For the first time, a robot with artificial intelligence will star in a movie.
This is not a film adaptation of a science fiction classic with animatronics or robots impersonated by human beings like Terminator’s T1000, but a real “plastic and bolts” robot that will play a part in the story.
The robot actor will be Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Erica.
The robot is called Erica, and is one of the impressive creations of Hiroshi Ishiguro and Kohei Ogawa, Japanese scientists specializing in the creation of anthropomorphic robots. The android is equipped with an artificial intelligence system so developed that it can participate in the film, thanks to the application of some acting techniques to its automatic learning.
It was its creators who trained the robot so that it could act.
“In traditional acting, actors improve their roles by referring to life experiences,” says Khoze. “But Erica has no life experiences. She was created from scratch. We had to simulate her movements and emotions through individual sessions, such as controlling the speed of her movements, speaking with feeling and training her character development and body language.
A 70 million sci-fi film
The film will be called “b” will cost about $70 million and will be produced by Bondit Capital Media and New York-based Ten Ten Global Media; it will tell the story of a scientist who devised a system to perfect human DNA by creating an “artificial woman”, who will then help escape to survive.
The director of “b” and Erica’s human co-star have not yet been identified, but producers have already shot some scenes in Japan in 2019 and plan to shoot the rest of the film in Europe in June 2021.