I was invited as an animatronics engineer by the Galaxy Effects studio. My task was to bring alive silicon aliens for some episodes of the movie - they were viewers of the intergalactic football sitting on a tribune. The production deadlines were tight, but on the positive side, full creative freedom was provided: no one had a clear idea of how to shoot them.

The first, more developed one looked like a fish. That's why it was named - The Fish. The most difficult was the mechanism for the two pairs of eyes, but at that moment everything seemed difficult. Due to a quite logical placement of folds and wrinkles on the face of the plastic sculpture, the mimics left no questions. Each servo drove its own area of skin, and together they were grouped for more complex movement.

Initially, The Fish was made to be controlled by a cable control system, which turned out to be a really bad idea. The tense cables did not give enough reaction speed, and it took a long time to get used to the control panel, as it was constantly changing during experiments.

The second one - Then Mandarin - in mechanics was very similar to simplified Fish. It had to be used for more general plans, so the number of mime was reduced and the accent was made on the external view. Having learned from the mistakes of the cable system, it was designed with servomotors from the very beginning.

We decided not to do honest facial animation in 3d scene - by the time of debugging the movements, the deadlines were already pressing, so I manually drew each servomotor’s track. Very inconvenient, but quite fast, if you do not change the algorithms of movements often.

In addition to mimics, I also made frames for their bodies. Then the costume designers tried their best, giving the bodies necessary shapes and appearance.

The third animatronic was also sitting on the tribune. According to the sketches, some tentacles should have been on his face in the nose area. We decided to make it as a mask on an actor, unlike the first two. A lot of time was spent looking for the right type of tentacles, different kinematic schemes and appearance were tested. It was decided that the tentacles should just hang like spaghetti, and be driven by an air stream from the pneumatic pistol from below. As for the rest of the control, only the squinting of the eyes remained - so I used a simple cable system