“This has got to be most entertaining thing that’s happened here in a while.”
So said one of the research assistants in Drexel’s Music and Entertainment Lab, as Drexel Magazine staff writer Maria Zankey and I went about the work of attempting to dress up “Hubo,” one of Drexel’s seven remarkable humanoid robots, as … John Lennon. Circa 1971.
And I assure you: This was no easy task.
From almost the first moment that I knew we would be writing about Professor Youngmoo Kim’s robotics project for this issue of the magazine, one question lingered in the back of my mind: How in the world could we photograph these musical robots (they can dance, and they can play music, and very soon, they may be able to do a whole lot more) in a way that would make clear to our readers just how amazing they are?
It was a question I lingered over for a week or so. Then, one day while walking through the halls of the Main Building, the proverbial light bulb turned on. “Hey, these are musical robots,” I thought to myself. “So why not shoot them as the most famous pop group in world history? Why not recreate the Beatles’ Abbey Road cover?”
And so began our strange odyssey here at the magazine: Finding a photographer brave enough to take on such a challenging assignment (in the supremely talented Melissa Marie Hernandez, we found precisely that person); walking the streets of University City, trying to find an intersection that kinda-sorta looked like the one on the famous cover (there aren’t many, I assure you); examining that cover image down to every last detail, figuring out which visual cues needed to be there to make this thing work (we borrowed that white Volkswagen, by the way); and, finally and most perplexingly, attempting to find clothing that not only matched the items worn by the Fab Four for Abbey Road, but also fit the Hubos themselves. Mind you, these robots stand at the height of your average four-year-old, but are built like your average weightlifting champion.
Which brings us back to that day in the MET-lab, where Maria and I laboriously went through a bag of thrift-store clothing and struggled to fit too-small jackets (white for John, blue for Ringo, brown for Paul, denim for George) over Hubo’s too-broad shoulders. It was a quite a scene, as was the day that we actually attempted to get this shoot done out at 35th and Baring Streets, with the Hubos lined up in the city crosswalk and passersby by wondering what on earth we were doing out there, fussing over and photographing four-foot-tall robots dressed up in ancient, dingy clothing.
But in the end?
Well, I think it all worked out. Hernandez delivered a beautiful Abbey Road-ish image (and a few other amazing images, too), and my silly idea became reality: There were the Hubos, as the Beatles.
We hope you got a kick out of the image, and we hope, too, that you’ll enjoy this issue of Drexel Magazine. As always, we invite you to share your thoughts, criticisms, comments and more by writing us at [email protected].
Thanks for reading.
Tim Hyland / Editor (June 2011 – April 2013)