This month Monster Legacy celebrates 5 years of successful publication! Did not believe I could get this far, and I look forward to writing more in the following years! Heartfelt thanks to all my collaborators and followers. Thank you everyone.

I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over – and the insect is awake.

Screenwriter Charles Edward Pogue first approached producer Stuart Cornfield to produce a remake of The Fly, one of the most influential science-fiction films of the 1950s. In conceiving the remake, the core concept the two agreed on was to essentially alter the manner in which the protagonist transforms. Cornfield told Cinefex: “when Chuck Pogue came into my office and said he wanted to remake The Fly, we screened the original film and decided a straight remake wouldn’t be as interesting as a change of the basic premise from a head-switching to a metamorphosis.” From there, Pogue’s pitch evolved around an introvert scientist having to deal with the progressive corruption and transformation of his body into that of a monstrous hybrid of man and fly — an idea influenced by David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, as well as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, two films that dealt with the contrast between the ‘inner man’ and the ‘outer appearance’.

While the script changed pertaining to certain aspects — such as character names and careers — its essential core, turns and twists remained consistent throughout its development. The duo presented the story to David Cronenberg — a choice based on his earlier films (such as The Brood,Videodrome and Scanners) which shared the common theme of what had essentially become a subgenre in science-fiction and horror: body horror, or the mutation and distortion of the human form. “I had always admired David’s work,” Cornfield recalled, “but found it lacking a certain linear quality, which The Fly had. I thought it would be a good project that would enable him to go from A to Z, rather than from A to 10.”

Expectedly, Cronenberg immediately connected with Pogue’s story and ideas; at the same time, however, he wanted to alter other aspects of it. He said: “there were some brilliant things in Pogue’s script, things I could relate to, things that felt like me. But I felt the characters and dialogue were rather 1950s. There was a lot of extraneous detail I wasn’t interest in, but there was also a core of wonderful details — basically the rethinking of the transformatins, the things that happen to the character, the concept of the chromosomal fusion of man and fly. All the little details that people think o as uniquely mine were already there.” Cronenberg strongly agreed with Pogue on the need to overhaul the original film’s story, defining the 1958 The Fly as “stiff and melodramatic,” as well as “a B-movie, despite the fact that it was in widescreen and stereophonic sound.”

However enthusiastic about the project, Cronenberg at the time was committed to Total Recall; Cornfield thus proceeded with the project without him, hiring British director Robert Bierman for the film, based on his horror short film The Dumb Waiter. The project, with a 9 million budget thanks to Mel Brooks’ collaboration, was to have effects provided by Christopher Tucker. The film however came to a halt when Bierman received the notice that his daughter had been killed in an industrial accident. Some time afterwards, Cronenberg — whose work on Total Recall had been terminated — was actually hired for the project; his only request was to rewrite the characters and dialogue of the film.

Cronenberg and Brundle.

The director’s first choice to helm the film’s wide array of special effects demands was Rick Baker, who had already collaborated with the director for Videodrome‘s visceral transformation and gore effects. Baker, however, was already committed to Sondra Locke’s Ratboy and had to refuse. It was then that the director offered the special effects work of the film to Chris Walas, who not only had worked on Cronenberg’s own Scanners, but had also created the Monster effects for other films such as Gremlins and Enemy Mine. With a tight preparation time of less than two months, Walas and Cronenberg immediately began brainstorming on how the transformation would actually proceed. The two settled on five progressive make-up stages (from facial discoloration to full-body latex appliances) which would ultimately culminate in a final stage hybrid creature represented by a series of animatronic elements.

Walas decided that in order to properly design all the make-up phases the project first needed to establish the design of the final stage of Brundlefly. Design work was assigned to Walas’s coworkers of Chris Walas Inc.. The concept artists involved in the creation of the monstrous hybrid’s appearance conceived a wide array of ideas, ranging from Stephan Dupuis’s more conservative concepts, reminiscent of the 1958 original, to Kelly Lepkowsky’s chitinous concepts, to Harold Weed’s more human-like designs. Cronenberg instead did not want a creature that steered in either direction, but rather something absolutely unseen. “At one time the drawings tended to be very insectlike,” Walas said, “which was too far in one specific direction. David insisted that the evolution was not human or insect, but that the two entities were headed toward some new reality.”

Another theme to consider was that the mutation in the film is treated as a cancer-like disease. “A lot of the original designs were based on the uniform evolution of a specific creature,” Walas continues, “so many of the developments that everyone did were symmetrical, balanced designs. David initially thought that might be the way to go, but then Stuart described the story as ‘the ultimate cancer movie’ and that this process was actually a horrible disease. David liked that, so we went out and got some very graphic books on disease. We did some designs along those lines as well, but they went a little too much the other way.”

One of the maquettes.

Eventually, the crew steered towards what began to be called the “Space Bug” approach, which essentially consisted in conceiving a creature whose physical traits represented a diseased, distorted halfway point between man and insect, with prominent asymmetry and withered appendages. The intention behind the design was to show that the laboratory computer’s supposedly “logical” fusion of Brundle and the fly results in a new species that has no purpose, nor can survive, in the natural order. Walas elaborated: “although man and fly are headed toward a specific genetic end, it is not a balanced or viable end. It’s basically a deformed thing that we’re seeing, not the robust organism that would spring from a naturally ordained genetic development.”

Another requirement were human-like eyes with eyelids. “The fusion creature definitely does not have the eyes of an insect,” Cronenberg commented. “Maybe if I were a kid among the audience this would be what I’d be complaining about, but I wanted it to have some human expressiveness.” This especially comes into play in the final moments of the film, where it is through sheer body language that Brundle finally begs to be killed.

Once the final design of the “Space Bug” was established, all of the make-up designs representing the preceding stages of Brundle’s transformation were “reverse-engineered” starting from it. Brundle’s body mutates into a distorted, diseased version of itself, with a developing Brundlefly inside of it. The filmmakers based this concept on an insect metamorphosis, and conceived Brundle’s outer body as a cocoon for the Monster inside.

Even before any major modification occurs, the first change that is seen is represented by the thick fly hairs growing out of the wound on Brundle’s back; the hairs were made of nylon monofilament fishline. They were trimmed and tapered at their extremities and tinted with black ink to create a translucent effect. The Stage I make-up seen early in the film was designed after an allergic rash and consisted mostly of dabs of varying colours applied to discolour Goldblum’s face. Fly hairs represented a subtle final touch to the face.

The Stage II make-up is seen when Brundle tries to cut off the fly hairs on his back, and ends up biting off one of his fingernails. The face sported further discolouration and more fly hairs. The appliance included plastic warts and pimples. For the scene where one of Brundle’s fingers spurts fluid onto the mirror, Dupuis devised three fingertip urethane appliances, which were moulded in two layers and included small canals through which two syringes could pump the fluid (dubbed ‘fly-juice’ by the crew). The fingertips were made of dental acrylic and inserted into precut grooves. The fluid was a mixture of glycerine, zinc oxide, methycel, and yellow food colouring. The fluid would squirt out of holes directly below the appliances’ false nail areas. The structure of the appliance, its fragility and the necessity of hiding it from camera restricted Goldblum’s range of movement, and dictated that the scene had to be shot out of sequence.

After a month of separation, Quaife visits Brundle again and finds him in the Stage III configuration. The facial appliances were sculpted by Stephan Dupuis. A trigger system unhooked a false ear (moulded in translucent plastisol) to fall off a mask positioned on the actor’s head. Since a cast of Goldblum’s actual ears proved to result in an inappropriately protruding effect, a cast of Michael Jobe’s ears was used instead.

Stage IV-A was the phase that bridged the singular make-up appliances of the precedent stages with the full body-suit appliance of the next stage. This stage was characterized by the hernia-like bulge which would later be revealed (in a deleted scene) to house the development of one of Brundle’s new insect-like limbs. After two failed attempts — which included new arm and head appliances — “for the third try, we made him a new set of arms and put bulges on his back,” Dupuis said, “distorted his body by gluing other pieces of foam onto his leotard and, on the left side of his pelvic area, the bulge.” The final head make-up for the stage was a slightly altered version of the Stage III head, which covered the top of the actor’s head and went around the ears. Dupuis replaced the face with Stage IV-A’s and blended the edges.

It is in this stage that Brundle is first seen walking on ceilings like a fly — an iconic sequence which was achieved with a complex rotating set (a giant chain-driven drum of culvert steel, 25 feet in height and 24 feet in diameter) combined with a fixed camera. The first was aptly dubbed the fly wheel. Cronenberg himself first tested the set, wearing fake fly wings and antennae and improvising a comical monologue about his failed amorous relationship with a praying mantis. For the sequence, Dupuis — under Walas’s instructions — devised hand and feet prosthetics that featured heavy coating of 407 latex, giving them the necessary traction for the scene, and that were also able to withstand multiple takes.

The body suits of the following Stage IV-B were sculpted by Howie Weed, Keith Admire, Bill Stoneham, Mark Williams, Conrad Itchener, and Stephan Dupuis,based on moulds of Jeff Goldblum’s body taken in a crouching, hunched position. They were painted by Margaret Bessara. Jonathan Horton supervised the construction process. Intense activity in the shop dictated that its members had to switch tasks depending on the timetable. Walas explained: “a team of sculptors worked on the body suits because there was an incredible amount of pressure to get them together as soon as possible and because they had to be done in numerous pieces to move correctly. I think we had a week-and-a-half to sculpt, mould and go through every stage. We were limiting ourselves to half a day to sculpt a forearm or the neckpiece. When we actually put the suit together, we began to notice subtle differences in sculpting style. Some pieces worked together great and others were just different. These pieces had to be redressed and recoloured to adjust the differences — most of which had to be done on location because we didn’t have a chance to suit Jeff until we got there.”

The body suits displayed further levels of deformation in the skin, as well as vestigial fingers and toes, warts, and various protuberances. They were moulded in separate foam latex pieces which required at least four hours of application and blending on the actor. Stage IV-B also featured preludes to webbed fingers and clustering feet.

The suits were composed of a leg section, two torso sections (one for the upper torso, one for the lower torso and crotch), hands and feet sections, a neck section, and a head section. The joining points were blanded with thin strips of latex. Dupuis said: “when we started out, we glued the bottom pants section and the torso together with Kreyton, because the stress and strain was so great around the crotch and pelvic area, along with the problem of foam shrinkage, that it came undone right away. If we had done it that way, he would’ve spent more time in the make-up room than on the set!” Initially, the sheen was achieved with spritzing, a method that was replaced later in production with SD-89 (a clear and flexible lacquer). Stage IV-B also included a wig with bald spots, created by Bob Kelly, as well as prosthetic crooked teeth with receding gums and a cleft in the lower gum area.

Stage IV-B is only seen in the deleted Baboon-Cat sequence, as well as another deleted scene that follows it. It is in the latter scene that Brundle’s hernia bulge splits open, unvealing a new, withered fly leg, which Brundle bites off and spits out, letting it fall off the iron awning he is on and onto the street below. This sequence was achieved by positioning the actor on a platform below the awning, with only his head, shoulders and arms rising through a hidden opening which was blended with a false foam latex torso. The fly leg was cable-controlled, and it was pushed out by Guy Hudson through a precut area of the torso. To suggest the grisly fleshy bits that Goldblum bites off with his prosthetic teeth, stripes and shreds of latex were twisted under the leg, completed with Walas’ own ‘Ultraslime’. The severed leg twitches thanks to cable controls fed through a hole of the set floor. The scene’s deletion from the final cut of the film explains why the final Brundlefly creature only has one withered fly leg instead of two.

Stage V‘s face was designed by Walas himself. This phase, the last to be represented by Goldblum himself, had cancerous growths and bulges, and a prominent head — all suggesting the creature inside the outer body progressively growing and pushing its exterior features out. Much like Stage IV-B, it included wigs (with increased bald spots) and prosthetic gums (initially with few remaining teeth, and then devoid of teeth; a special ‘dislodging tooth’ set of dentures was considered, but ultimately never constructed).

A new element in this stage was represented by the distorting contact lenses put on Goldblum’s eyes, in order to decrease their humanity. Dupuis recalled: “we were thinking about lenses at the beginning, but Jeff was leery about them. Chris sculpted the Stage V appliance and gave it a drooping eye, a bit more closed, with the eyelid puffed up. One thing that really bothered people about the make-up was that the eyes still looked completely human. The eyes are the thing you look at in the face, and they were a dead giveaway. We tested old large lenses at first, but they made Jeff look like a cartoon character — like Mickey Mouse with those big black dots for eyes. There aren’t many people making special coloured lenses in soft form, but Marc-ami Boyman, an associate producer on the picture, knew a contact lens specialist — Peter Weickoff, our saviour — ho could do soft prescription lenses. Because the head was sculpted on a slant, what we needed was a larger-than-human-sized lens for one eye and a normal-sized lens for the other, giving a lopsided, irregular effect. Peter did a real nice job. They’re very dark brown and have a black marble look to them.”

Stage V was also represented by a series of purpose-specific insert animatronics. A ‘flex-o-jaw’ head and torso puppet was used for the scene where Brundle inhumanly unhinges his jaw and vomits his digestive acid on Borans’s ankle and hand (the effects of the acid were represented by a layered gelatin model for the hand, and a collapsing insert animatronic for the leg).

