Disney’s Spider-Man Stunt Robot - Behind The Scenes Secrets

The Perfect Spider-Man: A Conversation with Dan Fields and the Disney Imagineers

Dan Fields, one of the creative directors at Disney, sat down with us to discuss the making of Stuntronix, the latest addition to the Marvel universe. As he observed the various animations, his attention was drawn to a specific aspect of the character's movements - Spider-Man's leg splay.

"Hey, guys, you seem to have all these amazing Spider-Man animations down," Fields said. "But he brought it to our attention that the character of Spider-Man is just a teenage kid and he's somewhat flawed in that he isn't necessarily the master of his abilities and his talents. Especially in a new Stark suit for example. So, could we do an animation that looks like he's going through the air out of control?" This observation led to some interesting design decisions and technical challenges.

Fields explained that one of the biggest hurdles was making robots look like they're actually out of control. "Robots are great at doing beautiful precise movements smooth," he said. "But making them look like they're actually out of control was a lot harder than we thought." To achieve this effect, the team spent a significant amount of time dialing in the look of fear in a robot's eyes. They wanted it to feel natural and not repetitive.

In addition to these technical challenges, the team also had to contend with the physicality of the robots themselves. The Stuntronix prototypes were built to be broken - intentionally so. "We built them to be robust and to be able to take that kind of beating," Fields said. "But we also knew that this could break, so we made it easy to fix or replace." This approach allowed them to iterate on the design and make adjustments as needed.

One of the most interesting aspects of Spider-Man's abilities is his agility and acrobatic skills. The Disney team noticed that the robot's movements in mid-air were being a bit too perfect - too smooth. "We realized we didn't need to carry the weight of batteries for extended periods of time," Fields explained. "The animations are under four seconds long, so we used super capacitors to store and release energy very quickly." These supercaps allowed them to create some really cool and energetic moments in the animation.

Finally, Fields talked about the power source behind Stuntronix - a nod to the classic comic book phrase "with great power comes great responsibility". However, instead of a traditional battery pack, the robot uses super capacitors to store and release energy. This allowed them to create some really unique effects, like the ability to pull off energetic poses without sacrificing mobility.

