How The Electric State Brought Its Unlikely Robots to Life with Cutting-Edge VFX

See how The Electric State used VFX and motion capture to bring its unique robots to life.
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How The Electric State Brought Its Unlikely Robots to Life with Cutting-Edge VFX
The new Netflix movie “The Electric State” depicts a world full of robots — but not robots as we know them.  Image:Google Directed by brothers Anthony and Joe Russo (who previously helmed two Avengers blockbusters, “Infinity War” and “Endgame”) for a reported budget of $320 million, “The Electric State” takes place in an alternate version of the 1990s, one where sentient robots have existed for decades. That’s long enough for them to have rebelled against their human masters, lost the war, and found themselves exiled to an area of the Southwest — an area that the film’s heroes (played by Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt) must sneak into. Crucially for visual effects supervisor Matthew E. Butler, design-wise, these robots are “deliberately the antithesis” of the robots that exist today. “Most of us have seen modern-day robots … and are used to these designs,” Butler told me. “If you look at Boston Dynamics robots, you’ll notice that they concentrate the mass of the robot at the center of…