Another animatronic, not seen in the final film, was used for a deleted scene of Brundle consuming the remains of Borans’s foot through a fly-like proboscis, which was built by Donald Bies with clear urethane (dictated by its transparency) and brass components. Only the exterior of the proboscis was moulded, whereas the interior was fabricated. The inner mechanism that operated it was covered with flexible plastic. The animatronic’s jaw, which opened down and outward to unveal the proboscis, was devised by Blair Clark, whereas the eyes and lips were cable-controlled. The puppet was maneuvered through an operating rod from behind, whereas Chris Walas — beneath the camera — held a prop shoe with his arms, dressed with the Stage V arm appliances.

A third full-bust puppet was identical to the first bust animatronic, save for a release mechanism in place of the flexing jaw feature. It was used for the key sequence where Quaife accidentally tears Brundle’s lower jaw off, beginning his final transformation. Brundle finally metamorphoses, or moults into the Brundlefly creature. Much like most insects, Brundlefly pushes the outer layers off by pumping itself with air. In devising the transformation effects, Walas attempted to avoid the cliches of precedent films. “There is a transformation scene in The Fly, but we consciously tried to avoid the standard cliche of stretching rubber by trying something new,” Walas said. “One of my concerns — which I expressed to David early on — was not wanting Brundle’s final transformation to be a Howling-style transformation in which the story stops to admire the effects, because that’s not what this film is about. In many respects, The Fly is a special effects movie, but first and foremost it’s a story of a person and what happens to him.”

The transformation was conveyed through a series of insert puppets shown in close-ups. Brundle’s hand, tightly grasping Quaife’s, is first focused upon. It grows two long insect claws. The transformation arm was cable-controlled, and was built with an aluminium understructure. The stretching claws were operated through a master-slave system with a small hydraulic cylinder.

The legs and feet shed their skins and emit fluid. The secretion, which is released with the shedding during the entire transformation, was devised by Bob Hall. It was a combination of methycel, food colourings, acrylic tints, and water thickened with binders and disintegrators. The transformation feet were devised by Kelly Lepkowsky, Jim Isaac, Keith Edmire, and Guy Hudson. The feet had an internal rod structure bent at a 90-degree angle which, after the bend, went nelow the set floor where puppeteers maneuvered the transformation. The feet had precut foam latex skin combined with urethane foam skin for specific texturized areas. For the shot where Brundle’s right clawed foot ‘steps out’ of its outer skin layer, a separate set-up was operated with rods pulling apart to tear the skin from the foot.

Brundle’s legs change shape — an effect achieved with a waist-down puppet, suspended from a wooden brace. The legs were internally supported by wooden rods. The right leg was hinged with a reversible knee joint, which snapped back into a backward-bent position by pushing a pole from beneath the set floor. The left leg was instead devised to portray the formation of a fourth joint. Another close-up briefly glimpsed at shows Brundlefly’s other withered fly leg bursting from a bulge — an effect that used a set-up similar to the one devised for the earlier deleted rooftop sequence.

Working on the extending head puppet.

The transformation reaches its climax when Brundlefly’s head swells by pumping itself with air, and pushes the outer layers of Brundle’s head out, revealing at last the ‘Space Bug”s monstrous appearance within a chaos of falling flesh and secreted fluid. The transformation head, dubbed the ‘extend-o-head’ was supervised by Lepkowsky, and was devised as a full-bust animatronic with an inner structure built in aluminium, and an outer structure constructed in fiberglass. It was maneuvered with cables combined with a master-slave system that connected two hydraulic cylinders. The skin was moulded in foam latex and latex.

Lepkowsky recalled: “this was the first time we’d ever used anything other than cable pulls, actually. We needed to have more pushing than pulling, not only on the transformation head, but on several of the rigs. The head was very challenging because we needed something that compressed to fit inside the basic dimensions of a human head, which we pushed to the extreme. It’s slightly distorted, but we were able to fit most of the forms of the Space Bug’s head inside a facsimile of Jeff’s Stage V make-up.” The portion of the transformation animatronic that went from the neck to the mid-head pushed forward hydraulically whilst the eyes and the top portion of the head — a cable-pulled hemisphere — performed another forward movement. The combined, simultaneous movements pushed the outer flesh and skin (moulded again in latex) out, causing it to fall off. Two syringes pumped another version of the fly fluid (this time an iridescent compound of microencapsulated liquid crystals in an oil solution).

Perhaps the most gruesome detail in the entire transformation was represented by the tearing of Brundle’s human eyes. The peculiar effect was achieved with condoms filled with thinned KY Jelly, torn shreds of latex portraying the broken sclera, food colouring and thread. The condoms were stretched to a point of tension, and painted like Brundle’s distorted Stage V eyes. The reverse sides were joined with three taps that connected to portions of monofilament fishline which attached to different points of the head: when the head expanded, the tabs pulled and tore the condoms apart.

With the transformation complete, Stage VI — the ‘Space Bug’ — is unvealed. Construction of both this creature and the following stage were supervised by Jon Berg. The Space Bug was a full-size animatronic creature, combined with a set of insert animatronic legs. A small working model was first built to foresee what issues the puppet might meet in the confines of  the set. The full-size Space Bug was sculpted in clay by Chris Walas, Jon Berg, Mark Williams, Michael Smithson, Valerie Sofranko, and Zandra Platzek. Platzek and Williams roughed out the basic forms; Walas sculpted the head, right leg, and parts of the body, and applied the final touches to the overall sculpture; Smithson sculpted the left leg; Williams and Platzek worked on the arms and body.

The Space Bug featured an inner armature built in fiberglass and steel, and skin moulded in foam latex, latex, or urethane, depending on the specific section; this expedient decreased the overall weight of the puppet, easing the puppeteers’ work. “If we had made the entire skin out of foam latex, it would have weighed three times as much and taken three times the effort to move,” Walas explained. “The technique was borrowed from a method I employed on Dragonslayer, which was to use flexible skins only in areas that moved as opposed to giving everything a general movement. That approach, in fact, is much more in line with insects, which have joint areas with moving skin and membranes, unlike the general overall movement of a human subject.” The creature was painted by Peter Babakitas and Zandra Platzek, and finally covered with a thin layer of Ultraslime and the iridescent fly fluid.

Berg collaborated with Guy Hudson and Donald Bies to devise the mechanisms of the puppet. Jim Isaac and Kelly Lepkowsky also collaborated in its construction. Brundlefly was puppeteered with an operator-guided counterbalance system: the puppet moved in a direction that was opposite to the movements imparted by the puppeteer. Berg himself was harnessed behind the animatronic’s tubular steel support structure. When Berg shifted his weight, the puppet emulated his motion. Mechanical connections inside the puppet were devised to change relationship with the primary lever — thus altering the position of the puppet’s body. Eyes, head parts, arms, and hands were cable-controlled.

Despite its complexity, the animatronic could not perform everything that was required by the sequences Brundlefly was shown in. “There were things that it couldn’t do,” Berg recalled, “but it could give certain broad movements and the illusion that it could do more which, for me, is one of the best essences of a good effect — giving the audience the assumption that they could have seen more.” Regardless of that, Walas was extremely satisfied with the Space Bug, and referred to it as his favourite special effect in the film. “Even though the principles are very basic — it’s a big puppet in the truest sense of the word,” he said, “the actual intricacy of its design is quite innovative. There are a lot of standard cable-controlled techniques applied to the close-up movements of its face and fingers, but the specifics of Jon’s slave system are unique and it has a beauty of simplicity and effectiveness. I wish its scene had been longer so that we could’ve given it more to do.”

The puppet was only filmed from the waist up; for shots of its moving legs, insert animatronic legs, whose construction was supervised by Mark Walas, were built. They were puppeteered through a cart suspended on a track above them; their motion was puppeteered with a series of levers and linkages.

The overall performance of the puppet was based on Jeff Goldblum’s own movements as the progressively mutating Brundle, as well as actual insects. The seldom stiff movements, Cronenberg found, actually rendered it more realistic. He said in his commentary of the film: “if you watch an insect, you know that they do move like little puppets — they can have a little puppet-like motion. […] So it was possible to replicate that with the motion you see with the puppet.”

The film’s final moments portray Brundle’s ultimate decay, as his monstrous form is fused with part of one of his own telepods — creator merging with creation. The almost biomechanical monstrosity (Stage VII) that results from the process was labeled as Brundlebooth, or Brundlething by the special effects crew, and was designed by Walas. Construction of the full-size puppet was supervised by Howie Weed and Jonathan Horton; newly cast pieces of the Space Bug sculpt, as well as leftovers, were used.

The gruesome side of Brundlepod’s body.

Weed explained: “we took the head, arms and stomach section and put them all together to resemble something basically like the Space Bug, then fabricated a completely new back section which was made out of everything but the kitchen sink. We had latex, garbage bags, rubber tubing, bits and pieces of stuff that the production sent us from the set; so we had some continuity going on. I think almost everyone in the shop had something to do with it, but the bits and pieces fell down to Jonathan and me. The whole thing was thrown together in about two weeks, from Chris handing us the maquette to us packing it into a box.”

Much like the Space Bug puppet, the Brundlething had cable-controlled eyes, mouth appendages, and fingers. Its crawling motion was operated from below the elevated set floor by a crew of nine puppeteers. The head, hands, elbows and torso were connected to rods lowered through groove tracks cut in the floor, which were concealed by a layer of vapour and smoke coming from the telepod. The puppeteers controlling the right and left arm movements coordinated to create an alternated forward motion; others maneuvered the cable-controlled face.

Berg commented on the two puppets of the final moments of the film: “I like to think of these puppets as being condensers for the human element behind them. No matter if they’re pulled by a cable, a string or a stick, it’s the essence of people putting their energy and sympathy into the thing, based on sculptural aesthetic which embodies that potential. Keeping that in mind while you’re building something can produce an effect on the audience that’s more than just a bunch of mechanics moving rubber around. My perception of a good effect is that it’s a strange distillation of technological skill and emotional aesthetics that blend together where it shows, but also somewhere inside the people who are working it. If you need six people to operate a puppet that’s supposed to [have] a personality, it’s like a little baroque orchestra coming together and having a good enough instrument that all of their energies can harmonize on it.”

“In some respects, this is a nature film I’ve made,” Cronenberg concluded. “We are seeing various larval and pupal stages of a Brundlefly. It’s a documentary of the creature — how it comes to exist, how it evolves, how it dies. Some of the stuff people see here as being horrific, well, if they saw a science documentary on real flies they would be just as horrified. I was a junior entomologist and loved reading insect books deep into the night and catching butterflies in Toronto’s ravines. The film’s attention to detail is me playing the role of a naturalist, and it pleases me to have invented an insect and shown people in detail how it works.”

For more images of Brundlefly, visit the Monster Gallery.

Like father, like son: Martinfly

Main article: Brundlefly

JACK
You really scared me, you shithead.

DAVID
Are you going to help me up?

Jack takes David’s extended hand to help him up when
THE WOLF MONSTER SPRINGS!

EXT. MOORS – NIGHT
The lunging beast brings Jack down in one fell swoop.
David falls back on his ass.  Jack is screaming and
struggling as he is torn to shreds.  David scrambles to
his feet and runs in complete panic.  Jack’s screams
and the wolf’s roars combine.

-John Landis, An American Werewolf in London script draft

The unfortunate story of David Kessler and his gruesome transformation into a feral beast began with John Landis’s first draft of An American Werewolf in London, written in 1969; the then young director discussed the story with Rick Baker during filming of Schlock — Landis’s first feature film, as well as one of Baker’s early make-up effects works. Landis’s core idea for the film’s transformation sequence was that such a radical bodily change would be painful for whoever was subject to it — as opposed to previous Werewolf films, where the lap dissolve technique implied that the performer had to remain still in one place. Baker recalled in Beware the Moon: “we both loved the old Lon Chaney stuff and especially the transformations in those kinds of movies; and he just said it didn’t seem right to him that if you were gonna change into a Werewolf or some other creature that you would just sit in the corner of a chair like Lon Chaney Jr. and be perfectly still except each time you’re in a slightly different position when you do the lap dissolves. [Landis] said, […] ‘I want to show the pain. I want him to be able to move around, he’s gonna pull his clothes off, we’re gonna see the whole body change — so figure out how to do that.”

Baker immediately began envisioning how the transformation should be achieved effects-wise. However, Landis’s story had to wait over a decade to be brought to life on the screen. It was only after the success of the director’s earlier films — particularly The Blues Brothers — that the film was finally greenlit by the producers of PolyGram Pictures. During that time, Baker had worked on other projects, and at one point accepted to work on another Werewolf film — thinking that Landis’s would never actually get made. “I had kind of given up on it,” Baker recalled, “I figured it was never going to happen; and as the way things work out, I get a call one day from Joe Dante and Mike Finnell saying, ‘we have this Werewolf movie we’re gonna do, would you be interested in doing it?’ I said, ‘yeah’; and this was The Howling. I started out doing some designs, working on it, and thought this’ll be my chance to use my transformation stuff I’ve thought up, and I didn’t really wanna tell John about it.”

In a twist of fate, Landis finally got his project approved properly when Baker was doing preliminary work on The Howling. “When I called him and said, ‘hey, I got the money, let’s go!’ And he went, ‘I’m doing a Werewolf movie,’ I was like, ‘what?!'” The subsequent conversation was less than pleasant on both sides. Rick Baker recalled, “‘you bastard!’ He was, like, yelling at me on the phone. ‘Well, you’re not going to do a transformation?’ ‘Well, yeah. I kind of told them somewhat about how…’ ‘You son of a bitch!’ He was like screaming at me and stuff.” Baker’s ultimate decision was to leave the project, both because of said call and because his The Howling designs were becoming too similar to what he had reserved for American Werewolf. Effects work for The Howling was left with Rob Bottin — Baker’s protegé at the time — at the helm. This also served to ‘test’ some of those effects in order to refine them for American Werewolf. Shortly after the release of The Howling, Bottin told Fangoria that “I learned from my mistakes, and Rick will be able to see them and learn from them, too.”