The Stuntronix project was an opportunity for the Disney Imagineers to push the boundaries of robotics and animation. With great power comes great responsibility - and with great creativity comes a whole lot of fun.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso disney has this impressive robotic spider-man it's slingshot 65 feet into the air over and over again every single day and it happens at the avengers campus in disney california adventure park we got a behind the scenes look at the engineering magic that went into this marvel superhero show here are seven things you never knew about disney's stuntronic spider-man stunt tronics is a word coined by disney to describe technology that uses a robot as a stunt double that way a robot can perform heroic feats that may be too dangerous for a human to do slingshotting robots around is a bit of new territory for disney to have fun with the illusion the robot is only a small part of the spider-man show in the park guests also watch a human actor before the robotic stunt double has its moment in the spotlight it took more than 10 prototypes to get to the stuntronics spider-man that is seen today some parts were built in days and others took months walt disney imagineering research scientists morgan pope and tony dohey gave us an up-close look at the prototypes they built and the story of how it came together so here are seven little-known secrets about the stuntronics spider-man the robot does have a name it's tom as in tom holland the actor who plays spider-man in the marvel movies now mr holland has a role in the pre-show for the spider-man ride that's at the park the ride is called web slingers and when mr holland was at the campus doing voice-over work for the ride he visited the imaginary lab to check out the robotic stunt double that shares his name we asked him if he wouldn't mind signing our robots in a sense sort of giving them his blessing and he was really great about it super great super super gracious a really fun guy and he just loved it so we've actually taken that signature and uh we've embossed it into all the other 3d printed chess plates we have yeah so i guess you could say all the bots have a touch of tom holland with them and if you're wondering that second signature that's kevin feige producer and president of marvel studios but these bots didn't start out looking human in the beginning it was all just a brick and a raccoon head the first pieces created for this project needed to answer a few questions and the most important question was is it possible to create a robot that could do stunts that's how morgan pope and tony dohey's work came together tony was working on these automatons which were not electronic these were simple models to test movement and yes he put a raccoon head on the body but no we're told it didn't have anything to do with guardians of the galaxy at the same time morgan was working on this electronic brick that has weights inside that can shift and move around and that lets it change how fast it spins and where it lands then the mission came to try to put these ideas together to make something that could move while being thrown across a room so it looks alive in a sense by giving it action several prototypes came together the first one looks like a piece of wood with a joint but it actually has the same sensors as the brick from there it was a matter of solving problems adding electricity exploring the different joint configurations making it look human deciding how to power it throwing it through the air again and again and again and you know learning a few lessons along the way one of those lessons is about elbows the final design does not have working elbows turns out you can make a very convincing spider-man without having working elbow joints this is also the robot where we learned we didn't need elbows he originally had an elbow joint here but we ended up locking it off because we didn't need it i didn't notice it you can start doing more interesting things you move one arm and not the other and get some of that like asymmetric motion that's really weird and beautiful and that right there is the key to the whole illusion because spider-man needs to be awkward peter parker is a teenager that has no clue what he's doing he's making it up as he goes so the perfect spider-man is something that doesn't move perfectly one of the creative directors dan fields said hey you guys seem to have all these uh spider-man animations down he's looking really great with the leg splay you know some of these other things that we're doing with him but he brought it to our attention that the character of spider-man is just a teenage kid and he's somewhat flawed in that he isn't necessarily the master of his abilities and his talents especially in a new stark suit for example so could we do an animation that looks like he's going through the air out of control and uh what what made that so challenging is that robots are great at doing beautiful precise movements smooth but making them look like they're actually out of control was a lot harder than we thought right so you had to spend some serious time actually dialing dialing that in so the look of fear in a robot's mind feels natural and not repetitive yeah speaking of things going wrong when you decide to make a giant robot fall from the air every day for months something's gonna break to account for this the stuntronics spider-man prototypes were from quite early on made to be broken we built them to be robust and to be able to take that kind of beating but we also built them intentionally with places where we knew that this could break and if it's going to break we'll make it easy to fix or easy to replace those two design ideas go all the way back to very early prototypes it was easier to just make something that you could switch out instead of trying to beef it up and beef it up and beef it up until it was indestructible now as you're building and programming a realistic spider-man you have to ask yourself what makes spider-man look like spider-man when he's flying that radioactive spider bite turned him into a master acrobat so he's very nimble and he has these cool iconic poses as he bends his legs in awesome ways and as the disney team was having the robot move around in the air with various poses and bends they noticed it was beating itself up you see the face of this prototype how it's all scratched and banged up you may think it's because of all the falls it took from heavy testing no i want to say we threw this at least a thousand times yeah before we retired it and went to the next prototype the the reason why the face looks as uh scarred as it does is not because it hit the ground it's because this had so much range of motion that right that kneed itself in the face that's right it could get there so so we learned some things right with this we designed that out in our next prototype right but much like the comic book hero it was able to handle a few blows just fine now of course we have to talk about how spider-man gets his power because with great power comes great responsibility no i mean how the robot gets its power it does not run on typical rechargeable batteries the time this robot is moving in the air is very short so it uses something to store and release energy very quickly super capacitors this kind of battery does not rely on chemical reactions like the lithium ion in your phone or one of these we realized we didn't need to carry the weight of batteries the animations over such a short period of time it's under four seconds basically the supercaps are a fun technology to use here because the they can take and deliver lots of current super rapidly i usually don't use them as often because they don't have a super high energy storage capacity so you can't put you know if it's like it's like a little tiny gas tank but you can pull a lot of energy out of it very quickly we needed him to be doing very energetic things while he's in the air but we didn't need to have him do it for a long time so it was a fun use of the of that technology which is is a little bit unusual you may hear about supercapacitors when we talk about the future of electric vehicles spider-man spider-man does whatever an electric car can so there you have it seven amazing facts for the amazing stuntronic spider-man at disney california adventure park and if you're craving more behind-the-scenes goodies on the stuntronix fighting check out our other video we show you what it takes to become a disney imagineer that gets to build robots for disney and what it was like to build this one if you like this kind of content from our channel be sure to give it a thumbs up to let us know that you want more of this and please tell me in the comments