not be overly complicated. I used big pistons and big, recognizable mechanical structures so that we, again, do not feel like they’re magic.”

The designer also had to create a boxing ring that could withstand the fury of these mechanical powerhouses.

“We looked at boxing matches, and the physicality of boxing is about energy and energy displacement,” Meyer explained. “It’s two guys beating each other up, but when you think about what the ring is designed to do, you have a sprung floor that bounces with the boxers, you have ropes that absorb. It’s all about energy absorption. So, I thought, if I have robots that are 1,200 or 1,500 pounds, I need a floor with seismic shocks underneath it, which is what you see underneath the floor. I got huge steel cables with lots of spring and lots of tension.”

In addition to building the robots up from recognizable pieces of current tech, Meyer utilized negative space, “punching holes through the robots so that they very clearly do not look like a man in a suit.”

“You need to see that they are clearly machines,” he said.

From there it was up to the team at Legacy Effects, successor to Stan Winston Studios, to convert those designs into practical, functioning 3D models that could work both as CGI creations and as practical animatronic creations.

During our set visit we saw the film’s robotic protagonist Atom at work in the ring. While the practical bot doesn’t handle the fight scenes, it’s capable of some gestures and motions to allow it to act in real time with its human counterparts. Legacy’s Jason Matthews was on hand to talk about the practical effects that appear in the movie.

“We have 26-and-a-half total live-action robots that were made for this film,” he said. “The all have hydraulic neck controls. Atom has RC hands as well.”

Those consist of ones like the model we were standing next to, which are there to give the actors something more to act against. Matthews also talked about stunt models, as well as stand-in models, which were mostly there to occupy the backgrounds in certain scenes.

“We have a half robot for a scene where Zeus tears a robot in half,” Meyer said. “It’s on a cart being driven away after a fight. It’s a live-action with a bit electric motor inside, flailing its arms and legs, rigged with sparks and smoke.”

Zeus represents the most advanced model robot fighter ever created. Meyer explained that, in the sanctioned, professional setting of the World Robot Boxing league, there are limitations in how a robot can be constructed.

“The height limitation is 8 feet, 6 inches, and anywhere down from there. The idea is that there are three generations, and we’re on our third generation of robot. Zeus is a G-3 and Atom is more of a G-2. They started with Generation 1, the first part of humanoid robots,” Meyer said.

He likened the sport to NASCAR, where cars are built along the same spec lines. The challenge in WRB, as in NASCAR, is to engineer a better fighter within the limitations of the specs

“A moving robot has different limitations. For instance, when they talk about Atom having the shadow mode, there is a reference to, ‘Oh, that has shadow mode. That takes up a lot of memory. What a rare thing to have,’” Meyer explained.

Atom’s shadow boxing mode is an important aspect of the story. Atom was never designed for matches: He was a sparring dummy and his shadow mode allowed him to emulate the moves and techniques of other robots, so that true prizefighters could practice for upcoming bouts.

Jackman explained that this this provides his character Charlie, a former boxer himself, with a unique way to interact with Atom as his corner man.

“You’ll see me early on, with some of my robots, using a remote control. You’ll see me with a headset on, I’m giving voice commands, which is what I do most of the time,” Jackman told us. “Then this robot has a shadow function, which I use to load punch sequences.”

Still, Atom is only considered a Generation 2 robot, whereas he’ll eventually have to face Zeus, a G-3.

“What makes [Zeus' designer] Tak Mashido so special is he’s the guy who can pack the most into his robots, and that’s why they’re so dominant,” Meyer said. “Tak Mashido is sort of revered because he is this boy genius and can pack a lot into his robots.”

Real Steel arrives in theaters on Oct. 7.

Story Credits to Rob M. Worley, SPINOFF ONLINE

BE SURE TO SEE THIS MOVIE!

In the meantime, you can contact me directly at:

dennis@dennisdupuis.com