DAVID
(pleading, whimpering)
I’m sorry I called you a meat loaf, Jack.

New bolts of agonizing pain wrack through David’s body. He grabs at his pants, pulling them off as if they are burning him. Standing naked in the center of the room, David gasps for air.

He falls to his knees and then forward on his hands. He remains on his hands and knees, trying to master his torment; but it’s no use.  On all fours he gives himself over to the excruciating hurt and slowly begins to change.

The metamorphosis from man into beast is not an easy one.  As bone and muscle bend and reform themselves, the body suffers lacerating pain.  We can actually seeDavid’s flesh move, the rearranging tissue.  His mouth bleeds as fangs emerge.  His whole face distorts as his jaw extends, his skull literally changing shape before our eyes.  His hands gnarl and his fingers curl back as claws burst forward.

The camera pans up to show the full moon outside through the window.  David’s moans change slowly into low guttural growls.  We hear the four footfalls as the WOLF begins to walk.  As the camera pans back over the room, we see the front door pushed open and hear the Wolf padding off into the darkness.

-John Landis, An American Werewolf in London script draft

The director’s idea of the transformation was a visceral one — he wanted to portray the pain that is a direct consequence of such a significant bodily mutation over a short period of time. “I always thought if your body is gonna go through such a huge change, it’s gonna hurt,” Landis said. “I wanted it to be painful.” When it came to the audience, he wanted to evoke in the spectators different emotions; the transformation had to be “horrifying, but also morbidly funny — funny peculiar and funny ha-ha; tragic, raw, terrible, tortuous, grotesque — all of these things, yet fascinating rather than repulsive.” The process had also to be achieved in a realistic, believable way, and was to be shot in bright light until the end of the scene — where an immature Werewolf form (dubbed the ‘man-beast’) is shown in the darkness. Another demand from Landis was that the scene had to be shot in bright light. The resulting sheer complexity of the sequence dictated that it had to be shot last — in the final week of production.

Baker obviously wanted to distance himself from the groundbreaking effects of The Howling, for which Dick Smith had suggested the use of bladders. Baker opted for sharp structural changes — hard structures, instead of inflating ones, pushing from beneath the skin. Initially, Baker’s intention was to build a full transforming animatronic able to perform a self-contained mutation. However, Landis wanted the sequence to focus on specific body parts one after the other for dramatic effect; as such, a series of ‘Change-o-Parts’ was instead devised.

Given the transformation had to be realistic, Baker approached it from a scientific point of view. Humans and wolves are both vertebrates, and both mammals — as such, most components of their skeletons are homologous to each other. “The way I decided to approach the transformation was through comparative anatomy,” Baker explained to Cinefex. “I didn’t have a wolf skeleton in my collection, but I had a dog’s and that was close enough. Comparing it to ahuman, you find that many of the bones are similar; it’s just that the proportions are different. I made lists of the differences — what the major changes were, whether this got shorter or that got longer — then figured out how we could get a suit out of this, in the later stages, that made sense.”

The ‘Change-o-Parts’, based on a cast of David Naughton’s body, included the head, hands, legs, and back. Their skin was moulded in ‘Smooth-on #724’, a urethane compound with considerable stretching abilities (and also “delightfully unpredictable,” according to sculptor Tom Hester). All of them functioned through similar principles. The pneumatic rams that caused the exterior structural changes were home-made air rams, with a large syringe at the operating end and one or more normal-sized syringes in the end that was internal to the puppet. The syringes faced each other, with needles replaced by plastic tubing. When the operator pushed the plunger on the operating end down, air pressure would push the smaller plunger out at the other end. An acrylic form representing the mutated shape was attached to the end of the smaller plunger. Thus, when the plunger was pushed out, the shape was pushed out against the skin, creating the change. Certain parts were also constructed as make-up appliances, and subtle changes were included in each stage of transformation.

When the transformation begins, Kessler snaps in sudden pain, and after undressing for the burning sensation, he looks at his right hand, which now sports a slightly discoloured appearance. The next shot of his face presents a subtle appliance on the underside of his nose, as well as loss of eyebrow hair (a choice derived from the fact wolves do not have them).

During the transformation, Kessler gets progressively hairier. Close-up shots of the hair growing were actually achieved with long hair pulled through urethane skin sections from behind — an action that was filmed in reverse to achieve the desired effect. To ease filming — given that Naughton was not a hairy person at all — the transformation stages with most hair were filmed first, with hair being progressively trimmed to portray the earlier phases. Progressive stages of dentures were also used.

Kessler falls to his knees; at this point, there is a hair increase, as well as a subtle appliance on the corners of the mouth. His hand elongates; this effect is the first ‘Change-o-Part’ to be seen, and involves cable-controlled fingers and a pneumatic ram to achieve the actual stretching motion. The cables had to be able to slide within the arm, so that as the hand stretched they would maintain the ability to control the fingers. The hand was filmed as an insert, aligned with Naughton’s own arm.

In the next shot, the stretched hand is represented by a make-up appliances, and there is a further hair increase and minor facial changes. Changes in the other hand, the legs, and the feet were also represented by respective ‘Change-o-Parts’ that followed similar principles to the first ‘Change-o-Hand’.

Kessler falls on all fours, and his back mutates — showing bones cracking and rearranging themselves. The ‘Change-o-Back’ was built from the lower neck to the glutes, and involved various pneumatically-maneuvered spine and bone shapes and independent vertebrae mechanisms, as well as moving shoulder forms. The air-lines of the rams all converged at a large plywood board. Subtle transforming effects were also provided by small bladders included within overlapping layers beneath the skin. The ‘Change-o-Back’ was the most complex puppet of the sequence, and needed at least ten or more crewmembers to operate it in proper coordination.

After the back changes, Kessler’s transforming body was represented by a fake foam rubber torso — used in combination with a new facial appliance including more lupine teeth, a brow piece, hair pieces and facial hair, as well as hand and arm appliances. The torso included an internal bone structure cast into the foam skin, as well as shoulder blades that were inclined at an angle. “That was the goofiest-looking stage,” Baker admitted, “which fortunately went by pretty quickly. The face was still relatively human, but it had this thick, dark mane from the neck on back. It sort of reminded me of the ‘goons’ — characters in the old Popeye cartoons. This make-up would be pretty together by lunchtime. David had the big rib cage and back on, hand appliances that only left him some use of his thumbs, the fur mane, the face and teeth — and that’s how he went to lunch. I have this hysterical memory of him trying to eat fish and chips all through all that and having a hard time of it.”

Kessler rolls over and falls on his back; there is a new facial make-up and a denser wig. To portray the grotesque and painful elongation of his body, Naughton lay inside a hole underneath the elevated set’s floor, with only his head and arms (all in make-up) visible. A fake lupine body including torso and legs was applied and blended with his head and arms. The body had an inner armature able to bend at specific joints; rods attached to the hips and concealed by the floor were used to manipulate the legs. Baker only got the desired puppeteered animation after filming, when the crewmembers were trying to detach the rods from the puppet. The scenes, however, could not be reshot because they were tightly scheduled in the final week of production.

After another stage of transformation with a body suit, and a further one with a hairier torso appliance, Kessler turns his head upwards — and it mutates horrifyingly. This, for Landis, was the culminating moment of the transformation. “Purposedly, John wanted the head to change last,” Baker explained. “He didn’t want the head to change very much because he wanted the transformation to basically almost climax with the head change.” Interestingly enough, Baker’s original intent was for David’s features to directly mutate into those of the Werewolf — a task that was actually more technically challenging than what was actually done — but Landis opposed that idea. This created the difficulty of creating an aesthetically appropriate stage. “To have David’s face, with everything else already closer to a wolf, would have looked dumb,” Baker said. The problem was solved with further make-up applications on Naughton’s face leaning towards lupine characteristics.

The ‘Change-o-Heads’ constructed for this phase featured a fiberglass inner structure and mechanisms cast in water-extended resin (because the urethane skin had a plasticizer component that corroded plastic). Both heads featured expanding forms for the brow area, snout, and cheekbones. Unlike the other ‘Change-o-Parts’, the extending snout was operated through cable and sheath mechanisms. Through holes in the underskull, acrylic forms could be pushed outward to take the structural changes into effect. The first ‘Change-o-Head’ began from the apperance of the last make-up stage, and stretched up to its range.

A full make-up appliance matching the final configuration of the first ‘Change-o-Head’ acted as a bridge between the two animatronic heads. Its main purpose was to show David’s transformed eyes during the transformation, as Baker was worried that he could not build realistic enough eyes for the ‘Change-o-Heads’; for that reason, he sculpted the heads based on a cast of Naughton’s face with a pained expression, and had them appear with their eyes closed in pain. “I was worried about making eyes that look real enough,” Baker recalled, “and getting the eye mechanism to work in this head that was gonna be stretching and moving. We purposedly closed the eyes in the Change-O-Head — the eyes were squinting up in pain because I just knew it was gonna be a problem to make the eyes look right.”

The second head began from the first’s final, changed configuration matched by the bridge-appliance. It was also designed to be asymmetrical — an intended effect that was not shown in the final film. Baker explained: “one side is more human, one side is more wolf-like, and my thinking was you could start shooting on the human side, it would turn and then you’d get more out of the Change-o-Head. But we found out as we were shooting it, when we turned the head faster — the more movement there was, [the more] you actually didn’t see the stretching-out of the face, which was the kind of big payoff in this whole piece; so we ended up not using it that way with the turning. We ended up with just a straight profile [shot] with it kind of stretching and shaking as it grows out.” Also included in the final cut was a straightforward frontal shot, which partially showed the asymmetrical details (including the subtle change in colouration on the nose). A partial head was built for the growing ear insert shot. Also built, but not actually used for the film, was also a third ‘Change-o-Head’ specifically designed to portray Kessler’s oversized canines erupting from his gums.

The transformation scene ends with an immature Werewolf form, dubbed the ‘man-beast’ by the crew. Sculptor Tom Hester elaborated on its creation: “we had an additional casting of the body for the transformation scene, so we used that, folded it up into a crouched position and then just fabricated some foam arms and shoulders, and I think there was a head, [which] was another casting from the original wolf mould. I took that and carved it down, shrunk it down a little bit. It wasn’t meant to be as big as the final Werewolf. So it was all just sort of cut and paste Polyfoam and then I put latex over the surface of it and laid hair on the body.” The ‘man-beast’ was a rod puppet devoid of internal mechanisms, entirely maneuvered from beneath the elevated set.

The cop enters a side door to find several bloodied corpses.  He hears something, looks over to see the Wolf hunched over a victim.  The Wolf turns, eyes blazing, mouth dripping with blood.  We see it clearly for the first time.  It is truly a hound from hell, its wolfen features a hideous sight.  Its eyes fierce, burning green.  The Wolf roars and starts for the cop. The cop rushes out and slams the door behind him.

-John Landis, An American Werewolf in London script draft

When it came to showing the audience the actual Werewolf, the director had a precise set of ideas on its appearance. With the intention to visually distinguish his character from previous iterations of the concept, Landis wanted the beast to adhere to a concise, yet striking guideline; he described the Werewolf as “a four-legged hound from hell.” His script describes the beast vaguely, frequently refering to its “blazing eyes”; it also briefly says that “its wolfen features are twisted and demonic.” Whereas Baker was leaning more towards a bipedal, more humanoid creature, Landis was adamant about the design following his idea — a powerfully-built quadrupedal Monster. “I wanted it to be a biped, and I was actually hoping for something a little more on the man side as well,” Baker said, “I always thought it was kind of interesting, that kind of combination of animal and person. But John said, ‘no, four-legged hound from hell.'” Landis added: “I always envisioned it to be four-legged. I wanted it to be this great big beast.”

Several different concepts were considered but discarded, including one by Craig Reardon. Baker found the inspiration for final Werewolf in a dog he owned at the time — a Keish Hound named Bosco. “I had two dogs at that time,” Baker recalled. “I had a German Shepherd — a white German Shepherd — and a Keish Hound, or Keeshond as they’re called sometimes, which was this hairier dog and kind of almost wolf-like. A lot of times I’d look in the mirror and I’d make faces and kind of like be working on sculptures and it looks like me and my dog was there so I was like — okay. He’s kind of like a wolf, you know, he’s got four legs, he had this big mane of hair which the wolf kind of had. So yeah, [the Werewolf] was very much based on my dog Bosco.”

The head of the Werewolf was also designed to implement several features at specific angles. “It’s also sculpted in a very angular way,” Rick Baker said in an interview for Landis’s own book, Monsters in the Movies. “The brows are very angular and there are 45° angles all through it. There is something scary about 45° angles.”

Actually bringing the Werewolf’s four-legged form to life was another challenge. A full animatronic character was immediately discarded, and a suit version was supposedly attempted – but deemed unfeasible. Baker eventually got the inspiration from his own childhood games. He explained: “late one night, I was sitting in my living room and it came to me. I thought of a wheelbarrow race. So I stretched out my legs over the edge of a chair and my arms out in front, testing the balance, seeing if I could shift around while still holding my weight. Then I thought, ‘what if we had a flat surface to support the weight — like a diving board with wheels — where we could move it around and vary the height?”

