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By now you’ve probably watched a few (dozen) videos from Boston Dynamics, the robotics company that makes its bones on developing bots that can do wildly impressive things. Hell, you’ve probably seen the firm’s viral videos posted on our page. Every few months, the Massachusetts-based maker releases clips of its creations stacking boxes and busting out backflips, and the Internet reacts accordingly.
These jaw-dropping demonstrations have long been ripe for parody, and now we finally get the Boston Dynamics send-up we deserve, courtesy of Corridor Digital, an L.A. production studio that specializes in visual effects.
In this video, a robot that looks just like one of Boston Dynamics’ ATLAS-style walking bots takes a beating from testers, getting pummeled with whips, balls, and hockey sticks, all in the name of research.
But then, a twist—and a potential harbinger of things to come: Fed up by the abuse, the bot fights back, kicking his tormentors where it hurts the most before threatening to open fire. It’s clearly a parody, but looks enough like the real thing that plenty of people have been fooled—so much so that Corridor had to issue a clarification that no machines or humans were actually harmed in the making of the video.
In a follow-up clip, the Corridor Crew posted a behind-the-scenes video showing how they faked the robot’s revenge. Corridor dressed a team member in an Xsens motion capture suit and rigged a CG robot model to the suit, so the bot you see on screen moves exactly how the actor’s body moves, driven by the motion capture data.
It’s fascinating, complex VFX magic, and you’ll come away even more impressed by the original clip. The fakery is further proof that visual tech can fool you whenever it damn wants—and that it’s not outside the realm of possibility that someday soon, we might see an actual robot wreaking havoc in retaliation and hardly bat an eye.