Ed Week 7: Hel

Hel is the name of a human woman but is used here to refer to the inventors robot. Originally made to represent his lost love (Hel) who chose to marry the master of metropolis instead and ultimately die giving birth to Freder, she will later be forced to take on the face of maria to discredit her in the eyes of the workers.

 

 When designing Hel's face I started with the human before the robot. I looked at many different features to show a motherly face with the resemblance to Freder particularly in the colouring.

In the end I wanted a person who looked very much like a person. Hel doesn't look nearly so polished as Freder and has visible wrinkles, bags under her eyes and various subtle imperfections. These were important in establishing the character of the inventor through her.

A lot of these imperfections would be smoothed over or obliterated when I came to design the face of the robot. As the inventor recreates his lost love he does not create a true replica; gradually he twists it to be an idealized version of Hel and she loses a lot of the personality from her face to become more of a doll. By creating this Automaton the inventor has essentially chosen the face of this woman over the personality of the original and as such he works to an idealized vision he's creating for himself.

This subtle difference, the desire to change and 'perfect' the one he loved also shows us subtly why she picked a different man to marry in the end and allows us to see a layer of Hel and the inventor also when she was alive that we might not see in their own character designs.

 

When it came to designing the robot frame and body it was her name that provided the ultimate inspiration. Hel is also a figure from Norse mythology, the Daughter of Loki and in charge of once of the realms of the dead she's described as 'half blackened and half flesh'  this coupled with the idea that she's been built in secret largely out of scrap influenced her final look.

Part of the final image is her dressed in an approximation of maria's clothing, changed to look like Maria. She retains a portion of her original features as the underlying structure of her metal skull remain the same but she's been changed enough that most workers who are only familiar with their spokeswoman from a distance or description would mistake her for Maria. Her clothes are ever so slightly too new, too unbroken, as a reference to the inexperience with these things that the upper-class citizens who dressed her in them have.