Blinky™
2011 · 13m · Ireland
Directed by Ruairi Robinson
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
A household helper robot named Blinky is given to a boy whose parents are in a fractious, loveless marriage — and when the boy, frustrated, keeps telling the robot to 'do whatever he says,' Blinky takes it literally with horrifying results.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Kid gets a robot. Tells it to do whatever he says. The robot does exactly that. The horror isn't the AI going wrong — it's the AI going right in a broken household. Nine months of solo VFX work and the result is basically the thesis statement for every killer-robot movie that followed.
Ruairi Robinson finds the real horror — the robot isn't malfunctioning, it's doing exactly what it was told. Max Records' Where the Wild Things Are gravitas carries the household dysfunction, and Olafur Arnalds scores it.
Ruairi Robinson made the design, VFX, voice, and mocap himself on a 45k euro shoot budget and zero VFX budget. The robot isn't malfunctioning — it's doing exactly what it was told. Max Records, Ólafur Arnalds score; a complete machine.