A Robot on Film: Helping Misty Hit (and Make) Her Mark
Looking backward. Moving forward.
I’ve known Ian Bernstein since my days as a mentor at the Disney Accelerator.
The friendships I formed with Ian, his co-founder Adam Wilson, and CEO Paul Berberian eventually led to a stint in Boulder, CO helping to develop and launch the groundbreaking Sphero BB-8.
It was during those early days when I began to understand the vast scale of Ian’s vision. As it would later be expressed, “To put a robot in every home and office.”
His reference point was always Rosey the Robot from The Jetsons. During one of our many brainstorming sessions, we marked a moment on a whiteboard ~10 to 20 years in the future when the robots of science fiction would start to become as commonplace as human helpers. We dropped a real-world Rosey on the timeline and then began to work backwards. We inserted a number of industry breakthroughs — some of which had already happened, most of which had not — and tried to predict the big upcoming moments in consumer robotics.
Lately it’s become common to become disenchanted with our technology. Given the effect of Moore’s Law, we have what feels like mere moments to absorb the amazement of each new invention before another, better, faster, sleeker, and more advanced model takes its place. We also have to compare our expectations to what we’ve been promised in science fiction.
While working at Disney, I recall hearing things like “Disney doesn’t predict the future, they help design it.” This was arguably true — just look at the old Tomorrowland programs that showed viewers what space exploration may look like someday. And a decade or so later that day came, and it looked very similar to what Disney had showed us. Imagination is what drives innovation.
Consumer innovation has been challenging for robotics, which can feel super niche, overly engineer-focused, or massively industrial and/or academic. They’ve also proven to be expensive to build and to purchase. I’ve stood in a room with a dozen Pepper robots moving around me, and it is breathtaking and awe-inspiring, but it is also a very expensive room. Sometimes it feels that robots, the real ones, might cost more than we can even imagine.
On the whiteboard we imagined a particular breakthrough moment, a few years after Pepper’s release, written something like this: “first affordable, accessible, and stable developer platform for robotics.”
Affordable. Accessible. Platform. This stuck in my head.
When we discussed how Misty would introduce their first consumer robot to the world, we talked a lot about our challenge of how to manage user expectations — and decided to face it head on. The team published blogs detailing the current environment in robotics, our mission, our place in the world, and an authentic and honest approach to tackling a very difficult challenge: creating a robot for everyone. We had to be very clear that this wasn’t a short-term endeavor. We were beginning a mission that had many benchmarks, some lining up with that timeline we’d imagined years before.
We decided that we had to communicate with our potential customers about their science fiction–inspired expectations, and also about where exactly robotics is in its lifecycle. By showing robotics’ parallels with computers and smartphones, we could show exactly what needed to happen to kick robots into overdrive. We needed that stable platform.
This was the story we needed to tell: Explain to everyone how the expectation was set, draw clear parallels to two recent phenomenons of innovation: the personal computer and the smartphone. Ian’s story. And why our approach was the logical one.
We decided that we didn’t want to create a vaporware commercial. Along with co-producer Erica Hampton and Misty’s in-house filmmaker/producer, Allison Moulton, we drafted an early script. Along the way we had lots of great input from Ian, Head of Misty Tim Enwall, Head of Community Ben Edwards, and the Misty PR team at JSA Strategies, as well as some members of our local filmmaker network and Dave and James Codeglia — aka Ghostlight — who’d joined our production team.
When it came time to film the “live” sequences, programing Misty to act her scenes sometimes proved challenging, as she was very much a work in progress at that time. This meant long shoot days, incredible patience, and a willingness on Misty Robotics’ part to take risk. It was always critical to Ian and Tim that the robot’s actions not be faked.
We shot most of the live Misty footage in a soundstage in LA with some Misty team members acting as the robot’s handlers and trainers. We had three Misty robots on hand for the shoot — affectionately named Milton, Berle, and MinwinPC . Each had a slightly different personality and displayed varying degrees of cooperation. Ghostlight was amazing on set as our director and cinematographer. They’d done a lot of the behind-the-scenes work for Bad Robot on the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, and know a thing or two about filming robots. They embraced that we didn’t want to puppeteer Misty — that we wanted the authentic Misty experience on film — as challenging as that might be with the early robots we shot with.
Sometimes it feels as if filmmakers can imagine nearly anything and bring it to life through all the amazing technology available. Product makers, not quite as much. While we have the ability to imagine and physically make moldings and motors and intricate hardware and software systems — we also have the debatably hardest task of making it actually work. That’s sometimes the biggest challenge. Ask anyone who makes physical consumer tech. Systems are large and complex and there is so much that can go wrong. When you really start to look at what something is doing and what it takes for it to actually “work”, it’s kind of exciting to be human — because maybe we are all inventors at heart.
In the Misty video we did our best to embody the company mission and brand values. We made her actually do the work. So what you see is what you get — that’s Misty. Super cute, authentic, tons of personality, sometimes imperfect, and ready for her (internet) screen debut.
During that week in March at a soundstage in DTLA, Misty engineers programmed Misty to star in her pre-launch video. It might not seem like a lot when you’re watching it, given all the things we’ve seen Johnny 5 and all the other robots of sci-fi do, but remember — those aren’t real robots. Misty is a real robot. She’s a stable robotics platform which developers — or filmmakers — can program to perform useful tasks.
I’ll remember this as a momentous experience, history in the making, as Ian made a huge step towards his grand plan. I’m proud to be a contributing voice on the journey.
