Know Your Neighbor: Robert Niosi, Animator/Movie Prop Designer, Briarcliff Manor

Last week, Robert Niosi took a curious visitor to his home all the way to the year 5795.

Well, not really, even if a digital readout displayed that the people in the room time traveled more than 3,700 years into the future.

Niosi was actually showing off a near replica that he built of the prop from the 1960 science fiction movie “The Time Machine,” based on the novel by H.G. Wells. The biggest difference is that Niosi’s contraption, which he completed in 2015 after taking 12 painstaking years to build, is of better quality than what was used in Hollywood nearly six decades ago. Otherwise, it appears virtually identical.

“As far as traveling in time, so far it’s only traveling at the speed you and I are traveling. That’s it,” he said. “I haven’t been able to get it to go in any other direction yet – but I’m working on it.”

Before dismissing Niosi, 64, as a kook, understand that he was seven years old when his father took him to see “The Time Machine.” As a child, the film ignited his imagination and was the biggest inspiration behind Niosi becoming a stop-motion animator and movie prop designer.

“I came into this project understanding tools and materials, but there was a lot to learn, especially about casting and machinery,” he said.

“The truth is there are folks that simply didn’t understand what would motivate me to do that. I can’t exactly tell you what motivates me, but I think a lot of people are compelled to make stuff. It’s in our DNA. Not everybody, but people who do crafty things.”

During the construction of the machine, Niosi was contacted by a Toronto-based filmmaker, Jay Cheel, who was planning a documentary about time travel. It was in the early 2000s, shortly after an entity named John Titor appeared. Titor claimed to have traveled from 2036, making outlandish predictions about the future.

After being exposes as a hoax, Cheel switched gears and made Niosi and theoretical physicist Ronald Mallet, who has researched the possibility of time travel, the subjects of his film called “How to Build a Time Machine.”

It was released in 2015 and a screening is scheduled for this Thursday evening at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville. He will appear in a post-screening Q&A with Mallett and Cheel.

“This may be the last time it goes to the big screen before it goes digital,” Niosi said.

For the past two years, it has made the film festival circuit across the United States and internationally, and has attracted two distinct crowds – science geeks and artists.

Niosi, who was born in Brooklyn and spent most of his childhood in Patchogue, L.I., would take his father’s 8-mm camera to create seconds-long homemade films. After high school, he spent one year at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, but found school too restrictive.

“I got antsy and I just wanted to go out there and do it,” Niosi recalled. “So I got myself a 16-mm Bolex camera, I quit school and I started working.”

He freelanced as an animator, building his portfolio by working on commercials, television programs, including “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” music videos, industrial and pharmaceutical films and feature films.

After Niosi and his family moved from Hoboken, N.J. to Briarcliff Manor, he had more time on his hands as he worked from home and became a stay-at-home dad. Through the Internet, Niosi realized there were likeminded people who loved “The Time Machine” and had built their own version.

Using his artistic wherewithal, he built the machine. Nioisi collected materials from far and wide – an antique barber chair which he upholstered with velvet mohair; the dish, which he bought from a company in Vancouver that makes water tank tops; a music box that plays the film’s score; and a readout of the year he’s traveling to when the dish spins.

It has been suggested to Niosi to place it in an exhibit. Instead, it sits in a downstairs room in his house. He would sell it only for $802,701 – the year that the time traveler visits in “The Time Machine.”

“The only reason why I would sell it (is) the money would enable me to do the next project,” Niosi said.