During those early, long, dull days of lockdown, Jacob Sutton decided to make a film he’d wanted to for a while. “How to Build a Robot” shows three boys making a robot out of cardboard in a farmyard. One climbs inside, and—the robot springs into action and they disappear into the countryside, over the horizon.

Sutton asked animator Brian Vowles to design the robot for him using 3D software. He then flattened it out into vector shapes, had these laser-cut from cardboard and delivered to the studio, and fastened everything together with brown tape. He also worked with a set builder and a welder to fasten a metal exoskeleton to the back. After the real-life robot had been built, and the film shot and edited, Brian went back to his original 3D design and set about crafting the animation to bring it to life. There was however one big trick left to pull off: to elide the change from the real model to the computer-generated (CG) model. That’s where we came in.

We worked on building a textured 3D replica of the real life robot. Starting with Brian’s animation, we made materials for each section of the robot, using orthographic pictures of the original laser-cut cardboard. Then we hand-lit the shot to match the plate, recreating the position of the sun, the shadows, and the colour of the sunlight reflected off the ground in virtual space. We also simulated some fun smoke elements where the robot’s foot crashes onto the floor as it bounds off the stage.

Finally we composited our render into a shot of the empty farmyard, blending from the cardboard robot into the CG robot, with some additional camera shake for good measure. The handmade blends into the imaginary, and the childhood fantasy becomes real.