Chris Clarke's animatronic baby is a tiny wonder from the uncanny valley

A video has begun making the rounds and it's, well, going to disturb you a little bit, sorry. It's an animatronic baby designed by special effects guru Chris Clarke, to be used in an unnamed UK soap

opera. While your immediate reaction might be to think that this is merely the first in an all-out assault from the uncanny valley, Clarke explains in the comments that there's something much less ominous at play here: you simply can't put an actual, premature baby under TV studio set lights for hours at a time. It's also not Clarke's first work on infants, as you can see at the 4:45 minute mark in the second video below. Clarke also did some of the special effects work for War Horse, enabling scenes that otherwise would have harmed an actual horse.

So the animatronics are creepy, but they're also preventing real humans and animals from suffering for our entertainment. Feel better now? Yeah, us neither.

 

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