Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNaF) is the hit horror video game franchise that leans into the inherent creepiness of animatronics. However, with a new movie upon us, the question remains: Did the filmmakers use computer-generated imagery to bring the haunted automata to life or create life-size robotic figures for the film?
The PG-13 FNaF stars Josh Hutcherson as a reluctant security guard for a restaurant chain, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. But soon enough what should’ve been a simple job turns into something much more horrific as the electronic mascots act way more lively than they should be. Soon enough, it becomes a fight for survival for Mike as the animatronics murder anyone who pokes around too much in the shadowy pizza joint after hours.
CGI or puppetry?
Despite the trailers for the FNaF fooling some into thinking the animatronics were done with CGI, owing to their incredible accuracy compared to the game, that’s not actually true. Indeed, the same workshop that brought the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to life for their first live-action movie in 1990 worked on FNaF, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
Project supervisor and lead designer Robert Bennett even took the time to respond to an unsubstantiated comment on the FNaF trailer on YouTube accusing the movie of using CGI instead of making real animatronics. As he explained to SFX Magazine (via MovieWeb):
“Well, no, it was all our costumes. Everything in that trailer is our costumes and nothing was touched up with digital.”
The process for bringing the animatronics to life was incredibly complex and involved puppeteers being “directly on the puppets, making it move,” in some instances and operating remote controls off-screen in other cases, as director Emma Tammi explained in an interview with io9. With that said, Tammi did say there was some post-production digital clean-up to the images done here or there, a common practice for any film nowadays let alone one with animatronics. As she explained:
“The whole approach of this movie and certainly with the animatronics was to do everything practically. There still ends up being a fantastic collaboration to be had with VFX artists, whether that be clean-up or enhancements. And all of our conversations with the VFX teams were also about how can we support it feeling looking practical. So we were really all in sync about that, which was an exciting collaboration.”
Five Nights at Freddy’s comes to theaters and Peacock on October 27.