This concept became the base of the Werewolf rig, which combined a suit for the upper half of the Werewolf and a dolly for the lower half, with a slant board supporting the weight of the performer and the lower legs puppeteered with wires or rods. Devised by Doug Beswick, the system had a jointed waist that could bend naturally from side to side, and a counterweight in the rear section to decrease the weight the performer had to support. The suit included arm extensions and a cable-controlled head. Given the technique, it had to be shot with the appropriate camera angles. The two suit performers were Kevin Brennan (whose proportions served as reference for construction of the suit) and Brendan Hughes. Brennan “was a trained dancer who had this really strong torso so he could hold himself in there at this awkward angle,” first assistant director David Tringham said, “and just be with his legs sticking out the end with nothing to support him really.”

Three insert heads were also built: a hero animatronic head with complete cable-controlled functions, and two stunt heads used for shots of the attacks. The stunt head could be fitted with soft or hard teeth depending on the action it had to perform. For the heads, the jaw was a simple hand-grip caliper mechanism, with handles moved in opposite directions to open and close the jaw. For certain shots of the moving Werewolf up close, Baker puppeteered the stunt head while sitting on the moving camera dolly.

Before filming Jack’s death, Baker warned actor Griffin Dunne about not to damage the stunt head — which at the time was brand new — with his acted fighting. Dunne did not exactly follow the guidelines, as Baker recalled: “first take, he grabs hold of the wolf and rips the foam face right off the skull. It was like, ‘okay… this is a good start.’ I was none too pleased about it; and I considered putting the hard teeth in. You know, I was thinking, ‘okay, if that’s how he’s going to play, let’s put the hard teeth in.’ [Of course] I didn’t put the hard teeth in, but when John said ‘action’ [for the new take] I was just like beating the crap out of Griffin with this head. It was just like I took my anger out on Griffin and I was just hitting him with this damn thing and just going [on with it]. I think it made the scene that much better. I was like, ‘if you’re going to play rough, I’m going to play rough too.”

The Werewolf was originally supposed to be shown only in sparse and quick cuts; for that reason, Baker intentionally sculpted it with a fixed expression. “That’s one reason he’s sculpted with an extreme kind of expression to begin with. I was worried that if we rely totally on the mechanism to make the expression that they would use a part when it isn’t really making an expression — you know, we’d shoot something but they’d cut in before or after when it was [emoting] so I thought if it’s only going to be this long, let’s make it look scary. No matter, even if we’re not pulling any cables or doing anything.”

What Baker had not foreseen was that Landis would be so satisfied with the Werewolf that he decided to show the creature far more than originally intended. “I became enamored of Rick’s work, so I showed it too much. I still think when I see the movie you see it too much. My favourite shot of it in the picture is the guy in the tube, when he collapses on the escalator and looks down, and the wolf enters like that at the bottom of the escalatorThat’s my favourite shot because it looks so fucking big! Like ‘what is that?’ You know? And you don’t really see it, but you see it. I like that.”

An artist’s worst critic is himself, and Baker is no different — when interviewed about the film decades after its production, he said that “I cringe looking at some of the stuff in the transformation.

 It was thirty years ago and I was thirty years old and the average age of my crew was like nineteen. There were kids who had never worked on a film before. I do think it’s pretty amazing that people still hold it in pretty high regard, this thing that was done by a thirty year old and nineteen year olds who’d never done this stuff.”

For more images of the Werewolf, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Four-Legged Hound from Hell

One of my photos from the concert – poor quality is due to having only a humble cell phone!

Sunday, 28th of August 2016: John Carpenter’s live tour reaches Rome, in the famed Hall of Santa Cecilia of Auditorium Parco della Musica.

And I was there and I saw it all. Stalls Area, Row 18, 3rd seat. Sometimes these events do reach my country after all!

I have been an enthusiast of Carpenter’s film work for years. He was and is capillarily influential on the horror genre and not only that — a true gift to cinema as an art form. Even when some of his films have structural flaws or scripts that fall flat, he always bestows them with a tremendous sense of imagery as well as a dense, brooding atmosphere — all characteristics that are absolutely unrivalled in the field. Carpenter is also known for composing the music of his films, music that much like the films themselves has become a part of film history. Halloween, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape from New York and so many more. All of the maestro’s films have a distinct sound to them and the fact that he himself composes their scores adds to how he excels at presenting his creative vision to the screen.

Carpenter enters, and the audience roars in an impetuous demonstration of wholehearted enthusiasm. The concert explodes into action with the iconic theme from Escape from New York, the dystopian thriller film starring Kurt Russell in one of his most well-known roles — the antihero Snake Plissken. Much like with all that follows, behind Carpenter and his crew footage of the film, edited masterfully to fit with the music, is played on a false-perspective cube-o-vision-esque screen. A brilliant addition to the show — one that helps remembering with a sense of tearful and emotional nostalgia these incredible films and the impact they have had on us all.

Directly after that the band plays the theme from Assault from Precinct 13, one of Carpenter’s earliest films and in fact his second motion picture after Dark Star (which was not featured in the concert). Again, footage flashes before the audience’s eyes — of men scuttling in the dark like ominous creatures, a kind of image that would find its way in several more Carpenter films.

Of course promoting his new album Lost Themes II, Carpenter next proposes two original pieces: Vortex and Mystery, two tracks taken from the first Lost Themes album. Dense with his characteristic synthesizer style, the tracks drip with appropriate mood, but can only pave the way for the next film themes.

“Over the years I have directed many horror films,” Carpenter says, announcing the next track. “Monster movies, slasher tales… ghost stories.” The Fog‘s theme is then played, and during this incredible performance, a nice moody touch is the fog coming on the stage as the band plays. A terrific effect which contributed to the atmosphere and helped evoking the vibe of the film. For a moment, it seems that the hall might as well be invaded by the ghostly Blake and his murderous, hook-handed and red-eyed crew.

Title cards flash before the audience: “Money is your God”; “Submit”; “Consume”; everyone knows it — it is time for the theme from They Live. For this one performance, Carpenter amusingly puts on the memorable sunglasses that allow the antihero of the film to discover the real world underneath the mundane routine he is used to. Footage of his encounters with the corrupt-faced aliens and the street fight with Keith David are shown.

One of the most memorable moments in the show was Carpenter announcing the theme for The Thing – he mentions Ennio Morricone, with whom he composed the score, and praises him highly — saying that Morricone is “the greatest composer in the history of cinema.” The theme then starts playing — the ominous, repetitive and heartbeat-esque music that perfectly underlines the brooding mood and paranoia in the iconic, timeless Monster Movie.

After another track from Lost Themes, titled Distant Dream, Carpenter briefly announces the next piece: “Kurt Russell and I – we’ve done five movies together, but the most fun we’ve had, I think, was when we were looking for a girl with green eyes.” The band then plays the lively, energetic theme from Big Trouble in Little China, one of Carpenter’s most creatively unique, grotesque and funny films. Fists rise in the air. The audience ravens with delight at the music — the quintessential film theme of the 80s.

Two more songs from Lost Themes — Wraith and Night — serve as a moody prelude. “Horror movies will last… forever!” Carpenter declares, and the Halloween theme starts playing, infused with a tremendous and previously unheard power. As with all the other performances, the unique structure of the Santa Cecilia hall contributes to the incredible quality of the music effects.

Do you read Sutter Cane? A memorable line for those that have seen that film, and one that was unfortunately missed in the show. Without much of an introduction, Carpenter follows immediately with the dynamic and rocking theme from In the Mouth of Madness — my favourite film of his, although one of the lesser known ones. The live performance paid respect to the original composition, and was welcomed with pumping fists and signs of the horns of an audience that by now is completely immersed in this unforgettable experience. Somebody in there must have been sitting with a copy of The Hobb’s End Horror.

A brief pause; Carpenter and the band exit the stage, only to rapidly come back and play the end theme from Prince of Darkness — Carpenter’s second film in his Apocalypse Trilogy (with the others being, respectively, The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness). Two more original tracks follow – Virtual Survivor and Purgatory.

Carpenter thanks the audience for the wonderful night, and then invites everyone to drive home safe — “for Christine might be lurking somewhere!” Red hues tinge the screen — and then headlights flash. The final piece played for the concert, in what was by far my favourite performance out of them all, was the theme from John Carpenter’s Christine. As footage from the film plays, with the demonic car murdering its victims one by one, the director and the band play the score with unparalleled emotion and energy. The theater bursts with the notes of the song in this explosive and unforgettable finale to the concert. One hour and a half has passed, and it has gone by too fast. The final song is still stuck in my head and I get a little tear as I am writing about it. I wish I could relive those moments again and again like the first time.

John Carpenter was born January the 16th, 1948. As of 2016, he is 68 years old; and yet, he is on tour worldwide (with the last date being October the 31st in London), celebrating and remembering the stupendous art he has created, more than four decades after the dawn of his filmmaking career. There is something so emotional and absolutely great in that, and it should be an example to us all — living life at its fullest even in his elder years, always true to his own soul no matter how much time has passed.

Even though I was not actually able to meet Carpenter in person as I had so much hoped to, I am infinitely grateful for being able to attend this concert — which I can safely say was one of the most incredible and downright best experiences in my life, one that I will forever and fondly carry in my memory.

Long live John Carpenter. Now and always.

To bring to the screen the creative Monster effects of his long-sought martial arts film, John Carpenter hired Boss Film Studios, headed by Richard Edlund. “Twentieth Century Fox had a very good relationship with Richard Edlund and Boss Film,” Carpenter said, “and I’ve always been impressed by their work — so we decided to go with them. When Richard — who is an extremely professional, extremely talented man — and his people came in, their ideas and input melded together with mine and we were in business.”

As the heroes of Big Trouble in Little China attempt to escape Lo Pan’s labyrinth, Gracie is unwillingly captured by one of Lo Pan’s henchmen — the Chinese Wildman. This character was based on the Yeren, a creature from Chinese folklore said to be an ape-like being — inhabiting the mountainous regions of western Hubei — covered in reddish hair. In the film, the Wildman is “in and out of the story strictly for shock-fright value,” according to Visual effects art director George Jenson. The first concepts were found to be too horror-oriented; “[those] concepts [were done] before Carpenter let me know how cartoony he wanted to go with the character. I should have known – I read the script!” Steve Johnson, part of the crew, joked.

Initially, John Carpenter intended the creature to resemble a cross between a wolf and a vampire. However, the concepts shown to him all seemed to resemble Werewolves — and thus Jenson had to gravitate towards other inspirations. “He was, in John Carpenter’s early thinking, to be half-wolf and half-Nosferatu,” Jenson explained to Cinefex. “I went through probably a dozen drawings trying to develop the look that he wanted; and each time I drew the wolf’s snout on the head, it just didn’t seem to work. Then I found–  in a National Geographic magazine — a picture of a mummy that had a really incredible look about it. So I started to bring a little of that influence into the drawing and toned down the animal quality of the creature — made it fierce and more human. The result was a qualit where he looked like a half-mummified, half-wild creature that had been wandering around the sewers of Chinatown for centuries, doomed to this life by some god. He even had shreds of old robes on him. That approach seemed satisfactory to John, so Steve Johnson took over from that point and did a three-dimensional sculpture. The Wildman turned out to be another one of those half-amusing, half-frightening creatures.”

Once a satisfying design was selected, the Wildman was sculpted and built as a creature suit by Kevin Brennan and Theresa Burkett. Johnson related: “we made what was basically a Greystoke suit, using the same technology Rick Baker had worked out. The undersuit was made of an unusual kind of spandex wth large, ventilated areas of mesh net so the suit could breathe a little more. Then on top of that, we added muscle padding which was sewn on at strategic points with elastic so that the muscles would slide over each other. That way, the actor wearing it had complete mobility. On top of the muscle layer we made a very tight-fitting spandex suit with hairs individually tied into it by Jack Bricker. He tied the hairs on one at a time, double-knotting them throughout the entire body — as well as for several pairs of extra arms and feet — using different shades of reddish-coloured hair. He did an incredible job. It’s really the best way to go when doing a creature with hair because it allows the use of skin for the whole body — and the spandex suit was actually painted like skin. Theresa coloured it with dyes, putting in a lot of mottling.”

The Wildman’s head included a self-contained mechanism rigged to follow the opening and closing motion of the suit performer. The creature’s lips could also curl. The mechanisms inside the creature’s head were devised by David Matherly. An insert close-up head was also constructed with cable-control mechanics by Makio Kida. “There were probably 20 cables on that one,” Johnson explained, “the ears pulled back, the eyes moved, they blinked, the brows worked just like the Greystoke brows, the tongue worked, the sides of the mouth pulled back, the cheeks puffed out. It was definitely going away from realism, but I’ve found that the most effective use of a mechanical head is to do broad movement. Even if it’s not the best thing to do in all situations, it definitely worked in this case.”

When the heroes enter Chinatown’s sewer system, one of the gang members is suddenly and unexpectedly snatched by a grotesque amphibious creature. “The sewer Monster is the one true shock-cut we did for the film,” Johnson commented. “It was the shot that was designed to get a jump out of the audience.” Joji Tani (Screaming Mad George) sculpted the sewer Monster — whose design, conceived by Johnson and Jenson, was loosely based on an angler fish combined with a toad — and supervised its assembly as a full-sized puppet, which included a solid steel armature and foam latex skin. Unusually enough, the Monster’s long fangs were appropriately sculpted glue sticks. The puppet was mounted on a track, and was operated from within by a puppeteer for the gross body and head movements. Arms and legs were maneuvered externally through wires. All the mechanics and rigging were devised by David Kelsey, Ed Felix and Alex Felix.

