(slow electronic music)

[Narrator] What do you wanna do?

[Narrator 2] (slurs)

[Matt] Well we took a leap of faith here.

We saw that the Skeletonics Team

had pulled it off.

And so we weren't gonna wait for Jim

to finish that prototype before

getting the art, the artist's start on the art of it.

His shells, his leg structure, his head.

Jim's working on the skeleton,

and now Rob and team are working on the skin.

[Alan] Now we've got something

that's a little bit unique.

Four-arm character.

How do you balance all that out?

'Cause there was a point where

we had Bruce in the suit

where your eye was drawn to the small arms.

And you were drawn to Bruce,

and you were constantly trying

to figure out, it was like, okay, I see it.

I see the guys, like, and that's

exactly what we didn't want.

[Josh] My first contribution

was the arms to cover up Bruce's arms

in the suit.

We had to disguise his arms,

so it looked like a robot, obviously.

Rob and I actually came up together.

I built him, but the three-clawed arm

on the right hand.

and on the left side we came up

with this drill bit idea.

Just kinda, a little wacky, a little weird, but just kinda

fun at the same time.

It's metal.

It looks heavy.

It looks cool.

[Vance] For those forearms,

we had some designs.

And the right arm, I think,

stuck pretty close to the design.

Left arm changed quite a bit.

Originally, I think he was a robotic hand.

But it ended up just turning into a gun.

That's out of nothing more than molded plastic

starts to cobble together these guns

that not only look dangerous,

but look like they each weigh about 500 pounds.

[Vance] His right arm, he has a Gatling gun.

And on his left arm, some futuristic type of

laser double shotgun thing goin' on.

And the left arm also has the microphones,

which he's interviewing the celebrities

down at Comi-Con.

The guys have done a great job

in assembling all of this, you know.

And they know there are these particulars

that have to be addressed yet,

but, you know, when you see it as a whole,

you just kind of like know there are certain areas

that have to be dealt with.

One of the biggest areas was weight.

Things just kinda got too top heavy.

So we've had discussions and we've decided

to just go in and try to trim a percentage

off of all parts on the upper part

just to give Bruce some more mobility.

We decided to use

a lot of vacuform shells on the upper body.

The time frame of the job was another challenge.

We didn't have tons and tons of time.

So vacuforms enable you to generate shells quickly.

They're lightweight.

They're pretty durable.

Jeff Deist and Dameon Fisher quickly

got to creating some stone bucks

that we could run vacuforms off of.

And the pieces started to come together.

We didn't have a lot of time to re-mold

pieces for the vacuform bucks,

so we took the positives that we already had,

you know, clayed them up,

and corrected it in stone as we went.

With Ultracal.

Although all the positives were Ultracal,

what we corrected it with was Ultracal as well.

Ted came in and he had

some foam structure that went

into the vacuforms that definitely dampens

because the vacuform is so thin.

It just (slurs) paper (slurs) plastic,

so in, you know, in putting some ribbing that

Ted did was really, you know, helped a lot from that too.

Really gotta focus on tryin' to keep the weight

as low as possible,

but also needed to not be bouncy.

You know, it can't,

we don't want a lot of bounciness.

It still had to look like a really robust robot.

The model shop constructed the leg.

The legs, for example, were pretty much

the biggest things we molded on the project.

We molded one leg,

and one leg acted as both legs.

And the lower legs, we chose

to use a different material,

which could, you know, take on all the punishment

that the lower legs are due to take

by kicking chairs or tables

or bumping into things.

We knew that we needed to design a head.

Ultimately, people will need something to lock onto.

They need to recognize it.

You know, you can't make it so alien

or so amorphous that they can't connect with it.

Darnell was prepping things

and then he had a few days

to prepare the face, the face mask.

And when we saw it on the computer screen

it was like, looks great.

Let's go for it.

And so we printed the face.

No molding in between.

And that's pretty important for me.

Because if that face somehow falls off

and breaks the day of, first day of Comic-Con,

I have thirty-five hour turnaround.

You'll see a lotta grills,

thin lines, thin areas, thin walls.

And my main concern was to make sure

those areas of detail were not too thin

that my technology could not reproduce

in an EBS-like material.

So then, legacy's painters jumped in

and started making magic.

Jamie Grove, John Cherevka, Derek Rosengrant.

The vibe of the paint scheme was kinda earthy tones,

militarian kind of scheme goin' on.

Battle damaged.

Beat up.

The shoes would be dusty.

There would be scrapes where the arms

were moving together.

If he's got in a fight,

you put dents and scratches and dirt.

Wow, he's got mud on his feet.

It's like, where's he been?

You know, what's he been doing?

It's got rust.

It's got drippy stains.

It's like, you know, it has a back story

that you don't even have to worry about telling.

It starts to tell itself.

And people start to fill-in the blanks.

It involves many techniques of weathering

and paint chipping, and you know, the green,

the army, the camo and the shades goin' on.

Stan always had us looking in books of tractors

or tanks or whatever to see how things wear.

And high points on corners and things would be

the things that take the abuse.

So we're applying all that stuff

to our paint techniques.

And just kinda the general aesthetic of this character.

Yeah, it fools everybody every time.

We've done stuff that's styrene and foam

and it looks like a heavy drill press part or something.

Then, after that, I kinda made my move in to do a lot

of the bracketing, a lot of the mounting of the shells,

getting everything actually up there,

physically up so we could start seeing

what the structure of the robot was gonna look like,

and the size and everything.

Head mounting and working with Con.

And just getting, kind of, all the artwork

and the shells around the Con's mechanism

and then, you know, just gettin' it dialed in

and gettin' it locked up, gettin' in the right spot.

(upbeat techno music)