Fascinating article on bringing Frank the robot to life for the current tour, with contributions from Mark Hough and Sam Pattinson (Treatment Studio) has been published as follows:
WIRED
Here’s how Queen’s giant live show robot was reborn
after 40 years
3 December 2017 by Sian Bradley
Queen fans rejoice; the robot drawn on Queen’s 1977 News of the World album has been animated for the stage. Here’s how Frank was built to entertain us.
Queen & Adam Lambert Robot: 02 Animatics from Mark Hough
– https://vimeo.com/229582224
Queen + Adam Lambert
An illustration of a child-like robot with murderous tendencies from the 1970s has been super-sized for the live stage. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Queen’s News of the World album, the 3D animation is joining Queen and Adam Lambert on tour. With piercing red eyes, a long angular nose, overly-plumped lips and a rounded torso, the giant Metropolis-esque robotic animation will appear on LED screens to entertain Queen fans throughout the show. The metal robot lived solely on the album covers of the 1977 album, which included We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. Now, Frank, named after his illustrator, will loom above Brian May, Roger Taylor (two of the remaining living members of the band) and Adam Lambert (who replaces Freddie Mercury). He will also be revamped in a special box set of Queen’s landmark album.
To build a 3D model from nothing more than a sketch, artist Mark Hough began with a low-poly face model. “I had to find a model that looked like a face but with low enough detail so I could pull him around like clay,” Hough explains. He pulled, stretched and morphed the face through nine different revisions, until it was perfect. READ MORE
Crash testing revealed that Frank worked perfectly. He just had a dodgy finger