San Bernardino-based company Garner Holt Productions (GHP) took over all animatronic builds from Walt Disney Imagineering a few years back, according to The Disney Blog. Their latest figure is a super-expressive Abraham Lincoln bust, which they revealed at at a recent open house.
GHP describe their figure, which uses a proprietary silicone skin mask, as the "most advanced humanoid robotic head ever created."
On MiceChat, the company's founder Garner Holt writes:
This is a figure we've been developing — the one at our open house is actually the "phase II" version of the concept — and the reaction was absolutely stunning (it was overwhelmingly positive at Comic-Con, too, where we showed a short video clip of the head in development). The Lincoln bust is part of GHP's Expressive Head Project, where we've endeavored to add realistic facial expression to animatronics in order to add an extra dimension of lifelike movement (a subtle way of saying, "We crammed more than 40 unique motions into this animatronic head!")…
The skin is the real star of the figure, and is so malleable it can replicate wrinkling around the eyes, crinkling the nose, and a variety of strikingly lifelike creases that appear and disappear as the face moves from expression to expression—it's incredible! Most importantly, it's been thoroughly tested to prove it's highly durable for theme park use…
The animatronic Lincoln bust we showcased at our open house represents the current state of the art in mechanical animation. It's also the first in a new line of super-expressive animatronic products we're calling "The Living Faces of History," which we will market not only to our traditional theme park clients but to museums and cultural centers as a means of bringing cutting-edge technology into alternative narrative-driven locations.
