… remote control robo-dolly …

[demo movie at bottom of post]

My childhood friend is back! Robotix!

... a remote control robo-dolly...

A few weeks ago I scored a Robotix kit online. I had no idea they had gone wireless at some point during the 90’s. Actually … I had no clue they were even still making them in the 90’s.

I used some Robotix in 1998 to create a robotic prosthetic arm/fishing pole in my early film Humanidad Aterrorizado.

[click to check out the film]

... Humanidad Aterrorizado (1998)  ...

After I got them in the mail, I combined them with the set I had when I grew up. Here is the remote control dolly I constructed out of them:

... why did they start making them purple ... ?

I modified one of the small Robotix pieces to hold the camera thread. It can go forward, backward, left and right. I can put the camera on a crane and have it rotate on a variety of axis.

... ok, I guess I can live with the purple ...

I will be using it in some capacity while shooting the video for “Combat”.

Here are some tests shots done in single frame animation (shot with a Canon A640 is continuous burst shooting mode). This is the slowest I can get my footage to look given the shooting rate of the camera. I need to work on stabilizing the camera and getting some motion timing issues figured out.

The soundtrack for the video experiment was all done with a beta version of my new VSTi – SK-crooner. It is a human vocal synth based on samples from the 1980’s 8 bit sampling keyboard, the Casio SK-1. I worked on it for a while today and it’s starting to come together.

~ 2mb
(This is not live action video – it’s time lapse. I’ll try some robo-dolly video soon).

Double click to play:

[qt:/blog/movies/robodolley.mov blog/movies/robodolley_poster.mov 480 270]