Would the Flipper animatronic please swim to the edge of the pool?
The "Flipper" what? During the filming of the recent Hollywood release, Flipper, in the Bahamas, Walter Conti, '81, sat on the set manipulating a joystick that guided Flipper through the water. As the star waited for his next set of instructions, his human co-stars absently petted his back, forgetting for the moment that Flipper was a mechanical dolphin.
Conti, who designed and built Flipper, loves to see his mechanical beast mistaken for the real thing. "Our goal is to see how close to Mother Nature we can get," says Conti, the founder of Edge Innovations, a Mountain View company that designs and builds mechanical animals for Hollywood movies.
Conti received his master's degree in mechanical engineering and design from Stanford in 1983. By 1986, Conti, who grew up on the special effects of Star Wars and ET, was working for George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic, creating mechanical whales for Star Trek IV. He formed Edge Innovations in 1990 and, ever since, has developed the animatronics (the combination of animation and electronics) for a dozen movies, including Terminator 2, Maverick, Flipper and the Free Willy movies.
Conti's current project is designing two giant, lifelike snakes for this spring's suspense film Anaconda. As a result, Edge's offices resemble a herpetology institute. The design engineers' computer screens are filled with cross sections of 40-foot-long snakes; segments of these creepy crawlers, as thick as fir trees, lie on tables throughout the warehouse. The segments are brought to life when the engineers and electricians install the complex system of wires and joints. This allows the snakes to make 130 different, writhing movements. "When it does come together, it's pretty amazing," says John Williams, MD '90, who designed the computer software that allows them to program the snake's movements. "When you power it up the first time," he adds, "it almost seems to come alive."
Conti says that the sophisticated integration of design and electronics is a direct consequence of his Stanford experience. "The Stanford engineering program had an interdisciplinary approach, as we do here," Conti says.
Animatronic technology is developing so rapidly, Conti says, that the mechanical dinosaurs used in 1994's smash hit Jurassic Park, are already, well, dinosaurs. "I look back at what we were doing three years ago and I almost get embarrassed," Conti says. "We're now getting to the point where we'll be creating mechanical humans that look real. That will be the ultimate challenge."