The large puppet was a potential hazard for the actor that it had to interact with. “We had to be extremely careful that when the Monster shot out on the track it didn’t atually hit the actor who was being attacked,” Johnson said. “If he had been hit accidently, it would have been as if he’d been hit by a car. As such, the shot had to be staged in a cheat — the actor had to be standing back far enough so there was no way the Monster could catch him. At this point they cut away to a reaction shot. When we cut back to the man-eater, we used an interesting stand-in for its victim. Screaming Mad George came up with some spring-mechanized legs that attached to the head of the actor playing the Monster. The legs were very lightweight, so when he shook his head, the legs were activated, making it look as if the character was kicking around half-swallowed already.”

“A Guardian. What it sees — Lo Pan knows!”

Shortly afterwards, the group is pursued by a floating, fleshy spherical creature with eyes distributed all over its surface — a guardian, Lo Pan’s own telepathic, organic surveillance camera. “The general idea is that it’s this mythological Chinese creature that is Lo Pan’s way of seeing remotely,” Johnson told Entertainment Weekly. “So, this flying eye will go out and get information and bring it back to Lo Pan. It was just a huge, surrealistic ball of eyes.”

James Kagel’s sculpture.

This ‘flying eye’ was designed by Jenson and Tani, and sculpted by James Kagel. Tani assembled and painted the creature, which was one of the most difficult effects in the whole film. “The other things we did for Big Trouble had problems that were difficult to solve,” Johnson recalled, “but they were just individual problems. Everything on the flying eye was a problem — basically becuse it was supposed to have 30 working eyes, make all sorts of faces and fly. From the beginning it was our biggest headache.” Dave Kelsey did a lot of the actual design for the mechanism; and the thing we were primarily fighting, at least in the beginning, was how to puppeteer the eye without creating massive problems for the roto department.”

Having had previous experience on Poltergeist II (with the creation of the Great Beast) Edlund and Bill Neil devised a new solution for the practical issues concerning the Guardian. Edlund said: “I figured that if we were to make a little donut-like bluescreen, the eye could be mounted right next to the screen. It seemed reasonable that if the eye had a hole in the back, the guys could then reach in to operate it yet it could be still surrounded by bluescreen material. Thaine Morris took care of the screen itself — he basically took a piece of bluescreen, cut a hole in it and rigged it up so that the flying eye was mounted on a rod that went through a 13-inch hole in the screen. Then Bill Neil set the camera up in such a way that it ‘floated’ — which made the eye appear to be floating.”

Two 24-inch diameter flying eyes were constructed (one for front shots, one for back shots); after filming, they were optically reduced to the desired size and composited into the live-action footage. Johnson recalled: “once we knew there were going to be shots from the back — with all the problems we had already — it seemed obvious that there was no way we could make one full sphere capable of doing everything. We tried to do as much direct rod operation as we could because the more direct the mechanism the better. For example, the cheeks were actually on big fiberglass pieces that were operated straight out the back. For a pivot point we had a large plexiglass plate coming out at the back of the blue screen that we ran all the rods through. That way, the puppeteers could see through it and see what they were actually doing, as well as watch the monitor. It still took about 24 puppeteers, but nobody had to do any roto.”

The Guardian featured a complex mechanical system animating its eyes, which were also used to express its emotional state. “It had two large mechanized eyes in the front that were really its major eyes for focus,” Johnson said. “Actually, they were the most highly mechanized function we did. They moved from side to side, up and down and any combination in between. They could roll, push out, pull in and could also be set to operate independently. For instance, there’s one shot where the flying eye gets stabbed in the forehead and its eyes cross and look right up at the knife. It also had to breathe, so we installed a system of bladders towards the bottom that could inflate and deflate. We put several other bladders in random places that just kept the skin bubbling a little bit — really subtly. We made a lot of the lesser eyes workable, but some we just made stageable — going on the principle that no one would notice — and we moved them slightly between shots. There was a little wire under the eyelid that could be pulled. Even the brows worked. It also had several eyes that were called ‘feeling eyes’. They were located at the end of eyestalks, like a snail, and were attached to a big rod at the end of a funnel-shaped collar which, in turn, was attached to the foam of the main flying eye body. They had mechanisms for a blink and eye movement; and when we moved the rod, all the flesh around each eye would move too. That added a lot of realism and organic movement to it. We could not only rotate the eyestalk a bit, we could twist it and push it out as well. They were all pretty much a four-cable mechanism and just came out in certain places. Only certain feeling eyes would move — they could stretch way out and around the back as if trying to peek over the front. We also used them for expression. When the eye was surprised, they would stick out like exclamation points; when it was scared, they would pull in. We made the eye’s lower lip and jaw the same way we did the Onion Head ghost for Ghostbusters — which was some spring banding connected to the lower lip with a line coming out of the back. But once again, we were limited because the line couldn’t come out from below — the optimum place to get the most movement out of it — it had to come straight out the back along with everything else. That made it really hard to maneuver.”

Shooting the Guardian proved to be no less difficult than conceiving its structure. Neil said: “the interesting about shooting the eye was trying to keep it animated with changes of expression, to keep it alive and also to keep it floating. The flying eye was locked off on a very rigid mount with all the puppeteers behind the blue screen. I floated the camera with pan and tilt just enough to keep the eye floating gently and to try and take the curse off the rigid mounting. It worked out pretty well, but it’s really hard to judge sometimes when dealing with one element and knowing there is going to be another element down the road somewhere. I think, in retrospect, I was a little too conservative in the amount of movement I did use via the pan and tilt floating. If I had the opportunity to reshoot the footage, I would have given the creature a little more movement so it would have had a greater sense of floating in the quick cutting of the sequence.” Despite his partial dissatisfaction, Neil still found the final results appropriate: “I think we ended up with some pretty nice shots. The eye seems to come to life and has a real vitality on screen.”

In a later scene, the eye is seen at rest on the ground, licking itself with a cable-controlled animatronic tongue. It is later killed by Wang Chi with his sword when Lo Pan is warned of the intruders’ presence. For the stabbing shot, one of the eye puppets was used in combination with an oversized sword prop; and for the final shot of it flying off, a life-size model was used.

For more images of the Chinatown Monsters, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Monsters in Chinatown

Although Critters was released two years after Joe Dante’s Gremlins, director Stephen Herek maintains that the script for the film was originally written by Dominic Muir far before Dante’s film entered production; Gremlins did, however, serve as a catalyst to greenlight Critters: Herek unsuccessfully attempted to sell his project to various studios, but it was only after the release (and considerable success) of Gremlins that New Line Cinema was willing to produce it. Herek thus had to heavily modify Muir’s script in order to significantly decrease the similarities between the two stories.

To portray the titular, voracious aliens, producer Rupert Harvey had to find special effects artists that could deliver every demand of the script within a tight production schedule and budget. Ultimately, the task was given to the Chiodo brothers — Charlie, Steve, and Ed — and their small crew of a dozen artists.

The entirety of the Critter effects was designed and constructed for only $100.000, a fraction of the film’s total 2 million budget. In addition to that, the special effects crew only had ten weeks to devise the effects. The Critters — or Crites, as named in the script — were designed by Charlie Chiodo as hirsute Monsters, with small limbs, disproportionately large maws with triple rows of teeth, and glowing red eyes. Once the design was approved, it was turned over to Steve Chiodo, who sculpted the maquettes and, aided by other sculptors, all versions of the Critters.

The tight production schedule also meant that a conventional foam latex skin for the creatures — the industry standard at the time — would be too time-consuming, since it necessitated at least a day to be fully prepared. The brothers thus devised a less expensive and quicker solution — a thin latex skin laid over a two-part urethane foam, which only needed a few minutes to set and was also more resilient. “It’s not quite as flexible as regular foam,” said Charlie, “but it lasts forever.” With this expedient, the special effects crew was able to pull up to six Critter bodies per day. The skins were painted with rubber cement paint, and covered with real moose hair which the brothers obtained from a taxidermist. Charlie explained: “none of the synthetic stuff looked good to me; it was expensive, and the hide is thick and tougher to work with, but it looks like a real animal.”

Ed Chiodo collaborated with Dwight Roberts in conceiving and building the mechanics for the Critters. The main puppets were full-sized 13″ models, with radio-controlled eyes and blinking eyelids, cable-controlled faces, arms and hands, as well as bladders in the throat and chest to simulate breathing. For the Critters’ eyes, clear plexiglass spheres wre coated with reflective scotchlite material in the back. On the set, a rig attached to the camera aimed a red light into the eyes, which bounced back to the camera lens giving the characteristic glowing red effect seen in the film.

Although the script demanded for eight Critters, the budget and time did not allow for more than four hero puppets. To resolve this issue, the brothers developed a series of prosthetic appliances (such as scars, deformed facial features, hairy eyebrows, and squinted eyes) that enabled each hero puppet to double as two characters depending on the sequence that had to be shot. Whenever more than four Critters are seen in the same shot, stunt puppets were used in the background.

the football-attack Critter.

Other than the hero and stunt models, a number of puppets with specific functions was also built: Critters that rolled onto themselves, remote-controlled rolling-ball Critters, Critters that could shoot their venomous quills, and a special puppet whose cheeks could puff — for the scene where one of the aliens swallows a cherry bomb. Since most of the puppets did not have functional legs, a special ‘walking’ Critter was also devised. Other puppets included hand puppets (used mostly for biting scenes) and stunt puppets that could be “thrown like a football” at an actor.

During the film, one of the Critters grows exponentially. To portray this leader Critter, a 26″ puppet was built; and as an extremely late assignment, the brothers were also asked to build a 4′ tall suit to be worn by a midget. The suit was only intended to be seen in quick cuts, but it was actually featured prominently in the film’s finale. “They didn’t give us the time or money to do it,” Charlie said. “The costume was just a quick, throwaway thing; they wanted to show something big. It looked alright, but there were no mechanics budgeted for the face; it didn’t move.”

Actual shooting also proved to be a challenge: “the schedule was crazy,” Charlie said. “They were trying to jam a hell of a lot of special effects and puppet work and action into a very short period.” Up to seven puppeteers were needed at once under the set floor to operate one of the main hero puppets. Steven was the principal puppeteer, and Charlie operated the eyes. The situation became particularly difficult when directions were being given at the puppet itself instead of at the puppeteers: “we’d have seven people below the stage floor, but up on top they only had one puppet,” Ed recalled, “so they’re yelling directions at the puppet. It was frustrating. There was a lot of yelling and screaming.”

With similar issues, filming fell behind schedule, with creature effects sequences continuously getting pushed back until a specific second unit was actually established with director Mark Helfrich. “Unfortunately,” Charlie said, “he wasn’t familiar with the puppets, and was asking them to do things that they weren’t specifically designed to do.” The clashes, however, did not last long: “in the end, Herek was happy, and the second unit director became happy when he got familiar with the puppets and saw what they could do,” Charlie continues. “You make concessions along the way. There is an economic reality, after all — you have to get the film out.”

Despite the shortcomings, the brothers remember the project fondly. Steve said in an interview that “I have been fortunate to work on a number of memorable movie moments in my career so it’s difficult to choose just one. I’ve enjoyed many projects for different reasons. […] Critters was the first movie Chiodo Bros was the key effects company on, responsible for designing the creatures, creating and performing a wide range of special effects for.”

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Main Article: Critters

To unleash the demons of The Gate, director Tibor Takacs needed the right special effects artist — and he found Randall William Cook. “When you talk to special effects people, a lot of them talk about limitations,” Takacs told Cinefex. “‘Well, you can’t do this and you can’t do that.’ But with Randy Cook it wasn’t like that at all — he talked about possibilities.” The Gate offered Cook the opportunity to use a wide array of different effects techniques. In his task, he was aided by Craig Reardon (for creature effects), Frank Carere (physical effects) and Illusion Arts (mattes and opticals).

The first creatures seen in the film are the monstrous hands that attempt to grab Alexandra from beneath Glen’s bed. Those were constructed by Craig Reardon, who designed, sculpted and built them as hand and arm appliances in polyurethane.

The Minions, small goblin-like creatures that are featured the most in the film, were designed by Cook and translated in three dimensions by Craig Reardon. Although the special effects crew did employ hand puppets and dummies for certain shots of the Minions, as per industry standard (i.e. Critters, Gremlins) the majority of the sequences were achieved with 4:1 scale suits in appropriately scaled sets, using forced perspective methods. Cook — who was inspired by the 1959 film Darby O’Gill and the Little People, as well as ‘Manners the Butler’, a character in television commercials of the late ’50s — said: “forced perspective is essentially the process of the hanging miniature, only in reverse; a hanging miniature takes something small and makes it appear to be normal in size by placing it closer to the camera. In forced perspective, something that is actually normal in size — like a man in a suit — is placed farther away from the camera to make it look small. So instead of building a miniature set and magnifying it, you build a huge set and ‘mini-fy’ it by placing it farther away from the camera. On The Gate, we worked with a ratio of four to one; so if we wanted to make something appear to be four feet away from the camera, we had to build it oversize and place it 16 feet away.”

The process involved three basic steps: building the Minions as creature suits; constructing appropriately-sized forced perspective sets that would allow the illusion of interaction between normal-sized actors and the small Minions; and filming the individual shots. Reardon built the Minion suits. “The suits were of course a large endeavor because we were working with a modest budget,” he said. “We had to have 15 of these rather elaborate suits. I decided to make them out of polyurethane materials because foam latex is slow to work with — you have to bake it for five or six hours — whereas polyfoam shoots up in a container brief minutes after being mixed. Also, foam latex has a tendency to shrink while polyfoam does not. This ensured that a month or so down the road, when we were shooting scenes, the suits would still fit the actors.”

