Robbie – A Short Sci Fi Film By Neil Harvey
“My name is Robbie. I am from a planet called Earth. It is part of a 4 billion year old solar system.”
Set 6,000 years the future, this 8 minute long sci fi film tells the story of Robbie – an aging robot drifting alone through space at the end of his battery life.
The movie was made entirely with original footage of NASA’s Robonaut 2 that film-maker Neil Harvey downloaded from their archives.
The voiceover narrative – told from Robbie’s point of view – is robotic but it still manages to convey strong emotions. In fact, it captivates and touches the audience so well that by the end one feels emotionally attached to the robot.
Here is what Neil Harvey has to say about Robbie [the film]:
I am Neil Harvey, a director and editor from Sydney, Australia. This video is a short film I created as an anniversary present for my girlfriend a few months ago.
The film-making process involved downloading about 10 hours of footage from the NASA archives and compiling a list of shots which resonated with me at some level. I did this over about 2 or 3 months when I had the spare time. From there, I put these selected shots on an editing timeline and watched them back until characters and narratives began developing in my mind. That is when i met Robbie.
A lot of people have read ‘Robbie’ as a rather sad story. My personal reading is that I find it to be a bit more uplifting, perhaps even celebratory. While it was not my intention to have “a message”, I was certainly interested in the way we confront death and the issue of not ever waking up again. I also felt that by transposing such themes onto an AI character, it would provide a much more compelling vehicle through which to explore these ideas than if we were watching a human protagonist. I’m not sure about anyone else, but I definitely find value in my life by occasionally thinking about how lucky I am that I was actually born at all. I guess this is why I find the film to be more cathartic than depressing.
My biggest thank you to all the talented film-makers and animators at NASA. Also, thank you to Jason Sondhi and the rest of the Vimeo team for their continued support of independent film-makers across the world.
Related articles
- NASA and GM Develop Robonaut 2
- Robots in Space: Robonaut 2 Blasts Off to the International Space Station
