The movie "Moon (2009)", by Duncan Jones, was a minor commercial, but major critical success. It was a low budget production, and chances are that you have not (yet?) heard about it. If this is the case, I strongly recommend to stop reading here - and go, watch the movie first. It won numerous film critic and film festival awards and it was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best British Film. Moon pays homage to quite a few Sci-Fi movies, and in particular to "2001: A Space Odyssey".
As a big fan of Sci Fi movie props, I was immediately drawn into the board computer, GERTY 3000, which, with a soothing voice (by Kevin Spacey) and an illuminated eye, is a wonderful nod to HAL 9000.
Some time ago, I built a HAL 9000 replica (well, actually two) with a sound module and an infrared motion sensor. When sensing motion, it triggers any of the HAL 9000 phrases from the movie. This really makes it come to life, and it has been a wonderful office companion since.
When watching Moon for the very first time, I liked the idea of building a GERTY 3000 replica. I was looking forward, in particular, to that little screen with Gerty's changing emoticons. Of course, GERTY 3000 has a more complex shape, including many angled pieces, but challenges are fun! What makes this particularly interesting, is that (as far as my Google searches indicate) so far nobody has yet attempted to build a life-sized GERTY 3000 replica.
References
As usual, at the beginning of a build, I start looking for references. Some are specific for the build, and some are more general about the movie. And although there were not too many (in particular, when compared to HAL 9000), I still found some extraordinary ones.
- The most helpful reference I found is the blog of Gavin Rothery who did the concept design and graphics for the movie (you can hear him in one of the two commentary tracks on the BluRay/DVD). Between August 18 and October 20, 2011, Gavin blogged about many details of the making of the artwork on his blog "They never went to the Moon". Here one gets first-hand background information and an incredible amount of details, including the making of the set, the making of GERTY 3000, designing the logos, and even an alternative ending of the movie. I also found this interview with Gavin Rothery.
- "The Prop Gallery" is featuring a nice set of images from the making of GERTY 3000.
- A large set of production photos on Flickr.
- An nice article on the costume design in Moon.
- Some genius who created a 3D model of GERTY 3000, was so kind to share this in the forums at therpf.com in this thread (in the first post). This was very helpful for my build!
- A beautiful build at a 1/6th scale: the build blog, and videos of testing the screen and the full unit.
- The page "Typeset in the Future" is a fantastic resource for typography in SciFi movies. Even if you are not a typography nerd, this is a very interesting read and it's pointing out some really interesting details for some iconic SciFi movies, that you may otherwise have missed. And here is a direct link to the page's section about Moon. Although the web pages are great, I strongly recommend buying the book (see the Amazon link below). It is rather inexpensive and really beautiful.
- Further background information is in the beautiful book "Making Moon".
(as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases)
Planning the Build
If you watched the movie, or the production pictures in the links above, you find that, in contrast to HAL 9000, GERTY 3000 is a huge device.
The main feature that attracts me is GERTY's screen displaying the emoticons (or: "Gerticons" as suggested at "Typeset in the Future"). So, I took this as a starting point. In his blog, production designer Gavin Rothery describes that they used a portable 7-inch DVD player for the screen, but later replaced those images by CGI renderings of the Gerticons. I want to use a Raspberry Pi for this, and ordered a 7-inch LCD display with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels.
Starting from the size of the screen, I design the rest in order to keep the proportions. My final result is maybe a little bit smaller as compared to the movie prop, maybe somewhere in the range of 80%-90%. I am building this from plywood (3/16" thick) using a laser cutter. The laser cutter files are made using the open source software librecad. Here is a very preliminary sketch of GERTY 3000, together with my HAL 9000 replica (and my daughter helped me with the Gerticon).
The final prop will have the following main functions: Like my HAL 9000 build, it will feature an infrared motion sensor, and when it senses motion it will play GERTY's sound clips from the movie.
This responsiveness is what makes my HAL 9000 such a nice office companion (of course: one must limit how often the sounds get played - otherwise it just becomes annoying). Continuously, it will also change the Gerticons displayed on the screen. These functions make it like a "real" GERTY 3000.
In addition, I will add a few practical features like a tea timer, an alarm clock for regular scheduled meetings, and maybe options to display weather information and news. The Raspberry Pi should also be able to do voice recognition which would really be impressive ("GERTY, display the news", "GERTY, start the tea timer"), but that may be some substantial programming effort, and I'm not sure if I really want to pursue that. But I do not have to decide that now...
In addition, I will add a few practical features like a tea timer, an alarm clock for regular scheduled meetings, and maybe options to display weather information and news. The Raspberry Pi should also be able to do voice recognition which would really be impressive ("GERTY, display the news", "GERTY, start the tea timer"), but that may be some substantial programming effort, and I'm not sure if I really want to pursue that. But I do not have to decide that now...
GERTY's Faces - the Gerticons
The faces ("Gerticons") are the essential elements that allow GERTY to express emotions. Gavin Rothery's original images, that were supposed to play on the 7" DVD player look like this.
For the movie, however, they replaced these with CGI images like these two, more yellow, and on a blue background that becomes darker towards the corners.
While waiting for the delivery of the LCD screen, I am creating the Gerticons to look like the CGI versions that we see in the movie, with the 1024x600 pixel resolution of my screen. Starting with an empty blue screen that is darker towards the corners...
I am adding the "Lunar Industries" logo in the corner...
...and the bottom text in Eurostile Bold Extended font.
These two screen will later also be used for other purposes.
On top of this, I am adding GERTY's ten faces.
Other Screens
I mentioned that I am planning to use GERTY also as a tea timer, so I prepare two additional pairs of screens indicating that the tea timer is running, and when the tea is ready (using the same background).
Another screen will be used when the alarm rings.
In addition, I produce a set of various screens to be displayed while GERTY is booting or shutting down.
I can't remember seeing the following image in the movie, but it appears somewhere in the making-of photos in one of the links above:
And if there is one for booting, then there has to be one for shutdown, right?
And, finally, two more screens. I have no idea yet what they will useful for, but I just had to make them. The first one is an image that I found in this large collection of photos on Flickr, indicating that the rescue unit is arriving.
Nice detail: on the left is a photo of the production designer Gavin Rothery, GERTY's dad. And another photo from the collection above shows Sam Bell on a completely white background, from which I created this.
GERTY's Voice
To play GERTY's sound clips, I need all the individual phrases as separate audio files. First, I made a list of all of GERTY's sound clips that I listed on this blog. Then I am using free software ("handbrake", "VLC player", and "Audacity") to rip these from the DVD, normalize the individual phrases, and apply fade-in and fade-out as described in another blog entry. I skip a few that have too much background noise, and end up with 97 good ones.
I have uploaded all the individual .wav files on my GitHub page.
other GERTY-related posts:
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