Oh that's tough. Hey guys, welcome to Comic-Con.

It's a room of imagination.

Wired's audience is a tech-obsessed crowd, no surprise.

Stan Winston School's crowd is also tech-obsessed

so we had to pack in full of tech surprises.

And in our earliest meetings we talked about those.

There had to be lights, there had to be cameras embedded.

We talked about embedding a microphones

that would be a surprise, that would come out of a gun.

Anything we could do to make you go, oh it can do that too?

One of the nice things about this project

is that it's Wired Magazine.

You have to involve new technology,

something fun and exciting.

We had meetings to talk about the video,

the audio, the lighting effects.

We had to address animatronics.

We had to address how do we get this character to talk,

how do we get it to interact with it

because that's not normally what we do on set.

You're in a live appearance

and it's like how cool would it be

for this thing to have sound effects,

have hydraulic noises and servo noises

and this ambient throb that made it seem like it was alive.

So Dave Covarrubias did a lot of programming in Arduino

and came up with some great sensors

that we've used on film

but not to the level that we used it here.

He created this proximity infrared sensor system

that would measure the distance

between the sensor and the ground.

It basically shoots out a beam of infrared light

and when it hits something

it basically bounces back into the sensor,

so it can kind of detect where you're at in space

within a limited range.

Really fun to play with.

It was some of my highlights of this

because I wanna do it on my Halloween costumes now.

It's triggered by what it's actually doing.

It's not some random feedback.

It was brilliant and Alan said, put it everywhere.

We put motion sensors in Bruce's arms

so that when he moved his elbow,

it would trigger a sound effect.

It added a lot of life to it.

This is just a linear pod,

like a volume control knob basically.

It just senses a change in resistance.

And as I stretch it.

(mechanical noises)

Again, we have to balance that

with weight and battery life.

The technical things that you have to worry about is like,

how long do the speakers last?

How long do the batteries last?

The power to the Arduino.

What is our backup if one of them doesn't work?

So you have to balance how much sound can I put in?

It would be great if we did this, this, and this.

Oh now I need a sound mixer.

Or we need two mixers.

Alright, forget that first one.

That's that balance of art and commerce.

On our C side, Kan had jumped in hard

on creating the actual mechanism

that would be radio controlled,

that would move the head up and down, side to side.

I wanted to use a particular server that I usually use.

It's very strong, which a server is heavy.

So I can't change a server.

But I took material much as I can to make it lighter.

When you do a radio control,

you can control the wave, the way the server motor runs,

so I create the wave that the two ends,

it slows down, or do this, do that.

But when you have a different wave control

it slows you down there.

Dave Covarrubias, in addition to the sound,

started to attack the lighting.

The eyes are the thing that brings it to life.

This guy will be able to focus on

if the body's attention is over here,

so will the eyes.

It'll be able to lead with the eyes before the head turns.

And do all the things that an animatronic head would do.

Even though it'll be much simpler, it's just an LED,

the idea is that when he starts talking,

it'll also react to the voice,

so we'll have a lot more interaction that way.

There's lots of little tricks in there

to try and get as much production value

as cheaply and as light as possible.

The sound and the lighting

almost completed the magic trick.

The last piece of that puzzle was the voice.

We had to address, how do we get this character to talk?

It needed to look autonomous

and yet at the same time it had to interact with people

in a way that we don't usually have to do.

We don't worry about the voice

that's added in post after the fact.

But that's not what was gonna happen here,

it was all have to be live.

It had to be live, ad-libbed,

and very, very fluid and organic.

(robot voice)

I can tweek the settings

and try to get something a little--

Feels like he should have a deeper voice.

[Dave] This is the one you thought was creepy

but is that pitch about the right thing?

Hello. How are you?

It was great, people are drawn to that

and it helped sell the idea like,

what's happening there?

Is that a robot? Is that live?

Oh my God there's a guy in there.

How is that making noise?

Putting Bruce in the suit,

turning on the lights, turning on the sounds,

and the voice, and the RC head, and he was live.

Go get 'em. Go get 'em.

Hi there, glad to see you.

[Robot] Good to see you.

Oh wow, you really got into this thing, huh?

[Robot] Are you enjoying your tour?

Not really, I'm scared.

(robot talking)