We see time and time again that making a video game always comes with unexpected challenges. It’s the exact same in movies too, and working with real animatronics for theFive Night at Freddy’smovie presented director Emma Tammi and her team with a lot more challenges than usual. Having to work with several hulking robots dressed up as animals can’t have been easy, especially when one of them decides to go up in flames on a random evening.
That’s apparently what happened on the set of Five Nights at Freddy’s during one fateful filming session, as the Foxy animatronic decided it was bored of waiting around for its time to shine and set its own arm on fire. This story was told by Tammi in a recent interview withIGN, in which she was asked about any weird techincal difficulties that occured while working with the animatronics.
“There was one day where we were rolling and I heard someone quietly and calmly say ‘Foxy’s arm is on fire’,” laughs Tammi. “And I looked over and one of the servos had been going for quite some time and had overheated, which happens sometimes.”
“This was actually the only time it happened on set, and it just started smoking and everyone calmly walked away. We put it out and switched out the arm but yeah, there were live robotic elements at play and sometimes they only have a certain amount of time they can operate.”
Right now, you may be thinking that Tammi and her team could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by just using CG for the animatronics, but Tammi goes on to explain that she and series creator Scott Cawthorn wanted to “pay homage” to the late nineties and early naughties due to the movie’s setting, and wanted to try and make Five Nights at Freddy’s “the way movies were made back then”. Obviously, that comes with more technical problems to potentially overcome, but the effort to use real animatronics does show in the trailers.
It’s not too long before we get to see Freddy Fazbear and friends up on the silver screen, as the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie will release in theatres and on the streaming service Peacock on October 25. There’s a chance we may see more movies in the future too, as Tammirecently expressed her desire to create a trilogy of movies based on the series, but only if the first one is liked and performs well. Given that it’salready made back its $25 million budget before release, we can safely assume that the latter is in the bag.
