Courtesy of Bleeding Cool, we now have descriptions for three clips of Shawn Levy's upcoming robot-boxing film, Real Steel, that were displayed today at the Empire Big Screen. Also included is Levy's comments on shooting the scenes, as well as how many of the shots actually featured real robots.
The first footage screened tonight was a fight scene set in an underground robo-boxing club and featured and Dakota Goyo as father and son, and CG and steel contraption as their bot, Noisy Boy. The fight is fast, loud, metal-on-metal smackdown stuff, and has a half-hidden surprise ending. What’s most impressive is how easy it is all to follow, and how natural – right down to how convincing the roboFX appeared.
Talking about the clip, Levy explained how many of the shots featured real robots, or at least physical in- FX, and it’s a pretty big proportion. Effectively, it’s anything where the robot doesn’t have to be too agile or get into a punch up.
The robot boxing was not animated from the ground up but performance captured on the stage at Giant. Levy explains that the fights were then slowed down to 89% to lend them the mass necessary to convince of their gigantic, steely nature, and some glitchy slowdown animated into their joints.
The second clip showed off Sugar Ray Leonard on the film’s set, teaching Hugh Jackman how to box for his back-story scenes. It’s obvious how impressed the filmmakers are by Leonard’s legacy, it’s less obvious that they really needed him.
And then the final clip showed off the entry of Atom, the film’s lead robot. He’s discovered in the junk in Metal Valley, a huge and dangerous landscape full of scrap. He’s found as the result of an accident, when young Goyo’s character falls into a long, Romancing the Stone waterslide and, after zipping off a sheer drop, gets snagged on an extended robot arm from the cliffside.
Levy goes on to confirm that the movie was shot in 2D, because
'we find it easier to think of the sports , conventionally, as being in just two dimensions'. For more on the cinematography and comparisons of the movie to
WALL-E and
Iron Giant, click the link below.
Starring Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lilly and Kevin Durand,
Real Steel hits theaters October 7th, later this year!