urbanamazon: (MajiGoBoom!)
[personal profile] urbanamazon
So. Spent all of yesterday avoiding the slimy pools of crack-headed male immaturity (aka working at Quizno's), then rented some DVDs to indulge myself and headed home.

Ate macaroni and cheese spirals and watched Underworld. Promptly fell into OMFGSQUEE! mode.

Okay, White Wolf WoD vs Underworld writers lawsuit aside, that movie left me grinning like a total and absolute geek. T'wasn't the story, nor the pretty faces ... it was the delightful featurettes about the absolutely mind-blowing prosthetic make-up.

Y'see, before I wanted to become an illustrator, I wanted to lean towards a proffession of special-effects make-up. As much as I liked cool CG effects in movies and crazy camera tricks, I loved the real, the tangible. For examples of what I'm taking about, see movies like Predator, Aliens, and the like. Take a gander at Farscape for some more creature feature, if you have the chance. I loved the mix of illusion and reality. I liked the challenge to fool every sense a person had, no just their eye. If they could see it, smell it, touch it ... my job was done. And when I watched movies that did the exact same, so perfectly, I was entranced. Like, again, I bring up Predator. That was a guy in a suit. A very pretty suit. We've come a long way since Godzilla.

Underworld had its flaws, but by no way at all were any of these flaws in the visual department. To see the behind-the-scene footage of the werewolf costumes ... oh, the bliss. Again, that was a guy in a very pretty suit. Everything from the digitigrade legs to the musculature to the fluidity ... ah, bliss.

And then there was the Hybrid. That was my reason for the OMFGSQUEE! Not that I consider Scott Speedman to be horribly attractive or anything ... it was the tekMage potential. Seriously. To see images like that on scree, prosthetic and painted and everythinged into full 3D glory .... SQUEEE!!

Spoliers aside, I'll post the caps that I was able to find:



Drool.

More drool.

In short, that last half hour was the entire movie, as far as I'm concerned. Gah. It was like seeing the offspring of Seberak and Caine ... which is also a slightly disturbing combination, now that I think about it.


True, I had my personal nitpicks, like my disbelief that werewolves should have such spidery-long fingers ... umm, no. Both my werewolf and my demigod have thick fingers with heavy claws, with flat palms and nearly triangular-shaped cross-sectioned fingers ... like actual large-breed canines. I also didn't like their 'feline' component idea ... werewolf, people. And tails! I need tails!

All in all, I am now cursed with a veritable goldmine of visuals to use as inspiration for more tekMage dreaming ... spent a good half hour last night thinking up a visual for the wings being shifted ... and the birth of a comic strip (or a movie script) called "Restaurant at the End of the World" ... but that's another story.

Re:

Date: 2004-02-16 11:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kouryou.livejournal.com
What I meant when I said that I didn't like their "feline" component idea was my reaction to some of the commentary in the Creature FX featurette on the DVD. They said that they were trying to put a bit of a feline approach on the werewolf design, as in shorter snouts, cat-like facial structure ... stuff like that. Didn't sit well with me.

I think the only CG shots of the werewolves were the transformations, that one shot of the werewolf on top of the train, and the wall-crawling (which was shot with the suit-men first, then edited in CG).

And I think that the movie might have been much more of a positive hit if WoD had made it first, despite what the writers claim is a completely original storyline.

Re:

Date: 2004-02-17 12:16 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dumdums.livejournal.com
Well. looks like I'm going to have to watch the extra features I will.

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