what other robots you would like to learn more about in future videos they could be robots with elbows without elbows i'm not pickyso disney has this impressive robotic spider-man it's slingshot 65 feet into the air over and over again every single day and it happens at the avengers campus in disney california adventure park we got a behind the scenes look at the engineering magic that went into this marvel superhero show here are seven things you never knew about disney's stuntronic spider-man stunt tronics is a word coined by disney to describe technology that uses a robot as a stunt double that way a robot can perform heroic feats that may be too dangerous for a human to do slingshotting robots around is a bit of new territory for disney to have fun with the illusion the robot is only a small part of the spider-man show in the park guests also watch a human actor before the robotic stunt double has its moment in the spotlight it took more than 10 prototypes to get to the stuntronics spider-man that is seen today some parts were built in days and others took months walt disney imagineering research scientists morgan pope and tony dohey gave us an up-close look at the prototypes they built and the story of how it came together so here are seven little-known secrets about the stuntronics spider-man the robot does have a name it's tom as in tom holland the actor who plays spider-man in the marvel movies now mr holland has a role in the pre-show for the spider-man ride that's at the park the ride is called web slingers and when mr holland was at the campus doing voice-over work for the ride he visited the imaginary lab to check out the robotic stunt double that shares his name we asked him if he wouldn't mind signing our robots in a sense sort of giving them his blessing and he was really great about it super great super super gracious a really fun guy and he just loved it so we've actually taken that signature and uh we've embossed it into all the other 3d printed chess plates we have yeah so i guess you could say all the bots have a touch of tom holland with them and if you're wondering that second signature that's kevin feige producer and president of marvel studios but these bots didn't start out looking human in the beginning it was all just a brick and a raccoon head the first pieces created for this project needed to answer a few questions and the most important question was is it possible to create a robot that could do stunts that's how morgan pope and tony dohey's work came together tony was working on these automatons which were not electronic these were simple models to test movement and yes he put a raccoon head on the body but no we're told it didn't have anything to do with guardians of the galaxy at the same time morgan was working on this electronic brick that has weights inside that can shift and move around and that lets it change how fast it spins and where it lands then the mission came to try to put these ideas together to make something that could move while being thrown across a room so it looks alive in a sense by giving it action several prototypes came together the first one looks like a piece of wood with a joint but it actually has the same sensors as the brick from there it was a matter of solving problems adding electricity exploring the different joint configurations making it look human deciding how to power it throwing it through the air again and again and again and you know learning a few lessons along the way one of those lessons is about elbows the final design does not have working elbows turns out you can make a very convincing spider-man without having working elbow joints this is also the robot where we learned we didn't need elbows he originally had an elbow joint here but we ended up locking it off because we didn't need it i didn't notice it you can start doing more interesting things you move one arm and not the other and get some of that like asymmetric motion that's really weird and beautiful and that right there is the key to the whole illusion because spider-man needs to be awkward peter parker is a teenager that has no clue what he's doing he's making it up as he goes so the perfect spider-man is something that doesn't move perfectly one of the creative directors dan fields said hey you guys seem to have all these uh spider-man animations down he's looking really great with the leg splay you know some of these other things that we're doing with him but he brought it to our attention that the character of spider-man is just a teenage kid and he's somewhat flawed in that he isn't necessarily the master of his abilities and his talents especially in a new stark suit for example so could we do an animation that looks like he's going through the air out of control and uh what what made that so challenging is that robots are great at doing beautiful precise movements smooth but making them look like they're actually out of control was a lot harder than we thought right so you had to spend some serious time actually dialing dialing that in so the look of fear in a robot's mind feels natural and not repetitive yeah speaking of things going wrong when you decide to make a giant robot fall from the air every day for months something's gonna break to account for this the stuntronics spider-man prototypes were from quite early on made to be broken we built them to be robust and to be able to take that kind of beating but we also built them intentionally with places where we knew that this could break and if it's going to break we'll make it easy to fix or easy to replace those two design ideas go all the way back to very early prototypes it was easier to just make something that you could switch out instead of trying to beef it up and beef it up and beef it up until it was indestructible now as you're building and programming a realistic spider-man you have to ask yourself what makes spider-man look like spider-man when he's flying that radioactive spider bite turned him into a master acrobat so he's very nimble and he has these cool iconic poses as he bends his legs in awesome ways and as the disney team was having the robot move around in the air with various poses and bends they noticed it was beating itself up you see the face of this prototype how it's all scratched and banged up you may think it's because of all the falls it took from heavy testing no i want to say we threw this at least a thousand times yeah before we retired it and went to the next prototype the the reason why the face looks as uh scarred as it does is not because it hit the ground it's because this had so much range of motion that right that kneed itself in the face that's right it could get there so so we learned some things right with this we designed that out in our next prototype right but much like the comic book hero it was able to handle a few blows just fine now of course we have to talk about how spider-man gets his power because with great power comes great responsibility no i mean how the robot gets its power it does not run on typical rechargeable batteries the time this robot is moving in the air is very short so it uses something to store and release energy very quickly super capacitors this kind of battery does not rely on chemical reactions like the lithium ion in your phone or one of these we realized we didn't need to carry the weight of batteries the animations over such a short period of time it's under four seconds basically the supercaps are a fun technology to use here because the they can take and deliver lots of current super rapidly i usually don't use them as often because they don't have a super high energy storage capacity so you can't put you know if it's like it's like a little tiny gas tank but you can pull a lot of energy out of it very quickly we needed him to be doing very energetic things while he's in the air but we didn't need to have him do it for a long time so it was a fun use of the of that technology which is is a little bit unusual you may hear about supercapacitors when we talk about the future of electric vehicles spider-man spider-man does whatever an electric car can so there you have it seven amazing facts for the amazing stuntronic spider-man at disney california adventure park and if you're craving more behind-the-scenes goodies on the stuntronix fighting check out our other video we show you what it takes to become a disney imagineer that gets to build robots for disney and what it was like to build this one if you like this kind of content from our channel be sure to give it a thumbs up to let us know that you want more of this and please tell me in the comments what other robots you would like to learn more about in future videos they could be robots with elbows without elbows i'm not picky\n"