Production Rentals and Services
SkullTronix offers rentals of still props, animatronics and even custom products for production companies. Prices depend on type and length of rental. Call us for more information.
Our latest production involvement was with the Southwestern mattress retail chain, "Mattress land". The directors of the commercial wanted the commercial shot using live motion with a live actor. On short notice we packed up the skeleton and headed to Burbank. We accomplished the live action requirement by having an off-camera actor use our Live Action (live motion capture system) to operate the skull. Meanwhile two men operated the movement of the arms using monofilament line and a third turned the torso from below. Normally these movements could have been preprogrammed into a fully animated version of the skeleton but due to the tight time constraints and desire to shoot the commercial live we conjured up the crude but effective puppeting solution using a non-animatronic version of the skeleton combined with a fully animatronic skull.
The Skulltronix Live Action System is very simple to operate: An off-camera actor simply puts on a baseball cap equipped with 3 reflectors. A proprietary camera
translates the actor's head movements directly to the skull. As the actor speaks a separate sound activated system moves the jaw. The motion capture actor
also has control via keyboard and mouse of eye color, eye brightness and eye movement.
In the Mattresss Land production everything was live and each shot was repeated until the Director was happy. But the movements of the skull could have been recorded and replayed or even recorded and edited for the final version.
The most accurate animation is produced by prerecording the movements using the VSA software. Using the prerecorded method requires the soundtrack to be
produced first. Then we use the soundtrack as a guide to synch animation of the jaw, skull movement and any required skeleton movements.
The SkullTroniX animation system provides great variety in mixing both pre-recorded animation and live animation with live actors.
Click on the video below to see the 2010 MattressLand commercial.