So many robots

Issue #65 of befores & afters magazine covers the visual effects of The Electric State.

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Set in an alternate, retro-futuristic 1990s America scarred by a robot uprising, Netflix’s The Electric State, from director duo the Russo brothers, follows orphaned teenager Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown) as she traverses a desolate landscape in search of her presumed-dead younger brother. The film is based on the 2018 graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag.

Accompanied by a mysterious robot named Cosmo— apparently carrying her brother’s consciousness—she teams up with drifter Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robot companion Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie), who appears in several different sizes. Along the way, they encounter a host of human and machine characters as the journey leads into the robot-inhabited Exclusion Zone and a deeper conspiracy surrounding the technology that ended the war.

Bringing this hybrid road movie and sci-fi spectacle to life required an on-set methodology that tightly fused live-action performance with digital character creation. During principal photography, stand-in performers and dedicated motion capture artists physically embodied the film’s robotic cast, acting opposite the principal actors to establish eyelines, timing and emotional interplay. The robot performers, part of a troupe led by movement choreographer Terry Notary, worked both in optical capture setups and accelerometer-based suits. The motion capture efforts were orchestrated by SuperAlloy Interactive and Actor Capture.

Overseeing this complex integration of live-action and motion capture was production visual effects supervisor Matthew Butler, who guided the film’s expansive VFX pipeline across multiple vendors. Leading the charge was Digital Domain, responsible for a substantial portion of the film’s robot characters, environments and sequences, while Industrial Light & Magic also contributed a large number of robots, including for the third act battle. Storm Studios and One of Us added further animation and visual effects support.

In this special issue of befores & afters magazine, we go deep into the visual effects of The Electric State via conversations with the principal VFX team-members: Butler, Digital Domain visual effects supervisor Joel Behrens, Digital Domain animation supervisor Liz Bernard, ILM visual effects supervisor Russell Earl, ILM animation supervisor Kevin Martel, and Storm Studios head of VFX Espen Nordahl.