Chris Lloyd

We asked the London-based illustrator, Chris Lloyd to introduce his animation series ‘Silly Robots’ and describe some of them :

The silly robots series initially started out as a joke and has, over time evolved into something much bigger than I imagined. Each robot generally takes a couple of hours from concept scribble to completion, I work directly in AE with shape layers and a few plugins to speed up this process. The project is not quite finished yet, but if people want to follow me on twitter/instagram you’ll be able to see the other robots in this series and a long form compilation animation is coming soon.

I love geometric shapes, endless loops and wanted to create a walk/looping cycles that didn’t necessarily conform to normal biped characters. I’ve selected a couple of my favourite robots so far and hopefully explain a bit behind them.

Silly bot 1:
Initially I wanted to make my friend laugh by sharing the weirdest walk cycle I could think of. I didn’t spend particularly long cobbling this together but when I showed him, he liked it and wanted to see more and thus the entire series was born.

Silly bot 6:
Trying to keep things fresh and try out new things I wanted to tackle a front facing walk cycle as I’d never done one before. It’s subtle but I really love the movement in this piece.

Silly bot 11:
By now I’d realised everytime I was stuck for an idea I’d turn to nature and imagine how would a robot insect/animal move or tackle a particular task. This is my interpretation of a robot dung beetle.

Silly bot 27:
I’d tried to tackle this idea a few times before but with two legs and could never make it work. Adding a third leg solved the issues I was having and made this robot super weird looking. Making this perpetual rotating leg movement work was really satisfying.

Silly bot 28:
A thought occured to me, I’d connected a few robots together with wires and cables, what would happen if a cable became unplugged. Would the robot run out of energy or carry on as before.

Silly bot 39:
My wife and I have just celebrated our first wedding anniversary and I wanted to create something for her. I wanted to see how I could turn a ‘1’ into something that made sense in this world that I’ve created.