Behind the Effects: ED-209 from Robocop

What movie hero is half robot and half cop?  Robocop!

With robotic super-strength and a shoot-first read Miranda rights second attitude, Robocop is at the same time one of the coolest and most ridiculous movie characters of all time.  It’s one of those 80’s cheese classics that everyone loves, and at the same time nobody really takes all that seriously.

And like most sci-fi movies from the pre-Jurassic Park era, the special effects in the original Robocop are pretty much computer free.  In this particular Behind the Effects article were going to be looking at the effects behind Robocop’s robotic nemesis ED-209.  Check out the following video if you haven’t seen the movie to see ED-209 in action.

Be warned the images in this video are incredibly violent

That robotic titan you just witnessed shooting a poor hapless businessman is kind of astounding to behold.  How do you put a giant robot inside an office room without actually building a giant robot? The answer, as per-usual on Behind the Effects, is pretty cool.

The majority of the ED-209 shots were created using stop motion animation.  The robot is actually a small doll that could be posed frame-by-frame to create the illusion that it, a non-animated three-dimensional figure, had animation.  Phil Tipett was the only one who did work on the stop-motion animated portions of the film, and he did a fantabulous job.  Here’s a picture of Tipett with his model.

But, you might ask, if the robot was just a little model then how did they get it to look so large in comparison to the much larger real-world people?  Well that was accomplished using two tricks.  The first of which was actually pretty mind-blowing, and the second of which was surprisingly simplistic.  To get a feel for the first of the two, let’s look at another picture of Tipett’s ED-209 model.

Did you see what that was in the background?  Yup; it was a picture of the office jockey’s from the film cowering in fear. 

That sequence was shot before the model was inserted.  In real life those people were cowering from nothing, and then the animator came in and went through each frame of the film posing his robot in front.  So any shot where ED-209 is walking and humans are in the frame with him, you are actually watching a stop-motion puppet being animated in front of the original recording.

The second method used was simpler conceptually, though arguably more complex in practice.  The special effects experts built for themselves a full-sized ED-209.  So for the scenes where people had to walk in front of ED, or when the robots movements were miniscule they brought in a giant hollow mock-up with limited movement.  The full-size version looked heavy, but was actually constructed out of light-weight materials like plywood and bunji-chords so that it could be completely taken apart and then reassembled as needed.  Check out these pictures of the full sized model “in the shop.”

Well that’s it for Behind the Effects.  I’ve found a whole new appreciation for Robocop, and I hope that you’ll be inspired to go back and relive it as well.  It’s a pretty fun action-picture with plenty of impressive effects!