HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER

Images by Millennium FX

The making of a monster

Within the walls of House of Frankenstein in Gay Street is a laboratory; inside is an animatronic creation of the creature that Mary Shelley described in her book. Emma Clegg admires the finished model and discovers how it came about

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

This excerpt from Mary Shelley’s book Frankenstein is the only description of the creature created by scientist Victor Frankenstein. For those familiar with the cult image of the monster in Boris Karloff’s 1931 film Frankenstein and its 1935 and 1939 sequels, this is a surprise as Karloff established the creature as a towering, green, halfalive figure with a flat-topped angular head and bolts on his neck.

The new House of Frankenstein attraction in Gay Street has stripped these entrenched visual associations away and has created, in its laboratory room, a creature in sync with Shelley’s description.

Co-founder Chris Harris explains, “What we’ve tried to do with Bafta Award-winning animatronic company Millennium FX is to create what we see using the words from the novel, how Mary herself saw the monster. Nobody has done that ever.”

I spoke to Chris Goodman at Millennium FX, who goes by the cool job title of ‘creature concept artist’, about the project. “We started with Mary Shelley’s description of Frankenstein, along with a document detailing various references and influences. The brief was to have a fairly subtle movement in the eyes and chest. Chris was very specific about details, especially around the face: the stretched skin, the watery eyes, the black lips. He was also keen to show that Frankenstein wanted to create something beautiful, almost like a Grecian statue. That was his dream. So we were aiming for a juxtaposition between the strong form and the grotesque.

“The movement in the eyes was important in the physical creature as well as in making the figure eerie – a lot of animatronics have that kind of Uncanny Valley effect.” This is a term used in the film industry in relation to special effects and prosthetics. “It means something that is real, but not quite right. It’s the seemingly small gap between real and just off that you can get with special effects”, says Chris.

“It’s not only the eye movement, but also the brow, which is what makes an eye expressive. There is an eyeball turning, but the brow and the cheeks also move to give expression.”

Chris designed the creature using a digital sculpting programme called ZBrush. “I did the design in three-dimensions, showed Chris [Harris] and the team renders of it and made changes based on their notes. Once we had a broad concept, I refined that and made it as minutely detailed as I could. At this point I sent the design off to be printed big scale and sent a digital version to Adam Keenan who built the mechanical element of the creature digitally.”

Chris explained that the 3D model is made in the computer programme and the model is then sliced into thousands of layers and the 3D printer builds the model one layer at a time. “It feels like it is growing out of the resin, whereas it’s just being layered,” says Chris.

“Once we had the three dimensional parts, we had to build the form, instal the mechanism and paint the parts visible to the eye. In the case of the head we had to remould the resin parts and cast it out in silicone that we could then paint and punch his black hair into.”

It seems to me that designing and creating a large monster from Mary Shelley’s short paragraph must have been a challenge: does the technology help with this? Chris tells me that in his view the key is not to get caught up in the technology. “Once you have a concept to work with and you know a software programme well enough, the programme becomes second nature so your mind can focus on the creative elements.”

Check out the Uncanny Valley effect of Mary Shelley’s creature at the House of Frankenstein, along with the other aspects of her story. n

There is an eyeball turning, but the brow and the cheeks also move to give expression ❝