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Gerty v1.0
Hello you, I was having a chat on Twitter with Duncan recently and he posted an old-school doodle of Gerty from Moon so I thought some of you might find it interesting to see some of the working process we went through in making the film. Consequently, what's about to follow is a series of posts of me showing you all sorts of rough stuff that was either done really fast or never got finished so please don't judge me too harshly. It's basically the artistic equivalent of me standing in front of you all and pulling my pants down with my hands on my hips. In other words - don't get too excited. So please don’t judge me too harshly for showing you the rough stuff.
This original "Pac man" design for Gerty was intended to have a rim-light above the head that could glow like a Halo. The main Gerty unit would also move up and down vertically a lot more so it would move up to the ceiling and run along the roof a bit more, with a halo occasionally glowing like a little electronic angel. We decided this was a bit too high-concept and so we toned it down to something more like a load of old dirty PCs bolted together which is the look that appeared in the final film.
Originally Gertys' screen was going to be faces constructed out of ASCII art (sort of like a mashup of Robocop 2), but I managed to persuade Duncan that it might read a bit messy and so we decided on the emoticons instead. The secondary bulge on the lower edge of the unit was to be a rotating camera-ball with multiple lenses on it reminiscent of the old-school television cameras with the rotating lens assembly.
If you follow Duncan on Twitter you'll likely be aware of how originally we wanted Gerty to have a soft appearance. We got excited by the US military Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot (BEAR), and initially thought it might be a good idea to take a few cues from it.
The "Pacman" design above is my initial attempt at a cute sort of a design. Here's Duncans' original sketch too in case you missed it on Twitter. Don't judge him too harshly; he really concentrates when he draws ;)
