In an exclusive video created for Fast Company, Karin Fong (number 88 on our Most Creative People list) and her team at Imaginary Forces put together a behind the scenes look at the creation of the "Machine Vision" used in the film Terminator Salvation. To render believable images of how a robot might see in the year 2018, a combination of military and NASA technology was employed, including a relative of the Mars Rover's optical system called the Bumblebee.
Last week we revealed the evolution of the water-based Hydrobots. Today we offer a look at the making of another Terminator Salvation star: the T-600. The inspiration for the look and movement of the T-600 came from the Soviet-era T-34 tank (pictured here), an influential weapon created for the battlefields of WWII and widely praised for its efficiency, effectiveness and killer design. John Rosengrant, who worked for Stan Winston on the original Terminator and now leads his disciples at Legacy Effects, told me about the mental process behind building this bot: "I love war machines and there was a rough crudeness to the Soviet tanks where they didn't worry about how perfect they looked, you know--they went on to make like 60,000 of them during WWII--so they'd just take a grinder and knock off a seam and move along to the next one."
"McG and [Salvation production designer] Martin Laing's idea was to craft these machines that exist in a world before the Jim Cameron chrome look," said Rosengrant. "We thought it's in the evolution of these machines to be very functional, very robust, with a more Neanderthal look. They're big, cantankerous and not very smart because the machines don't need to fool anyone. Unlike the T-800 or T-1000, the T-600 is designed to be in the field and it doesn't matter if its skin is coming off. No one is concerned with what it looks like and that gives it a sort of zombie aspect. It's creepy."
Click on a thumbnail below to begin viewing the Making of the T-600.
