Rise of the Creature Designer to Director
Lycans (werewolves) and Death Dealers (vampires) are back for the third installment of the successful Underworld horror franchise. This time, though, the artist helming the project is the very person who designed them in the first place. With Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (now playing from Screen Gems), famed creature designer and production designer Patrick Tatopoulos makes his directorial debut with an origin story that takes us back to an ancient time, when lycans were mere slaves to their vampire masters.
A veteran of the two previous movies, Visual Effects Supervisor James McQuaide enjoyed a great collaboration with Tatopoulos. "One of the unique pleasures of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (UW3) was working with a director who had both production designed Underworld: Evolution (UW2) and had designed/built all the creatures for all of the Underworld pictures. As a result, there was a knowledgeable attention to detail that provided the visual effects (and the movie, for that matter) with a level of reality that it very likely would never have had. Patrick knew exactly the shape of the werewolves' necks, precisely how he wanted the werewolves to move their hind legs when they ran, where the CG rocks that we added to the meadow in front of the fortress should be placed, what the clouds in the fortress assault sequence should look like, etc. And that he could draw what he was looking for, made its execution immeasurably easier."
During production, McQuaide worked alongside On Set VFX Supervisor Charlie McClellan.
Underworld: Evolution, released in 2006, featured some 553 digital effects shots, plus about 800 opticals -- far more than the 390 vfx shots of the first Underworld. "From a vfx perspective, UW3 is a significantly larger, more complicated picture than either of the previous two," McQuaide observes. "For example, in UW2, we had 29 shots that involved CG werewolves while, in UW3, there are 80 CG werewolf shots. In UW2, at most, we had four CG werewolves on screen at a single time; in UW3, we have 15-plus shots that have 250 to 300 werewolves on the screen at once. In UW2, we were proud to have two werewolves transforming in a single shot; in UW3, we have a shot where four Lycans are transforming at the same time, to say nothing of shots where transformations are occurring while Lycans are running, while they are on fire, etc. We even bit the bullet on UW3 and had clothes fall away as a result of the transformation, an issue we had previously avoided by having the transformer pull his jacket off.
"Another challenging aspect of the new movie was the overall budget: it was relatively low, slightly more than half the cost of UW2. So, while the scope of the vfx that presently exists was certainly suggested by the script, it had to be greatly reduced in prep in order to make the budget work. However, in post, as Screen Gems was able to see how great a picture Patrick had made, additional vfx allowances were made that, in essence, allowed the vfx to grow back to the size originally suggested by the first reading of the script."
These late additions caused unexpected deadline issues during post-production. Since production had wrapped at the end of March 2008, the various vendors initially had a respectable eight-month post period. However, with new vfx shots added late, they eventually had to rush to complete the project on time. "One of the main reasons 10 companies worked on the picture was to address the need to expedite things," McQuaide explains. "For example, the fortress assault sequence -- which consists of roughly 25 vfx shots, all of which involve CG werewolves, many of which featuring 250 to 300 werewolves -- had to be completed in less than three months."
The 10 facilities involved were:
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