If you haven’t heard the name Matt Denton, and you are crazy for building real world droids, then perhaps you should get to know the man. He along with Joshua Lee built BB-8 from the ground up for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In a new interview with TechTheLead, Matt talks about the trials and tribulations that come with building this droid for Lucasfilm.
On trials that were faced with building the red carpet version of BB-8:
The red carpet BB-8 was a huge challenge for myself and Josh Lee, who was the principal mechanical engineer for the project. We both had some idea of how it might work, but had not tried anything in practice, so we decided to just start making it and see where it led.
There were other ball-based robot around at the time, but none with an external head! The more we got into the project the further we pushed our initial goals.
For example, our first version was not going to have any lights within the body, and it wouldn’t be able to turn on the spot, but during the design process we had a couple of eureka moments in which we thought we could add these functions in.
The closer the functionality our red carpet BB-8 had to the film BB-8 the better, as it would help to sell that magical moment when it appeared on stage for the first time. In the end we created something that was so close it could be filmed on!
On upcoming projects from Matt:
Well, my day job is working on films such as Star Wars. I’m currently working on the last in the new trilogy – Episode 9, but I’m not allowed to talk about that.
You can read more about Matt and his work on other things like his robot Mantis, by hitting the source link below!
