It took 13 puppeteers to bring AppleTV+’s titular robot “Sunny” to life.
Joanna Sotomura, the American performer who embodies the ominously helpful bot, flew to Tokyo where the series was filmed to meet the robotics team two weeks before filming began. “We had our robot dojo space. I would do the rehearsals and scenes as Joanna, and they would put tape on my stomach for Sunny’s eye line, and I’d be rigged in a helmet with a ring light. A monitor and camera tacked my facial expressions and projected to the robot in real-time,” says Sotomura.
“Sunny” follows Rashida Jones as Suzie Sakamoto, an American housewife living in Kyoto. The buddy mystery pairs Suzie with the title character, an intelligent “homebot” named Sunny that has been left to Suzie by her missing husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima).
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Speaking with Variety, Sotomura explained how she spent much of the two weeks “trying to practice the head and coordinate it with the arms and the driving of the bot.” She added, “It took a little bit of trial and error, but by the end of the shoot, we got a pretty well-oiled little Sunny bot.”
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WETA Workshop’ss robotics engineer Craig Hobern and robotics supervisor Tyler Page shared their Design Studio team worked on over 100 prototype sketches, concept art ideas and collaborated with showrunner Katie Robbins to get the look of Sunny right.
“The team talked about this idea that Sunny would be inspired by ideas of architecture, plants and ceramics,” Page explains. “They came up with this idea of a very much Japanese-inspired look, trying to imagine what it would be like inside a domestic environment, and how that bot is going to work and serve.”
From an aesthetic side, Sunny’s technology would be hidden so she had a clean look.
Page’s next challenge was working with the animatronics department to establish how the puppetry would work. “The problem we needed to solve was to make Sunny believable,” Page says.
In addition to Sotomura working the head and face, Sunny required a puppeteer to work the arms and move the bot through the space. “Craig was in there doing micro adjustments on the animation,” says Page.
Hobern and Page spent three months in pre-production figuring out those logistics. A month of that, Hobern says, was a month of extensive training with all of the puppeteers in “puppet boot camp.” Says Hobern, “We spent time getting them so they could do the actions like pick up a pen. It looks simple when you see it on screen, but it’s really a lot of work to get to that place where you get the feel of how far you have to move your hand to reach out and touch something.”
The puppeteers would spend time in blocking and rehearsals watching Sotomura spending as much time as they could observing her. “They would observe and watch her, and when it came time to bring the puppet onto set, it would be with Joanna’s dialog, her head movements and the hands would move organically with her,” adds Hobern.
The six-month shoot also became a training ground with Sunny. “Every day they improved and learned new things and figured out a better way, and Joanna figured out how to change her rig to make it more comfortable or make it more responsive to her. It was an ever-evolving process.”
“Sunny” is streaming on AppleTV+
