Animatronic Model Services in Chicago, IL

What does E.T, Jaws and Jurassic Park have in common?
Well, aside from being blockbuster movies, they all used “animatronics”.
Animatronics, in a nutshell, is a mechanized puppet but instead of using strings, it uses far more advanced technology such as teleoperation (more commonly known as “remote control”) in order to control the animatronics from afar. Here at DINOMOTION, we provide the best animatronic services in Chicago, IL, and other areas.

If you have unique preferences regarding the overall design, shape, size, performance complexity, and quantity of effects, our designers can work with you closely to bring your ideas into reality.

Mechanical

Electronic

Structural

Surface

Putting it Together

The mechanical components are created by Engineers, who work on designing and building the mechanical system. This includes everything from the most basic gears to the more complicated hydraulic systems.

The surface component is everything that we see on the outside of the creature. This ranges from the skin, the hair, the parts of the face and all other small details. If the structure helps increase the realism of the creature, the surface will make people wonder if what they’re seeing is fake or real.

There are different materials used for the creature’s skin, with foam rubber being the most common. This rubber, which is very light and spongy, is made by mixing air with liquid latex rubber and then cured to make it hard. Silicone and Urethane are also used for the surface, but they are rather hard to work with which is why foam rubber is still preferred by many people.

The materials used for the structure are shaped by using molds. The materials are simply poured into a mold and then they’re pulled out once they get hard enough.

Once all components are done, it’s time to put everything together. This is a laborious process, and probably one of the hardest stages in creating animatronics.

The team will start by making sure that the frame is good to go. They then proceed with putting the mechanical systems in place. As each system is placed, the team makes sure that it is running smoothly before the next system is placed by testing it. After testing and confirming that the system is good, they proceed with placing the next mechanical system. This becomes a cycle until all mechanical systems are placed.

After the mechanical systems, it’s time to place the skin or the surface. While the team is doing this, they make sure that there are no unwanted folds, no stretching or no place where the skin is too tight. In case any of these problems occur, the staff would need to detach the “skin” and reattach it in a different way.

Once these are all done, the team would need to test the animatronic again to make sure that every part of the model works perfectly relative to each other.

ANIMATRONICS TODAY

ANIMATRONICS VS. ANIMATION

HISTORY OF ANIMATRONICS

The most widely-seen form of animatronics today are those used in movies. Popular movies such as King Kong, Jurassic Park, The Neverending Story, and Chucky all used animatronics to bring these amazing creatures to the screen. Let’s take Jurassic Park, for example, which is one of the first movies to introduce animatronics in the field of movie-making. If you were awed by Jurassic Park when it first came out in 1993, I’m sure you were amazed even more by Jurassic Park III which showed more complicated animatronics compared to the first movie. While it was the T-rex that made us scream in the movies during Jurassic World I, it was the

Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III that gave us nightmares. Just to give you an idea, here’s what the staff had made to give us this great movie: The Spinosaurus animatronic was 43.5 feet (13.3 m) long – almost as long as a bus. It was completely

powered by hydraulics, even the blinking of the eyes. This animatronic model can work in both land and water. All large steel pieces were cut using waterjets (a tool used to cut metal parts with a very high-pressure stream of water). The animatronic was completely controlled by remote control. Another form of animatronics are those used for display in zoos, museums, carnivals, charity events and even birthday parties. These models can either be moving or static, depending on your preference. Some of the “creatures” used for these events have friendly faces so they don’t scare even the youngest of the audiences. These are the kinds of animatronics being offered by Dinomotion.

They sound almost the same, which is why many people get confused with the difference. But, what really is the difference between animatronics and animation?

It’s actually quite simple to remember. Animatronics is something that you can actually see or hold,

while animation is usually 2D or 3D – something that you can see on a TV screen for example.

Let me explain further. Animatronics are like robots covered with “skin” to make them look real. If you have tried the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios, the moving dinosaurs are actually animatronics.

Animation, on the other hand, are like cartoons. They are wholly created by the animator using certain software and program which does not involve real-life actions. You can watch an animation, but you can’t hold it because they don’t have a physical body.

How Animatronics Started. The very first “animatronics” started way back when the first advanced mechanical clocks were made. No, it wasn’t anything grand but making the characters in the clock move in perfect timing with the sounds and time of the clock gave way to the modern animatronics we know today.

Leonardo Da Vinci, while widely known today as a great artist, was also a genius inventor. He was believed to dub in early animatronics, as told by the stories of the Automata Lion – supposedly created by Da Vinci himself. While there was no solid proof of this invention, stories tell that this automated lion walked and presented flowers to the King of France at the end of its performance.

This brings us to modern animatronics, which was first developed by no other than the great Walt Disney in the early 1960’s. One of the earliest examples was found in the 1964 World’s Fair in New York Hall of Presidents.