F.R.H.A.N.K.

As part of the Saatchi & Saatchi run campaign 'F.R.H.A.N.K.' is an A.I personality, a gaming buddy for the hungry Halo-ist or famished Fifa star and a genuine, gears and everything, bloody great robot!

Kettle helped to develop how the face emotions and speech were to be delivered in real-time, helping take FHRANK out of a series of canned videos and into real-time emotion creation...

We also made some super shiny startup and shutdown motion graphics sequences, and steered the look development of his face and the content on it.

FRHANK was then happily dumped upon the gaming blogger Ali-a, who helped FRHANK to learn more about the gamine world (with the assitance of several thousand other gamers), and in return fed Ali FridgeRaiders from his build in firdge. yes. Really.

Check out the first of his long series of exploits below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALTuDeUV-4w

Initially commisioned to produce some animated sequences for the facial expressions we spent some time to understand what was actually required and threw away the idea of canned emotion to emotion video. We then designed and prototyped a system that would allow FRHANK to have a full range of expressions, fully capable of blending from one state to the other, or multiple expressions as required. 

Since FRHANK's face is made out of an array of dots, rather than a 'flexible' face, further throught was required as to how these dots could map sucessfully to expressions and change and layer sucessfully.

This was then all communicated to the developer to implement and through a collabrative itterative approach, a fully expressive and talkable FRHANK face was born.