People have been building monsters for the silver screen ever since movies were invented. In every era of filmmaking, artists have used whatever they had and whatever would work to bring a vision to life …as long as they stayed within budget. Mental Floss spoke with some of today's leading monster designers and animators to get a glimpse into the world of movie monsters.
1. CREATURE EFFECTS HAVE COME A LONG WAY SINCE GUYS IN RUBBER SUITS.
The earliest creature features typically involved a guy in a rubber suit terrorizing Tokyo or carrying off a damsel in distress. Today’s creatures are much more complex and believable, thanks to new varieties of silicone rubber, upgrades in animatronics, new forms of design software, and the development of CGI.
“Special Effects as an industry is always evolving, and products and materials are expanding and becoming more readily available than ever before,” says Stuart Rowsell, a creature technician and founder of Bloodhound FX in Australia who has worked on films including Star Wars: Episode II (2002) and III (2005), Superman Returns (2006), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and Alien: Covenant (2017).
3D printing is also shaking up the industry. Lino Stavole, a creature engineer at Spectral Motion based in Los Angeles, founded 3D scanning, printing, and engineering company Behold 3D to cater to the needs of the entertainment industry. Stavole tells Mental Floss that his company used 3D printing in silicone to create an alien creature for the movie V/H/S in just two days, a process that once required several more. “That really opened my eyes to the potential of what technology can do,” he says. 3D printing is also pushing boundaries in terms of design intricacy—Stavole says a creature he helped create for Netflix’s planned reboot of Lost in Space incorporates about 400 different 3D-printed parts.
Read more about how movie monsters are made at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Stuart Rowsell)