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Jed Fisher
Visualizing Indescribable Monsters The team at Framestore faced some unusual challenges as they created the monsters for HBO’s acclaimed new series Lovecraft Country.
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ast month, horror fans got a nice treat in the form of Lovecraft Country, the new HBO series based on Matt Ruff’s novel about Jim Crow racism taking on supernatural forms and menacing Black residents of 1950s-era Chicago. To help bring to life the creatures in the show, showrunner Misha Green and exec producers Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams relied on the team at Framestore, which provided a wide range of VFX shots for the 10-part series. The creative studio was responsible for designing, asset building and animating the series’ Shoggoths, the supposedly ‘indescribable’ creatures from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. They appear in two different forms as the series analyzes the horror writer’s cosmic, creature-filled world from a fresh new perspective. Framestore’s work was led by head of CG and project VFX supervisor Grant Walker, who sculpted the 3D model of the Shoggoths. The art department’s work on the series included creating several iterations of the Shoggoths, as well as an array of other-worldly creatures and ghosts. Each of these ghosts had a gruesome visual representation of their human forms’ death, work that allowed the www.animationmagazine.net
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team to really imagine the character behind their designs. Bringing to life creatures and ideas which might have a limited description in Lovecraft’s
creatures were said to be so hideous that they couldn’t be described. We had to bear in mind that ‘unfathomable’ nature but also think about the Shoggoths in a realistic way, not
‘While we had to bring to life something that’s so inherently unnatural, the laws that govern gravity, weight and timing all still applied so we used a lot of references from the animal kingdom in our animation.’ — Framestore’s VFX supervisor Grant Walker
initial work was one of the project’s biggest challenges for Framestore. For the Shoggoths in particular, work needed to be completed for two kinds; several white ones which appear in a number of frantic, vicious scenes and a black Shoggoth which is larger and more intimidating and ultimately seen in more detail in the series. The Shoggoths aren’t particularly beautiful creatures, with translucent skin through which you can see veins and muscles and eyes dotted all over their heads and backs, as well as several different appendages which it uses to grab and devour the target of its attacks. As Walker explains, “Many of Lovecraft’s
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just making decisions about how it would look but how it moved, its behavior and how it interacted with its environment. I think we ended up with something of a departure from what was initially devised within Lovecraft’s september|october 20
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