‘Sunny’: How Joanna Sotomura, Puppet Boot Camp, 100 Concept Sketches Helped Bring Bot to Life
variety.comJazz Tangcay Artisans Editor It took 13 puppeteers to bring AppleTV+’s titular robot “Sunny” to life. Joanna Sotomura, the American performer who embodies the ominously helpful bot, flew to Tokyo where the series was filmed to meet the robotics team two weeks before filming began. “We had our robot dojo space.
I would do the rehearsals and scenes as Joanna, and they would put tape on my stomach for Sunny’s eye line, and I’d be rigged in a helmet with a ring light.
A monitor and camera tacked my facial expressions and projected to the robot in real-time,” says Sotomura. “Sunny” follows Rashida Jones as Suzie Sakamoto, an American housewife living in Kyoto.
The buddy mystery pairs Suzie with the title character, an intelligent “homebot” named Sunny that has been left to Suzie by her missing husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima).
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