People of average heights were selected for the roles. “I think we worked with a standard of about 5’6″ or 5’7″, something like that,” Reardon continues. “A casting call was put out for men and women of that general height, and when they showed up we arduously put them into our suits. Everything fit adequately. We had made allowances for adjustments at the elbows and the knees because we figured we might have some problems; but as it turned out, I think we would have been better off with unit suits that they could just have jumped into because we were constantly patching those joints. I regretted that, but you simply don’t know all these things in advance and you seldom have time to thest. Certainly on The Gate, everything had to come right off the griddle and onto the plate. So you take your best guess and go for it.”

None of the suits had elaborate mechanisms in them. Mechanical heads were built, but did not work as intended — something that the filmmakers retroactively appreciated. Reardon explained: “there were plans for three functioning heads. We had some radio control on two of them and one that was supposed to be our ‘hero’ head, but none of them worked very well. Fortunately, they really didn’t have to. Without any movement at all, the creatures had a sort of fascinating, stupid fish look. I liked the design because they seemed like minions of any overlord in that they had a kind of mechanistic expression, as if they were incapable of any independent thought or action. And so that fortunately allowed us to take the liberty of not giving their faces a great deal of animation — which I don’t believe damaged the effect in any way since really the charm and interest of these creatures is in their pale, plucked-chicken immediacy as they scurry around the kids’ feet.”

To increase the illusion of the Minions’ size, they were filmed at slow speed — at around 12 frames per second. “We lowered the film speed to what I figured would make the physics look correct — 12 frames per second. It seemed to work dramatically, even though the characters were quarter-size and the speed was only twice as fast. Of course, that meant the actors playing normal-size people had to be coached to move at half speed. This usually wasn’t much of a problem because the actors normally had to do only simple movements during the perspective shots. We knew from the outset that there would be no time for retakes. The schedule was so tight we had to get our shots the first time, because whatever we got the first time was what we had to live with. So all our ‘tests’ show up in the film. We didn’t have a chance to experiment with a single one of the forced perspective setups beforehand because we just didn’t have the time.”

Oversized set elements built for the Minion sequences included 4:1 stones, and an oversized leg that had to be lined up with the actor playing Terry for the scene where he falls into the hole. One of the most complex sequences to film, however, was the scene where the ‘Dead Workman’ falls in front of the children and shatters into a swarm of Minions. Cook related: “now that was something nobody had seen before, except maybe in a Tex Avery cartoon. It was a typical cartoon gag where a character would smash into a wall, break into a hundred little versions of himself running around in confusion, and then reassemble and go on to the next gag. And I just thought it would be a visually memorable thing to do in live-action. We timed it so that we would always stay one beat ahead of the audience and play on their confusion.”

The shot was set up as follows: the room set included a full-size section on the right and a forced-perspective section on the left; a workman dummy was suspended above the forced-perspective set; it was dropped to fall face-first, with a system rigged to ‘catch’ it on time; when it falls, to avoid a bouncing motion, “we did a freeze-frame on it so the bounce wouldn’t be seen,” Cook explained. “Then we had an eight-frame rotomatte transition — animated by Catherine Sudolcan of Illusion Arts — that had the workman transforming into the minions.” Each element of the final sequence was shot separately. “It had to be treated like an optical. For instance, we used split-screen to isolate the kids who are standing off in the corner watching the action. They were shot at 24 frames per second. We shot the dummy falling also at 24 frames per second, and then did the freeze-frame on him. And in this instance, even the Minions were shot at 24 frames per second, then skip-framed. If we’d shot them at our usual 12 frames per second, the exposure would have changed and the lighting wouldn’t have matched. Then we had the rotomatte elements to cover the transition. So it was a multi-element effect.”

The Minion performers were carefully directed in order to move apart in an appropriate fashion. Cook recalled: “when we were lining up to do the workman breaking up, we were working late at night. I first got them all into a rough positio, and then I went through and told each one to lie down in a way that would approximate a body part. One guy would be the head, two guys would be the shoulders, another two guys would be parts of the arms and so on. They all had to contort themselves into ridiculous position to approximate the outline of the body; and so there was a whole big line of them all crouched down in their positions. These guys had all been told to take care of the suits and be real serious — no fooling around. Well, at one point I was up on the camera platform and Craig was down on the floor attending to the suits, and this one guy was lying down sort of on his back with his legs crossed and one arm up over his head, looking like he was taking a sunbath. Carig walked over to him and jokingly kicked him in the polyurethane butt and said, ‘hey, get up you silly-looking dope.’ Then he heard this muffled voice from inside the mask saying, ‘I can’t move — I’m an arm.'”

The Minions are only servants announcing the coming of an Evil creature — the Demon Lord. Dozens of them gather around the hole in the house to greet their master. Cook said: “on stage and in film you always give a main character an entrance; you just do. It’s a dramatic rule. I wanted to do something that literally made it feel like you were being drawn into the presence of royalty.” Once the Demon Lord appears, the Minions swarm off — their purpose fulfilled. “The Minions decamp because their function — preparing for the way of [the Demon’s] arrival — is over,” Cook continues. “Their moves were basically staged like the parting of a curtain. It’s very theatrical — shameless pageantry.” For this sequence, the Minions were optically replicated by Illusion Arts to increase their number.

Originally, the Demon Lord was conceived in a much different manner, being described as a mass of human flesh and entrails. In its final incarnation, designed by Cook, the Demon Lord is a serpentine Monster, with a horse-like head and multiple pairs of arms and tentacles. Unlike the Minions, the Demon Lord was brought to the screen as a stop-motion character. It was built by Cook as a two-foot tall puppet, which was animated either against bluescreen or a miniature set. A close-up head was considered, but ultimately unable to be built. “We really did expend a lot of effort getting as much detail into the puppet as possible,” Cook related. “Since in the film the creature is magnified seven-and-a-half times the size of the actual puppet, the puppet as a consequence had to be sculpted with seven times the care because it was to look seven times as big.” For certain scenes, the Demon Lord was used in combination with a puppet portraying Glen.

For the scene where Glen kills the Demon Lord with a positive-energy-charged rocket, a rubber duplicate of the Demon Lord’s chest was used in combination with a prop rocket. “Incidentally,” Cook said, “that shot was a conscious lift from Harryhausen’s It Came from Beneath the Sea in which a torpedo was fired into the giant octopus.”

Tibor Takacs concluded: “I think we were just lucky. We almost overextended ourselves. It was extremely ambitious and we didn’t have time to test or reshoot anything, but it all happened to work. Due to everyone’s work on the film, and to Randy Cook’s effects planning and his talent, we were able to pull it all off the first time.”

For more images of the Demons, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Demons of the Gate

The Water Horse director Jay Russell first developed the appearance of Crusoe, the titular creature of the film, with concept artist Matt Codd. The core concept was to have a design that would channel the classic depictions of the Loch Ness Monster — like the iconic 1934 photo hoax by surgeon Robert Wilson. “We felt that since we were creating our own version of this legend we wanted to have something unique.” Russell and Codd also attempted to make the creature a realistic, animal-like character, that would have a familiar element to it.

“We decided early on that we wanted him to have elements of other animals, but no particular animal specifically,” the director said in an online interview. “We incorporated elements of different animals into Crusoe so that he would have this odd familiarity, even though you’ve never seen it before.” Reference animals for the various aspects of the character — ranging from visual design, to skin texture, to animation — included lizards, sea turtles, owls, eagles, dogs, and seals. “When we first began designing the creature,” Russell added, “creature designer Matt Codd and I sat down at the computer and began cutting and pasting different body and facial parts of many different animals together. We wanted to create something which seemed familiar, but was unique at the same time. As a result, Crusoe’s face is a combination of a horse, a dog, an eagle and a giraffe. Then we sketched out four different life stages for this animal from birth to fully grown.” Crusoe’s eyes were based on an eagle’s, a key trait to make them more expressive. Richard Frances-Moore, animation supervisor, said that “because he can’t talk, his eyes have to be expressive and the staccato blink of the eagle’s eyes were great for that.”

Russell and Codd developed Crusoe in all of its growth stages — from newborn to adult creature — which were nailed down to four. “I wanted each stage of Crusoe have its own distinct personality,” Russell said. Weta Digital was hired to bring the Monster to life through computer-generated imagery, and first fashioned three-dimensional maquettes based on Codd’s concept art. The sculpting process was supervised by Gino Acevedo and Richard Taylor. The maquettes were scanned to serve as a first base for the digital models. For each stage, Weta built and rigged a separate creature with changed anatomy traits.

As stand-ins on set, silicon model versions of the creature — ranging from rod-operated dummies to static dummy heads — were used to interact with the actors and establish eye lines. For certain scenes where Angus rides Crusoe, a bluescreen Crusoe prop, reproducing the creature’s withers and the base of its neck, was devised for Alex Etel to ride, and mounted on a rig able to perform a wide array of movements. Erik Winquist, co-visual effects supervisor and compositing supervisor, said: “it was trickier than we had anticipated. Crusoe is an organic, flexible creature with a lively performance, not like the fiberglass neck on the jet-ski rig. We had surprising cases where, because of extensive previs, the animation stayed true to what they shot, but in the nighttime race on a dark, stormy loch, the animation had to amp up. Once it deviated from the puppet neck, we had to patch and replace things.” Partial or total digital doubles of Alex Etel were used in many shots. Interaction of Crusoe with the water was achieved with both practical water elements filmed on set, water elements filmed separately at varying camera speeds and then composited together in the final shots, as well as digital particle simulations with new solvers and shaders specifically developed for the project.

Crusoe’s head was a key part of the design, with an intended evident tridimensionality to it. “The look of his face was particularly important because he had to be expressive,” Frances-Moore related. “Crusoe’s face is very three-dimensional. The sides look different from the front, like a dog’s face, so expressions that are modeled change significantly when you look at them from different angles.” In making Crusoe an expressive character, the filmmakers wanted to avoid human-like expressions, and thus based themselves on those of dogs. “We didn’t want to humanize him,” Letteri said, “but everyone can understand dog emotions.” In fact, Russell added: “everything Crusoe does in the movie is based on true animal behavior, which myself and Weta studied through nature footage of seals, whales, dogs. My theory behind this was, if we made Crusoe a ‘real animal’ and if I had Alex Etel acting and behaving as though he were dealing with an animal instead of a cartoon character, the emotions would be real—just like how we get emotional with our dogs or cats or whatever.”

Animation-wise, Crusoe’s eyes and the muscles around them were tweaked until the very end of post-production. “We made adjustments in the muscles around his eyes and the mouth so we could get those expressions that suggest a personality,” said Russell. “We were tweaking that almost right up until the day we finished the film.”

Frances-Moore commented on the multiple stage approach to the character: “we’d done large-scale creature effects, but we’d never dealt with a character that changed so much. We had to create many versions of the character and make sure they were all related to each other.” Christopher White, visual effects supervisor, added: “it’s important that you realize it’s the same character throughout the film.”

Much like the visual design, Crusoe’s movements in all of its stages were inspired by real animals to enhance the believability of the character. “Even though this is a fanciful character, we wanted it to appear that it could be a real creature that could exist,” Frances-Moore related. “We also made sure that through the different stages we were thinking about what was going on under the skin of the character, where he was coming from… especially in relation to Angus. That keeps the character consistent throughout even as it’s changing.”

Crusoe is first seen in the film as an infant, hatched from the egg Angus finds (a physical model). This first stage was inspired by newborn bird chicks (particularly for proportions and skin texture and colour) as well as baby turtles, owls, and eagles. “We first see him when he hatches from the egg and he’s a baby bird,” visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri said. “Cute, but messy and ugly at the same time. He and the boy have to quickly find each other and bond.” The newborn Crusoe, according to Frances-Moore, was “more freaky than cute.” Initial maquette designs were more reptilian, something Russell wanted to distance the character from; the face was thus enveloped with more flesh around the cheeks.

To enhance the appearance of a vulnerable newly-hatched animal, the baby stage had a soft, wrinkly and translucent skin. Weta Digital developed new systems that enabled the subsurface scattering of light to reach unprecedented realism. The new layered approach to subsurface scattering was developed by CG supervisor Martin Hill. “We wanted to see the veins through his skin and the fleshiness underneath,” Chris White, visual effects supervisor, elaborated. “Instead of having subsurface scattering just going through a skin layer, we added layers beneath.” While it was particularly important to see the layers of the baby Crusoe, this technique was applied to the skin of all the growth stages of the character.

Texture painters created maps that would define a ‘blood layer’, which was also controlled by shaders that could adjust the amount of visible skin or painted veins, based on the angle of view. White said: “if you’re looking down at him, you can see more of the blood layer. Crusoe was a perfect creature to test this on because he’s so small and had a baby-bird look. When we got good results, we used it for his puppy stage as well.”

The fragile nature of the baby is also conveyed through its quivering, uncertain motion. “Jay [Russell] was specific that we needed to believe this was a newborn creature,” Frances-Moore said, “so we focused on giving him shaky movement. Because he didn’t have full control, he’d overshoot. We’d start his movement sharply, like an electrical impulse, and then have it dissipate and smooth out at the end as his weight took over.”

Crusoe’s peculiarly fast growth rate is seen when he grows double his size overnight — becoming what the filmmakers called the ‘puppy’ stage or the ‘toddler’ stage. The design curve of the puppy went through an inverse process of the baby’s: the initial iterations were “too much like a lamb and too cutesy,” according to Russell. Later renditions were thus devised to be more angular and hydrodynamic. “We had to add more angles, so it looked like something that could live underwater,” Russell added.

