How We Made A Prop Robot

Sawadee khap my farangutan friends and puan puan khun Thai. In my day job I often have to make theatrical props and I thought this may be of interest to some viewers. In this vlog I have a short section on how we made a prop robot to use in a video. It was made with cardboard boxes. The body was a large box, the head was made from a photocopier paper box, the next was a hat box and lid and the feet were parcel boxes. As you can image, it's very square. I also wanted it to look like one of those metal flight cases.
I was relatively cheap to make and looks the part.
A lot of people who watch the video think that the prop is a costume and that someone is inside. This is not the case. We only have one shot of the robot's shuffling feet because if we panned up you would see a short actor with silver piping only up to their knees. The same technique was used where you see arms. These shots were the same foil pipes used as sleeves and black gloves. The camera was placed on the camera person's chest and the arms moved in front of the camera.
To make the robot move around we simply detached its leges and pushed it around on a trolley.
The head movements were done by twisting the head from behind, so it swiveled in the hat box lid neck. This was done by John who you may have seen in previous videos. He also walked backward down the stairs hiding behind the robot's torso in order not to be seen.
I have included these clips after the description on how the robot was made. You get a sense of the video and story from the clips. The story is that the students build a robot in an after-school club. They accidently knock over a cup of water causing the robot to short circuit. The students can't get the robot to work and leave. However, the robot reactivates and the circuit that controls its behaviour towards humans has been fried. C.H.A.R.L.Y - that's the robot's name -then calculates that robots are superior to humans, and he goes on a murdering rampage throughout the school. He eventually enters a room where a trap has been set by the students. A bowl of caustic soda. Believing it to be sugar C.H.A.R.L.Y eats the soda, and it mixes with his hydraulic fluid causing him to short out for good.
The second 'Cameo' was in a recent video we made called 'Portals'. C.H.A.R.L.Y had been on display in the school and was looking a little worse for wear. He needed a little TLC, but he can still be used in other projects. We may be using him for a film in the future, 'Robots V Aliens', which will be a sequel to 'Our Robot" - this film - and another film we made, 'They Came From Somewhere Else'. I may put up a trailer or props movie for that too. That was a big project with models and green screens and so on.
I also have some other prop makes I'll post. It's all paper, cardboard and hot glue guns, so cheap, cheap, cheap.
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