Team America
Here in more detail are design drawings and pictures of a few of the 275 retro 1960's characters designed by Norman Tempia in conjunction with AnimatedFx designed, tooled, and fabricated animatronic skulls and bodies. The AnimatedFx system led to a multitude of advanced breakthroughs that had never been achieved on such a scale before.
Breakthroughs:
- Animatronic heads the size of lemons with 9 servo motors each with 12 or more points of movement incorporating a modular design and a self contained WiFi receiver/ transmitter. There were two types: one male, one female.
- Quick change character faces that allowed fewer puppet skull and body substructures to be used to create 275 distinct characters both creatively and economically. Turn around time for 45 complete characters took 3 days with a minimal crew.
- Characters and cast for a full length animated character driven feature film for a mere fraction of the cost of a "live" cast or CGI rendered characters.
- An advanced high tech modular approach to these types of characters in a control system utilizing cutting edge WiFi technology to control all the character features via multi band transmissions when WiFi technology wasn't as commonplace as it is today.
- A modular system for approaching characters was created quickly in an intensive 6 week R&D schedule, then the new design was rendered via tooling using advanced Cad/Cam, advanced roto-molding and casting of all skulls and body parts, electronic design and assembly, character development, drawing, sculpting, wig making, casting, painting, etc. culminating in a dependable cast of convincing and memorable characters.