Since the new subsurface scattering technique proved successful with the baby Crusoe, it was also used for the puppy stage, with an added fat layer. White elaborated: “it was a natural progression as we learned how the technique worked. By lightening his muzzle and the area around his eyes, we added a level of cuteness and tied him back to the infant stage. He progressed so quickly; we wanted to make him feel like the same creature through all four stages.”

Puppy Crusoe was initially slightly larger; his size was finally determined when the visual effects team saw in what bathtub it had to fit in. “Once we put him in the tub and saw how much room he needed to be able to flop around, we had to scale him down a little bit,” said Letteri. “At the size we thought he was going to be, he couldn’t be as playful.”

Crusoe has now developed a playful personality, which was conveyed with movements inspired by familiar mammals. “For the toddler Crusoe,” Frances-Moore said, “we looked at seals and dogs because they have a playfulness which we as humans respond to.” Footage of otters on land and in water was also used as reference. “In his puppy stage, he’s the most fun: adventurous and slightly silly,” Frances-Moore said. “At this stage, he really bonds with Angus, and the audience has to fall in love with him.”

When puppy Crusoe gets in the bathtub, he makes active use of his flippers. Frances-Moore commented: “the flippers were quite tricky to rig. They’re like a long, long hand with support on the very tip and at the ‘wrist’. If you look at a seal’s flipper, it’s effectively full of fingers underneath, like a hand hidden within. We had to build an advanced reverse-IK rig to control the contact point anywhere along the hand.”

Animating Crusoe’s now more expressive facial movements was another challenge; Weta devised a Maya-based system that provided the animators with blending shapes that recorded the creature’s facial structure. Instead of blending from a shape to another, the system reacts taking the underlying flesh and bone layers of the digital rig into consideration.

A specifically-developed system called Pogo — developed by CG supervisor Simon Clutterbuck — allowed the animators to convincingly portray fat and muscle layers. White said: “the fat jiggle is defined by the tension of the surface. Animators could identify points on the surface and specify how much weight to apply in certain areas. They might give the loose skin under his neck a certain tension, for example. Or, the creature department might set up his belly to have a particular kind of movement.” While the muscle layer was mainly moved by moving the digital rig, Pogo managed secondary, detailed movements that enhanced the realism of the animation.

The ‘teenage’ Crusoe is the stage seen the least in the film, but nonetheless a challenge. The main goal with this phase of the character was transferring the playful personality and appearance of its previous iteration on “a cow-sized creature.” Frances-Moore elaborated: “just like a kid, the teenager is not comfortable around the house. He quickly moves into the loch, [and that change] is a driving force for the story, but he’s still very much the same character. So, one of the things we did when he jumped to the larger size was to keep his puppy aspects alive, like a big dog that still has a puppy inside.” Pinnipeds were again used as reference for the movements of the ‘teen’ Crusoe. “We looked at bull seals and sealions because they’re unwieldy and a bit like teenagers,” Frances-Moore said.

Consistency with the earlier stage was also guaranteed by texture maps and shaders. The snout is still lighter in colour than the body, and the same patterns are present. “Even as an adult, his texturing still holds true,” said White. “So does the expression in his eyes.”

The adult Crusoe was the most complex version of the creature. In this stage, he is seen exclusively in water; designers and animators took reference from cetaceans — dolphins and whales — for both his anatomy and texture as well as his movements. The silhouette of the adult Crusoe’s face was inspired by a horse. “His face is bonier and more structural,” Frances-Moore said. “He doesn’t have the flexibility of the puppy, but he has the same flow of expression.” The actual structure of the skull, whose outlines can be vaguely distinguished below the skin, was based on Theropod dinosaurs — or rather the popular ‘skin-wrapping’ dinosaur restorations. “If you look at a close-up of the adult Crusoe’s face, you’ll see horse in it, and there’s a bit of dinosaur, but if you look closely there are all kinds of other things going on,” Russell said. “There’s a bit of a dog’s face in there, around the eye there’s a bit of eagle. The little antler things we took from a picture of a giraffe.”

To properly convey the mass of the adult Crusoe, the animators based their work on cetacean motion. Horses were also used as reference for facial movements. “We studied whales and horses,” Frances-Moore said. “There is one chase scene in the film where the adult Crusoe is travelling at speed and is scared, so we had his eyes bulging and nostrils flaring, like a horse.”

Convincing the audience that the adult creature was the same Crusoe was still a primary issue. The animal’s driving force — hunger — proved essential: the animators used it as a running gag to connect all stages character-wise. “He’s hungry all the time. It’s a great gag because it’s always getting him in trouble, and it allows us to push his growth,” Letteri said. “Angus feeds him from his infant stage to puppy. When he was hungry, he rubbed his nose against Angus, which was cute when he was a puppy. Then, when he’s a big, looming, majestic creature as an adult, and we don’t know if he’ll eat Angus at first, he puts his nose down and starts to nudge Angus in the same way. So, we get a moment of reconnection.”

The creature’s anatomical complexity demanded a convincing swimming animation. “It’s difficult to animate him in a pose-to-pose way,” Frances-Moore related. “He’s so large and flowing, and all his parts work somewhat independently.” The animators solved the issue by creating a static swimming cycle for the digital model; they could then set a specific path and let the animated model flow through it. “Rather than moving the creature in world space,” Frances-Moore continues, “you could animate with reference to the spline that you push him along and make changes based on that.”

“All the shows have really hard things to work out, and this was no exception,” Letteri concluded. “Although it was fun developing the character, we had to try a lot of things to make sure it held up the whole way. And, water is always technically challenging. There were no short hours on this one.” White added: “This was my first kid show,” says White. “It was fun working on something my little nephews are excited about.” The director himself was satisfied with the effort, claiming that “even now when I watch the film, I sometimes forget that the Water Horse was not with us on the set.”

For more images of the Water Horse, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Crusoe

Main Article: Larry Talbot

Even a man who is pure in heart, and says his prayers by night;
may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.

In the early 30s, Universal was developing a Werewolf film. Aptly titled The Werewolf, the story harkened back to traditional French stories of the loup garou (wolf man). Actor Boris Karloff was pre-cast as the titular character, and make-up artist Jack Pierce designed an extensive Werewolf make-up specifically to fit the actor’s bulky physical traits. In 1935, the project underwent several changes and was retitled as Werewolf of London — which would go on to become Universal’s first Werewolf-themed film. The role originally assigned to Karloff was turned over to Henry Hull — a change that forced Pierce to devise a ‘scaled down’ version of the appliances: not only he needed to fit Hull’s thinner physique, but — as the actor himself argued — the other characters in the film would have to recognize Dr. Glendon even in Werewolf form.

In retrospect, Pierce found this initial effort disappointing; however, at the dawn of the following decade, he was able to resurrect his original concept for Universal’s new Werewolf project — The Wolf Man. With Karloff occupied in other kinds of roles, the part of the Wolf Man was assigned to Lon Chaney Jr. — whose bulky physical features, similar to Karloff’s, allowed Pierce to bring to life his original vision. As envisioned by the artist, the Wolf Man was a hybrid creature leaning more towards the human side of the spectrum, allowing Pierce and special effects supervisor John P. Fulton to use less extensive appliances; in addition, Chaney would be able to deliver his performance without excessive hindrances. As the Wolf Man would be fully-clothed throughout all of his appearances, the make-up simply consisted in make-up for the face and hands, a chest appliance to enlarge the actor’s chest, and foot extensions to portray wolf-like digitigrade legs.

Despite the differences in design, the make-up application process was not very different from the one Pierce devised for Werewolf of London. With the exception of the Wolf Man’s nose, the nails and the foot extensions (boots covered with yak hair and manually-sculpted feet), Pierce’s make-up involved no moulds or pre-made appliances: every make-up application started from scratch, with yak hairs carefully laid out in order. “I put all of the hair in a little row at a time,” Pierce said. “After the hair is on, you curl it, then singe it, burn it, to [make it] look like an animal’s that’s been out in the woods. It had to be done every morning.” Every make-up application session lasted up to two and a half hours. This, combined with the intricate make-up design led to an uneasy and controversial relationship between Chaney and Pierce and an overall unpleasant experience for Chaney.

Working in tandem with Pierce, Fulton realized the film’s transformation sequences: in the first, only Larry Talbot’s feet are seen transforming into the bestial Werewolf feet; and in the finale, the dead Talbot reverts back to human form. For these key scenes, Fulton used the same technique — this time perfected — he had used for Werewolf of London: progressive stages of the make-up (always applied by Pierce, with increasing hair number and density) were photographed in identical conditions and lap-dissolved in the final film to create the illusion of a progressive transformation.

Chaney recalled the experience: “the day we did the transformations I came in at two AM. When I hit that position they would take little nails and drive them through the skin at the edge of my fingers, on both hands, so that I wouldn’t move them anymore. While I was in this position they would build a plaster cast of the back of my head. Then they would take drapes from behind me and starch them, and while they were drying them, they would take the camera and weigh it down with one ton, so that it wouldn’t quiver when people walked. They had targets for my eyes up there. Then, while I’m still in this position, they would shoot five or ten frames of film in the camera. They’d take that film out and send it to the lab. While it was there the make-up man [Pierce] would come and take the whole thing off my face, and put on a new one, only less. I’m still immobile. When the film came back from the lab they’d check me. They’d say, ‘your eye have moved a little bit, move them to the right… now your shoulder is up…’ Then they’d roll it again and shoot another 10 frames.” Despite Chaney’s varying, oftentimes exaggerated accounts, the entire process realistically took roughly 10 hours.

For more pictures of the Wolf Man, visit the Monster Gallery.

“Something was coming up behind them. What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater; and a power and terror seemed to be in it and to go before it.

It came to the edge of the fire and the light faded as if a cloud had bent over it. Then with a rush it leaped across the fissure. The flames roared up to greet it, and wreathed about it; and a black smoke swirled in the air. Its streaming mane kindled, and blazed behind it. In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left it held a whip of many thongs.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Conceptualizing Durin’s Bane for Fellowship of the Ring was one of the most arduous design challenges the artists at Weta Workshop met in the entire project. Not only were Tolkien’s descriptions of its appearance vague enough to interpret, but beyond its anatomy the creature had to channel the fundamental diptych of “Shadow and Flame” the writer assigned to it. “The Balrog took the longest to realize,” said Weta concept artist Christian Rivers, “because it had so many ethereal attributes. Even Tolkien’s description was hard to translate — a shadow blacker than black, with a mane of fire on a creature that was vaguely a shape. A man-shape? We didn’t know.”

You fear to go into those mines. The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dum… Shadow and Flame.

Compared to the novel, the introduction to the Balrog is greater in scope. The crew designed the Moria Goblins’ armour to channel the appearance of the Balrog, implying that they worship it as a deity. In addition, as Durin’s Bane approaches the scene, the photography of the film leans towards progressively warmer colours.

One of John Howe’s original illustrations.

Concept art by Ben Wootten.

The Balrog’s ‘man-shape’ was always a defining aspect of its silhouette, and was initially taken literally — with muscular, prominently humanoid iterations. The turning point of the design process was a published illustration by John Howe — made before the film’s production — which portrayed the Balrog as a more bestial and demonic creature than a simple human form, a concept that proved pivotal for the design process. The film Balrog thus steered towards a similar direction: the “man-shape” would only be suggested by the anatomy of its torso, as well as its upright and imposing posture. A mane of fire running down the creature’s neck and back was another element that was established early during the design process — as well as the ram-like horns curving downwards and forwards. Based on their interpretation of Tolkien’s writing, Jackson and crew also decided to endow the Balrog with wings — a choice stemmed from two brief passages in Fellowship of the Ring:

“[…] His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the thongs whined and cracked. Fire came from its nostrils. But Gandalf stood firm.

[…]

“The Balrog made no answer. The fire in it seemed to die, but the darkness grew. It stepped forward slowly on to the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall […]”

Howe commented on this choice: “Tolkien was always a little brief in his description, so people interpret it in different ways. I mean, I’ve always drawn him [the Balrog] with wings because it just seems so cool to have wings! There’s a hint of it in the book when Tolkien says, ‘there are shadows, like wings’, and frankly that was all the excuse I needed to stick wings on it. It doesn’t say they don’t have wings, so why not? That was Peter’s tongue-in-cheek approach, too! If it doesn’t say it’s not there — then we can do it!”

Wootten’s maquette.

The Balrog’s look was ultimately developed progressively through a series of conceptual maquettes. Given it would obtain its ethereal appearance through digital enhancement, the Balrog also needed to be a reality-based form. Ben Wootten was the artist with the most influence in the process, being responsible for the final iteration of the design. Visual effects supervisor Richard Taylor said: “its skeletal structure was a mixture of a dog and a bull, with wings based on the structure of bat wings. It had the tail of a lizard, and its horns were fashioned to look like actual horn material.” The 4′ tall maquette depicting the final design’s head and torso was sculpted by Wootten himself and Jamie Beswarick.

Gino Acevedo’s initial colour schemes for the Balrog were based on dark but organic, animal-like patterns. However, it was ultimately established that Durin’s Bane would be a fantastic being composed of lava, taking into consideration that the Fellowship encounters it deep within a mountain. Most importantly, this expedient also resolved the question of how to convey the “Shadow and Flame” description. Scenographer Grant Major said that the demon “appears to be made of fire, of lava almost. It’s as if the environment it is in, the base of the mountain, because it is volcanic, infused in this fiery monster.” Taylor added: “the skin just happened to be congealed, cold lava. By basing it in this physical reality, the audience could believe in this fantastical, bizarre creature.” Wooten’s maquette was finally scanned to obtain a rough digital model, which was then refined manually and completed with the rest of the Balrog’s anatomical components, such as the wings.

