science fiction film

There have been a lot of films and television series exploring sentient AI, consciousness, and identity, but there’s rarely been quite such a unique take on those themes as that provided by Love Me, the first feature film from directors Andy and Sam Zuchero. The film premiered at Sundance last year, where it won the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, and is now getting a theatrical release.

(Some spoilers below.)

The film is set long after humans and all other life forms have disappeared from the Earth, leaving just remnants of our global civilization behind. Kristen Stewart plays one of those remnants: a little yellow SMART buoy we first see trapped in ice in a desolate landscape. The buoy has achieved a rudimentary sentience, sufficient to respond to the recorded message being beamed out by an orbiting satellite (Steven Yeun) overhead to detect any new lifeforms that might appear. Eager to have a friend—even one that’s basically a sophisticated space chatbot—the buoy studies the vast online database of information about humanity on Earth the satellite provides. It homes in on YouTube influencers Deja and Liam (also played by Stewart and Yeun), presenting itself to the satellite as a lifeform named Me.

Over time—a LOT of time—the buoy and satellite (now going by Iam) “meet” in virtual space and take on humanoid avatars. They become increasingly more advanced in their consciousness, exchanging eccentric inspirational memes, re-enacting the YouTubers’ “date night,” and eventually falling in love. But the course of true love doesn’t always run smoothly, even for the last sentient beings on Earth—especially since Me has not been honest with Iam about her true nature.

At its core, Love Me is less pure sci-fi and more a postapocalyptic love story about transformation. “We really wanted to make a movie that made everyone feel big and small at the same time,” Sam Zuchero told Ars. “So the timescale is gigantic, 13 billion years of the universe. But we wanted to make the love story at its core feel fleeting and explosive, as first love feels so often.”

The film adopts an unusual narrative structure. It’s split into three distinct visual styles: practical animatronics, classical animation augmented with motion capture, and live action, each representing the development of the main characters as they discover themselves and each other, becoming more and more human as the eons pass. At the time, the couple had been watching a lot of Miyazaki films with their young son.

“We were really inspired by how he would take his characters through so many different forms,” Andy Zuchero told Ars. “It’s a different feeling than a lot of Western films. It was exciting to change the medium of the movie as the characters progressed. The medium grows until it’s finally live action.” The 1959 film Pillow Talk was another source of inspiration since a good chunk of that film simply features stars Rock Hudson and Doris Day chatting in a split screen over their shared party line—what Andy calls “the early 20th century’s version of an open Zoom meeting.”

Building the buoy

One can’t help but see shades of WALL-E in the plucky little space buoy’s design, but the basic concept of what Me should look like came from actual nautical buoys, per props department head Roberts Cifersons of Laird FX, who created the animatronic robots for the film. “As far as the general shape and style of both the buoy and our satellite, most of it came from our production designer,” he told Ars. “We just walked around the shop and looked at 1,000 different materials and samples, imagining what could be believable in the future, but still rooted somewhat in reality. What it would look like if it had been floating there for tens of thousands of years, and if it were actually stuck in ice, what parts would be damaged or not working?”

Cifersons and his team also had to figure out how to bring character and life to their robotic buoy. “We knew the eye or the iris would be the key aspect of it, so that was something we started fooling around with well before we even had the whole design—colors, textures, motion,” he said. They ended up building four different versions: the floating “hero buoy,” a dummy version with lighting but limited animatronics, a bisected buoy for scenes where it is sitting in ice, and a “skeleton” buoy for later in the film.

“All of those had a brain system that we could control whatever axes and motors and lights and stuff were in each, and we could just flip between them,” said Cifersons. “There were nine or 10 separate motor controllers. So the waist could rotate in the water, because it would have to be able to be positioned to camera. We could rotate the head, we could tilt the head up and down, or at least the center eye would tilt up and down. The iris would open and close.” They could also control the rotation of the antenna to ensure it was always facing the same way.

It’s always a challenge designing for film because of time and budget constraints. In the case of Love Me, Cifersons and his team only had two months to make their four buoys. In such a case, “We know we can’t get too deep down the custom rabbit hole; we have to stick with materials that we know on some level and just balance it out,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, it has to look like an old rusted buoy floating in the ocean.”

It helped that Cifersons had a long Hollywood history of animatronics to build upon. “That’s the only way it’s possible to do that in the crazy film timelines that we have,” he said. “We can’t start from scratch every single time; we have to build on what we have.” His company had timeline-based software to program the robots’ motions according to the directors’ instructions and play it back in real time. His team also developed hardware to give them the ability to completely pre-record a set of motions and play it back. “Joysticks and RC remotes are really the bread and butter of current animatronics, for film at least,” he said. “So we were able to blend more theme park animatronic software with on-the-day filming style.”

On location

Once the robots had been completed, the directors and crew spent several days shooting on location in February on a frozen Lake Abraham in Alberta, Canada—or rather, several nights, when the temperatures dipped to -20° F. “Some of the crew were refusing to come onto the ice because it was so intense,” Sam Zuchero recalled. They also shot scenes with the buoy floating on water in the Salish Sea off the coast of Vancouver, which Andy Zuchero described as “a queasy experience. Looking at the monitor when you’re on a boat is nauseating.”

Later sequences were shot amid the sand dunes of Death Valley, with the robot surrounded by bentonite clay strewn with 65 million-year-old fossilized sea creatures. The footage of the satellite was shot on a soundstage, using NASA imagery on a black screen.

Cifersons had his own challenges with the robot buoys, such as getting batteries to last more than 10 seconds in the cold and withstanding high temperatures for the desert shoot. “We had to figure out a fast way to change batteries that would last long enough to get a decent wide shot,” he said. “We ended up giving each buoy their own power regulators so we could put in any type of battery if we had to get it going. We could hardwire some of them if we had to. And then in the desert, electronics hate hot weather, and there’s little microcontrollers and all sorts of hardware that doesn’t want to play well in the hot sun. You have to design around it knowing that those are the situations it’s going into.”

The animated sequences presented a different challenge. The Zucheros decided to put their stars into motion-capture suits to film those scenes, using video game engines to render avatars similar to what one might find in The Sims. However, “I think we were drinking a little bit of the AI technological Kool-Aid when we started,” Andy Zuchero admitted. That approach produced animated versions of Stewart and Yeun that “felt stilted, robotic, a bit dead,” he said. “The subtlety that Kristen and Steven often bring ended up feeling, in this form, almost lifeless.” So they relied upon human animators to “artfully interpret” the actors’ performances into what we see onscreen.

This approach “also allowed us to base the characters off their choices,” said Sam Zuchero. “Usually an animated character is the animator. It’s very connected to who the animator is and how the animator moves and thinks. There’s a language of animation that we’ve developed over the past 100 years—things like anticipation. If you’re going to run forward, you have to pull back first. These little signals that we’ve all come to understand as the language of animation have to be built into a lot of choices. But when you have the motion capture data of the actors and their intentions, you can truly create a character that is them. It’s not just an animator’s body in motion and an actor’s voice with some tics of the actor. It is truly the actors.”

Love Me opens in select theaters today.