In the trailer for The Water Horse, you find a kinder, gentler Loch Ness Monster tale. All images courtesy of Sony Pictures Ent.

Stories and sightings of monsters inhabiting the lakes of Scotland are centuries old, with the most famous culminating in the photo snapped of what became known as the Loch Ness monster in 1933. People have theorized the creatures are everything from a monster-sized eel to a plesiosaur that somehow escaped extinction in the land locked loch, but scientists have never found actual evidence any of them exist.

Hollywood is now taking the tale to the big screen showing how that creature might have come to be in director Jay Russell's spin on author Dick King-Smith's book The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (opening Christmas Day from Sony Pictures). Instead of Nessie, the creature in this story is called Crusoe and he's found still inside his egg by a little boy named Angus (Alex Etel). At home, the egg hatches and births a mythical creature known as a Water Horse in the Scottish Highlands. Together Angus and Crusoe become fast friends but how do you hide a slippery creature with a penchant for trouble from the rest of the not so friendly world? Such is the story of the charming, family movie.

But for Visual Effects Supervisor Joe Letteri, who has just become a full-partner at New Zealand-based Weta Digital, the bigger question became how do you bring Crusoe to life? With his team of digital artists under the guidance of Russell, Letteri and his crew finally brought the mystical to life. Letteri talks to VFXWorld about the challenges and process of making The Water Horse happen.

Tara DiLullo Bennett: How was Crusoe conceptualized?

For the design of Crusoe, the design team went back to classic renditions of Nessie.

Joe Letteri: We had a couple of ideas of when we started. The main one was the classic picture of the Loch Ness Monster. We knew as an adult we needed him to look like that especially because we were going to do the gag in the film of the guys taking the [infamous] photo. Just trying to come up with what that would be and the closest thing we could think of was a plesiosaur. It looked about the right thing. As we started thinking about him being smaller and smaller, we started thinking more of like a seal, with flippers and a little more friendly.

Jay had done some concept art before he came here showing Crusoe in all his stages. The idea was that when we first see Crusoe, he's hatching from an egg. Jay wanted to go with the look of a bird, where they come out messy and kind of ugly but cute. We wanted that idea so he has more of a beak. He snaps at Angus so you don't know if he is dangerous. But the next time you see him, he's grown into a puppy phase. We used seals for the body type and the performance, even though he different from a seal because of the flippers. But we went for the idea of a seal with the way he moved and the playfulness. In the face, it was more puppy dog because this really in a way is a boy and his dog story. We didn't want to humanize Crusoe, but we wanted to be able to recognize his emotions and a dog is best for that. We kept going back to that. So that left the one phase to fill in which was the teenage phase, where he is halfway in between the two. We played it like a teenager, where is just more awkward and doesn't quite fit in. That was part of the story too because it's the part where he is separated from Angus and find his own way in the world. You see in the movie the two parallel stories for a few minutes as they both go through that phase.

TDB: Was there a time when you considered using performance capture for Crusoe like you did for other Weta Digital created creatures like King Kong or Gollum?

JL: We always thought that he would be an animated character. We never gave any consideration to doing Crusoe with motion capture because with all the animal references the performance that we wanted, it really required an animated performance to do that.

TDB: Despite not utilizing performance capture, Weta Digital still has immense experience with creating full-blown CG characters and Crusoe falls into that category. How did that prior work inform how you approached creating Crusoe?