BP “Robot”
- Article 1 of 6
- The Post, November 2000
It's a hard brief. “We want something that looks like a robot, but doesn't look anything like a robot.” That was the challenge put to Bob Hinks of model-makers Asylum for BP's robot campaign.
“We were asked to design and build a robot woman that comes to life but not like anything that had gone before. The idea was that oil would flow through the robot, bringing it back to life.”
The trick was to make sure that the famous, similar scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or any other sci-fi robot never occurred to anyone.
Director Paul Street started looking through photo galleries in LA for inspiration. He’d just received the script and thought there were huge opportunities for creativity. “We didn’t want to do Metropolis or C3PO,” says Street. “I wanted to concentrate on the core story and narrative – the emotional context of the spot.” Rather than Lang’s or Lucas’s robots, the work of photographer Terry Moogler became one of the big influences on the design on the BP robot. After a month of “to-ing and fro-ing”, with Asylum producing amended design after amended design, they had a look that everyone was agreed upon. And just five weeks to make the robot and shoot the advert.
Street quickly cast the model that would be both the main character and the… model for the robot. Asylum had photographs of her taken, as well as plenty of measurements (“she was very skinny,” says Hinks) so they could create their own robot based on her shape and Street’s and the creatives’ ideas
“We met Rushes to consult with them about how it would be animated,” says Hinks. “We had mouldings made right from the start and sent them to them. Initially, they thought they would be doing the whole head as cgi but eventually they animated just its eyes and mouth. But they had a tremendous amount of rod-removal and cleaning of reflections to do.”
There was even more cgi to do when the original Perspex sets “just didn’t work”, according to Street. But instead of having to do a re-shoot with a new, hastily constructed set, Street was able to provide Rushes with high-quality graphics from the agency. The Inferno team was able to create a new background for the entire shoot using those stills. It’s barely noticeable in the advert but the abstract background never even existed.
“I always thought the job would be live-action integrated with live-action,” says Street. “But we ended up with a great proportion of effects. If I had had more time now, in retrospect I would have given Rushes a bit more work, and pushed them about 20% more.”