The next challenge was to properly convey the lava-like texture of the Balrog’s body. As envisioned, the Balrog’s outer surface acted like solidified lava, containing the creature’s innards — molten lava. Taylor elaborated the concept in the commentary for the film: “we very much wanted the feeling that the surface of the Balrog was like congealed lava, and that if he [remained] still for a long time it would turn completely black — but through his actions, the lava would split, revealing a more molten mass of heated lava underneath the skin — as if his skin is running with liquid veins of heat and fire. His eyes glow like white embers and when he roars, the heat wave flows out of the inner forms of his body, where this massive energy is stored. We wanted his back to erupt into this huge flaming furnace as if all the energy is pouring off his back like a huge mane; and his wings are almost like shadows of smoke writhing around him.” Gray Horsfield also described the Balrog’s skin moving “like tectonic plates”. The Balrog’s outer surface was defined and texture-painted by Paul Campion and Rob Shrider.

The Balrog’s animation, much like the other creatures of the film, was inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects. The animators also wanted the Balrog’s movements to have regality and intelligence. Animation supervisor Randall William Cook related: “the Balrog, another member of ‘the Harryhausen family’, was a huge challenge. He had to be more supernatural than just a big, dull Monster, and so we set out to give a sort of sense of regality to his movements. He had to be a Monster, but also malevolent and intelligent.”

This concept also had to be applied to the simulated fire and smoke that burst forth from the creature. “He had to be animated in a way that the fire would behave dramatically,” Cook said. Not only did the Weta crew need to devise an improved fire and smoke simulator — they also needed to find a way to give it a dramatic character. The crew chose to finalize the bulk of the animation — i.e. the Balrog’s actual body — before adding smoke and fire effects, in order to maximize the time to develop a technique to portray them properly. Cook related: “we semi-finaled the animation months before we saw smoke, which made it difficult to know exactly how much to animate. As it turned out, we put more work into the animation than we should have, given how much of the Balrog was covered up with smoke. We thought there was going to be more of a real shape, and more definable locomotion. I even had a grand theatrical notion of the Balrog carrying a tail behind him, sweeping like a train on a costume — but it ended up just smoke.”

Technical director Jim Callahan initially devised a complex physics-based fluid dynamics system and volume renderer; it was discarded because it was deemed as ‘too render-intensive’, and the fire produced with it did not behave dramatically as Jackson intended. After failed experiments in puppeteering actual gas jets, the crew settled on a combination of practical and digital effects — a system developed by Gray Horsfield. He explained: “I did a test initially, which was just a single, blobby little cell-shaped thing moving down a slope. It was on fire and it was burning. I did that using sprites, which are basically just pictures on particles. […] For the Balrog, we shot fire — explosions and propane tanks going off, flames billowing and curling around — and then we put those pictures on fairly rudimentary Maya particle systems. Each particle was a picture of fire doing its stuff. We did the same thing for smoke. In both cases, the pictures were animated, not just still, so they would evolve over time. There were a lot of these little sprite projections going, synchronized differently, and we layered them together until it looked appealing. We added fire where we felt we needed it, and took it away where it didn’t seem to be working. So basically, we were just utilizing Maya as a compositing package to reposition the pieces of fire so that they were in the right place and moving the right way.” This process considerably quickened the rendering process, allowing the crew to render two frames per second.

For more pictures of the Balrog, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Articles:

• Cave Troll
• Watcher in the Water
• Flame of Udun

“It’s white. You never told me it was white.”
“Think it will scare the kids?”
“The kids? This will give the parents nightmares.”

“There is no shortage of awesome dinosaurs,” said Colin Trevorrow, director of Jurassic World. “We could have populated this entire story with new species that haven’t been in any of these movies. But this new creation is what gave me a reason to tell another Jurassic Park story. We have the most awe-inspiring creatures to ever walk the Earth right in front of us, but for some reason that’s not enough. We’re always hungry for the next thing, and those who profit from it are always looking to feed that hunger. The focus groups want something bigger than a T.rex — and that’s what they get.”

The Indominus rex’s various attributes and qualities shifted as the script for the film was refined. Early names for it included Malasaurus (in the storyboards) and Diabolus rex — or D.rex for short — the nickname most widely used by the crew during production. In one of the original story drafts, the creature was an unprecedented fictional species of Dinosaur discovered in China — a concept Trevorrow discarded because the Monster’s origin needed to fit within the thematic of the film.

The Indominus thus became the product of genetic engineering, an idea that both satisfied said necessity and harkened back to Michael Crichton’s original novel — where Dr. Henry Wu considered genetically modifying the next generations of the dinosaurs in their park in order to satisfy what the public wanted. John Horner, paleontological supervisor for the film, commented on the idea of transgenic engineering: “it is actually the most plausible idea in the whole franchise. It’s the kind of thing that we can do these days. If we could bring dinosaurs back from the past—and I mean the way Jurassic Park did it—we actually would be able to probably make hybrid dinosaurs and transgenically make them do other sorts of things. So as weird as it is, it’s plausible.”

As a hallmark of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs, the Indominus rex’s genetic structure represented an element with unexpected outcomes. Horner, who oversaw the whole design process of the Indominus, was also the one to suggest a camouflaging ability — which the filmmakers decided would be incorporated from cuttlefish genes. “I have, for years, wanted to get camouflage on a dinosaur,” Horner said. “The cuttlefish is what we use for their camouflage — they’re just the best camouflagers ever. So our dinosaur has that capability. I would like to have had a dinosaur that camouflaged itself so well that it wouldn’t even have to run after anything. It would just wait until something came up to it and eat it. But we have to have them running in a Jurassic Park movie.”

The filmmakers strived to design a Monster that not only would satisfy the various needs of the script, but also convey a balance between realistic believability and dramatic stylization. There was an element of natural malevolence the character also had to convey. “The challenge was to introduce a character that displayed a frightening, indiscriminate malevolence to anything that moves,” said creature model supervisor Geoff Campbell. “With Indominus there’s no soul, only an uncontrollable monster with a vengeance.”

Design groundwork started with Legacy Effects Studio — headed by John Rosengrant and other Jurassic Park creature effects veterans — hired to retain the visual connection with the other films. Rosengrant collaborated with concept artists Ian Joyner and Scott Patton The Indominus had to fit within the Jurassic Park dinosaur aesthetic in its structural design.”The Indominus was one of the first things we started designing and working on,” said Rosengrant. “We went through a lot of iterations to try and figure out what this hybrid creature was going to be, as far as making it evil but believable and then mixing the characteristics of both the T.rex and the Velociraptor.”

Although the Jurassic Park versions of the T.rex and the Velociraptor were the fundamental base of the Indominus design, other dinosaur species were used as reference. The notion of large claws was inspired by the Therizinosaurus. “It has great, big claws and big arms,” said Horner. “It’s sort of the opposite of a T. Rex—rather than having short little arms, it’s got these monstrous arms.”

Legacy’s design was an ornate creature with fins and crests. This iteration was passed over to Industrial Light & Magic, headed by visual effects supervisor Tim Alexander. Also collaborating on the digital effects were Jurassic Park veterans Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett. At ILM, the concept art was sculpted into a digital maquette by Kris Costa — and used as a template to further define the Monster’s appearance.

Indominus concept by Aaron McBride.

The Indominus — with the work of art director Aaron McBride and his team –began losing its ornate qualities, which were replaced with more aggressive traits such as quills, spikes and ostheoderms. Limb length and other anatomical features were also discussed. “Her design comes from reading the script, talking to Colin and figuring out what she needs to do,” Alexander said. “We needed to take into consideration what action she needs to do. Colin pointed out that he wanted her to have weapons different from the other dinosaurs. She has long arms and hands and a very powerful thick tail. Knowing that he wanted to use those actions in the film helps us to define what that character was going to be. She needed to run 35 miles per hour and that goes to limb length – all of those design considerations.”

The realism of the design was always a key factor the crew put into consideration. “We wanted it to be super cool and different,” Alexander said, “but it couldn’t look too alien or too much like a fantasy character. It was very important to Colin that the D.rex look like something that could possibly be created.”

ILM artist Glen McIntosh, collaborating with John Horner, was instrumental in the process.  “[Glen] made a number of descriptive illustrations and sketches to bring out the armoured plating along her neck and back,” said Campbell, “as well as defining her trade mark fenestrae between the nostrils and eyes and in front of the ear holes. If you include the eye cavity you get a kind of cathedral effect of three strong vertical structures defining her face.” McIntosh elaborated the bony horns above the Indominus’s eyes and decided to carry that horned pattern down the neck and flank of the creature.

The Indominus’s head was designed to work visually from all angles, and was especially intended for front shots. “Regardless of the scientific data and whether or not T-rex even had binocular vision, Spielberg designed the original T.rex with her front facing eyes partly because she looked better when she was moving toward the camera,” Campbell said. “Colin Trevorrow wanted to follow that same plan of attack.” For the Indominus’s eyes, their shape and relative size, the crew used goshawks as reference, and included a full nictitating membrane.

Particular attention was given to the Indominus’s mouth. “I needed to know how the mouth would come together and close,” McIntosh explained, “and there were several options. The mouth could close so that no teeth showed, such as on a Komodo dragon or the Raptors, or it could close with the upper teeth exposed, like the T.rex and other theropods, or it could have interlocking teeth, like those of a saltwater crocodile. It would have a very different look, depending on how its jaw closed.” Ultimately, the crocodile-like jaw structure with exposed, interlocking teeth was chosen. The lower jaw was also emphasized and brought forward to create an underbite effect. “Colin liked the opposing tension of gnashing teeth that you find with crocodiles so we incorporated that into the design and then added more meat to her jaw for bone crushing,” Campbell said. “We also pulled her lower [jaw] forward to give her a menacing under bite. This was all in the very early design stage of defining the character as a maquette for basic approval from Colin.”

With all of this data collected, Steve Jubinville — the lead digital modeler of the project — sculpted an entirely new digital model of the Indominus, based on Kris Costa’s maquette and incorporating all the new elements the crew defined. “Steve came with an incredible sculpting talent in addition to having worked on a number of dinosaur projects before coming to ILM,” Campbell related. “Building up his own reference library of lizards, birds and other animals he started sculpting an entirely new model of Indominus based on Kris’ maquette, starting with an accurate skeleton and muscle model for rigging and then moving on to the surface topology, detailing and adding structure, weighting skin folds, adding creases and aging along with bony scutes along the side of the head, neck and back. Martin [Murphy] worked with Steve, mapping out a scale pattern and the two of them worked back and forth in ZBrush, Adobe Photoshop and The Foundry’s Mari to finish the model and texture.”Similarly, a baby Indominus model was fashioned for the early introduction sequence.

The Indominus rex was an entirely digital effect. On set, the crew used stand-ins such as cardboard cutouts of the creature’s head, as well as 3D printed replicas of its feet, to establish where exactly the creature would be in a specific shot. A 1:5th scale maquette of the head and neck — differing only slightly to the final version of the creature — was also 3D-printed by the Legacy crew, and painted by Jon Cherevka.

Given the size of the creature and the other large animals of the film, ILM developed an app for iOS called Cineview — which allowed them to have an instant representation of the digital creatures on set. “I can get the same frame that they have on camera and see the dinosaur viewed on my iPad,” Alexander explained. “We could have discussions about how big the dinosaurs were going to be and if they were going to be framed correctly. With numbers of dinosaurs and different locations, we could see if the dinosaurs would fit.”

The digital model used for the animation incorporated realistic skeleton, muscle and skin simulations, where the skeletal movement effectively drove the muscular movement and the skin sliding over the muscles themselves. ILM’s simulation systems were refined to unprecedented realism. “Typically animation would inform the simulation,” McIntosh said, “and it would also in many ways kickstart the simulation. If we did nothing we would get some interesting aspects of impact tremors in the flesh or muscle. There’s also a tensing that precedes the movement – it’s new for Jurassic World in that it wasn’t just a secondary action as a result of the step, they’re using their muscles to take that step. We also had a tail rig where we could build muscle detail on top of that; in typical texturing, if there’s stretching of the limbs the texture itself stretches — but they devised a system based on the scale detail where the space between the scales stretch, but not the scales themselves. You see that when you see a snake swallowing an egg and the skin between stretches but not the scales.”

Initial animation tests were used to explore the possibilities given by the Indominus rex’s anatomical structure. Its large forelimbs allowed the animators to distinguish the creature from the traditional T.rex, incorporating different cues. Although the animation of the Raptors and T.rex from the previous films served as reference, the animators integrated new behavioural elements distinctive to the Indominus. “Initial motion studies were done,” McIntosh explained, “and we also quickly realized she would have long arms and raptor claws, and small thumbs. It opens up the world creatively to make her very distinct from a T.rex. Not only can she get down on all fours and sneak around this environment, she can push off with her claws to get up, use her claws to throw things around. We did a bunch of animation tests to explore that; we found that if you overanimated or made it too anthropomorphic and human-like in its movement, [you can detect it]. The goal was to always make sure she felt like a gigantic animal that was a theropod but taking advantage of its extra features.”

Among those elements were the Indominus’s flexible jaws and long arms. “She has a much more flexible jaw than other dinosaurs,” McIntosh said, “and can open her jaws much wider. We took advantage of that in the animation. We also took advantage of the D.rex’s long arms, which give her the ability to go down on all fours, and to swing and grab at things in a way that the T.rex can’t.”

For more pictures of the Indominus rex, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Indominus rex