...It Started as a lego competition

In January of 2020, just before Covid came into full swing, I was spending some quality time with my son who was visiting and my niece and decided to have a Lego building competition to keep the kids entertained. After a couple hours the idea of a competition was abandoned in favor of some good old fashion creativity and at the end of it all, we had created an odd looking Lego robot that i thought was amusing and had personality.. so I placed it on my desk as a keepsake to remember the get together.

The little guy had a story to tell...

Everyday I would get prepped for design work, sit at my desk and get to it..but everyday I would also catch the glance of the little robot..and it just seemed like it had something it wanted to say. So as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months I started to hear a voice form in my head as to what the robot may sound like..and then..a story slowly started to come into focus.

From legos to polygons...

I felt like I had something pretty special in mind story wise, but I knew I would have to put some work into actually representing the little guy in a practical and functional way. I knew I wanted the robot to be a musical robot that had originally been a military experiment gone wrong. What kinds of features would a musical robot have? Maybe a screen, perhaps a beat pad, fingers that could play instruments, maybe a glass display for an equalizer to represent his mouth. So in my free time I dove into 3ds max and in line with how the original robot was built from legos, I started designing and connecting shapes that represented the lego robot in a way that could work in real life.

Audi-bot is born

For a couple of weeks I continued to put most of my free time into recreating the lego robot in 3ds max. And after large quantities of coffee, a few daytime consultations with one of my most prolific collaborators (my then 9 year old son), and alot of imagination, we now had a finished model and a pretty cool name... Audi-Bot Musical Companion Version 0711 aka Audi-Bot MCV-0711 (The 0711 had special meaning as it was my Son's birthday)

into the story

After I completed the first model and made all the texture maps, I needed to rig the model for animation and eventually motion capture. It took me several days, working when i could in Maya to complete the rig. Once it was finished it was back to fleshing out the story. I knew he was going to be a failed military experiment re-purposed and sort of auctioned off to the "most desperate" bidder.

I also knew we were going to be making some fictional companies and logos and since I design for a marketing firm, it was right up my alley. I first started by creating a company name and logo for who would be manufacturing Audi-Bot and I drew inspiration from companies like M-audio, Korg, Yamaha etc.. I landed on Audio Sonic because it had a cool ring to it and it sounded like it could be a company and the name of a movie. Below is the finished audio sonic logo.

Expanding the Story and marketing ideas

The story that was coming into focus was ambitious and we began looking for ways to generate public interest in the character. An idea came to me to create a static set that Audi bot could inhabit to save from having to do loads of CG work on multiple digital sets. So over the course of about a week I kit-bashed together a manufacturing fabrication unit and shifted focus on a small story nested within the larger narrative of when audi bot first gained consciousness. The fabrication facility can be seen in the pictures below.

The Tik Tok Experiment

So we had a story, a character, and a set, now we needed a platform. The concept was simple enough, create an interactive experience as a marketing tool and see how people responded. Notice I said the concept was simple..the application and practicality of it all on the other hand was one of the most brutally meticulous processes I have ever experienced. We created a scenario where Audi-Bot wakes up in the aforementioned fabrication facility, discovers one of the fab workers phones that was left overnight and creates a tik tok account. I ended up spending weeks on details like the phone recording audi-bot correctly, correct tik tok recording and upload screens for the phone as well as the phones viewport camera feed correctly recording Audi-bot in real time so you would see that properly reflected in his eye lenses..to put it simply..it was insanity. but i feel it was worth it. you can see the first few videos we ever uploaded as "Audi-Bot" combined into one titled "My First Night Alive" below.

and here are two more...

The Response was extremely positive and the experiment a complete success. We had an outpour of positive comments from all over and people were just connecting to this character as can be seen from the video above which was a response to a Tik Tok user asking Audi bot what it was like to be alive. In June of 2022, I managed to output 6 videos to the Tik Tok platform in all. They garnered well over 100,000 views between them, each one taking about 2 days to complete working 18 to 20 hours a day. Of course a video every 2 to 3 days doesn't work well with Tik Tok's algorithms nor do 18 to 20 hour days on the human body so it was time to step back with the data we had gathered and start searching for money to put together a proper team. and sadly..that is where our story reaches a pause. As we all know, life happens, and we are still attempting to find time to raise what money we canto enable the return to this project that we believe to have so much heart(not to mention profitability if merchandising is still a thing lol) I will leave you with the last project we ever did with Audi-bot back in 2023 named Imagination. It was a passion project dedicated to the two kids that helped spark this amazing character on that cold January morning 3 years earlier. I hope you enjoy it and if you have been in any way inspired by this story please share it. We have placed a donation button at the bottom of the page and if you feel compelled to see our project finished we are grateful for anything to start production back up. Any contributors will also receive production credit. Thank you and we hope you like our short..Imagination...

What is Audio Sonic & who is Audi-Bot? well...