David O’Reilly made the video game portions of Spike Jonze’s film Her, breathing life into a cute, vulgar Alien Child.
One of the iconic and hilarious parts of Spike Jonze’s film Her stars Alien Child in a 3D animation by David O’Reilly. Doing the animation for the futuristic video game portions of the film, O’Reilly looked back on his experiences of Her and sees animation like that of Alien Child as the future.
Comparing his animations to the realistic art style found in today’s popular games like Grand Theft Auto V, O’Reilly said he could see cartoonish animation styles become more popular, overtaking realism in games. Especially with the recent launch of the PS4 and Xbox One, many of the big games being developed today place a greater emphasis on making graphics look lifelike.
In Her, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in a future Los Angeles that’s developed augmented technology as different gadgets all work together, eliminating the need for things like desktop PCs and smartphones. Theodore works as a greeting card writer, living a mostly solitary life and playing Kinect-like games. He ends up falling in love with his OS named Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), who tries to help him in whatever way she can. In the posted scene, Alien Child has a back and forth vulgar battle with Theodore and provides unhelpful comments.
Other than the video game sequences in Her, O’Reilly’s animation work can be found in music videos for U2, concert visuals for MIA, and the Adventure Time episode “A Glitch is a Glitch.”
Source: Made Man
