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Article
by Jody Duncan
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Monster
Island -- an MTV-produced movie that was first aired
on the MTV network, then released on DVD on November 2 --
was to some extent the realization of a dream for writer/director
Jack Perez. That dream was to make a monster movie in the
mold of the old Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien films,
with nary a computer chip employed to bring his creatures
to life on screen.
Though
nothing in his previous directing credits -- La Cucaracha,
Wild Things 2, The Big Empty and, for television, The
Mary Kay Letourneau Story -- suggested an affinity for
classic creature movie fare, Perez, like so many other filmmakers,
had been infected with the movie bug while a child watching
some of those very movies on television. "Like a lot
of people," Perez said, "I was heavily influenced
by the original King Kong, by Harryhausen's pictures,
by 1950s atomic mutation movies, such as Them! and
The Black Scorpion. I wanted to do a project where
I could resurrect the look and feel of those movies. I didn't
want to do a spoof of them; I just wanted to find a vehicle
that would allow me to recapture the feelings of watching
those movies on a Saturday morning when I was a kid."
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Perez's
original notion was to develop a 'monster of the week' television
series. "The idea was to have a small coastal community that,
every week, would be besieged by another creature from the 1950s.
That would have allowed me to use the entire arsenal of 1950s
movie creatures -- giant bugs, the creature from the black lagoon,
everything. There was some interest, but it wasn't the kind of
thing they are doing on television right now." Enter executives
at the MTV network, with whom Perez already enjoyed a relationship.
"They were doing made-for-television movies; so my manager
suggested that I adapt my television series idea to a feature
and pitch it to them. I did, and they bought it."
The
only caveat to the network's involvement was that the film's storyline
be connected in some way to the MTV world. Perez retooled his
story, using the device of an MTV contest as the set-up for bringing
his characters together on Monster Island. "MTV is always
having these contests -- Have Aerosmith Come Play at Your Prom,
or whatever. So, to set up the story, I devised a contest in which
an entire senior class wins a trip to a tropical paradise, hosted
by a pop star. During that pop star's performance on the island,
she is carried off by some gigantic mutated thing. From there,
it takes on a King Kong structure -- a small band going
into the jungle and facing different creatures to rescue this
pop star."
The
pop star was portrayed by Carmen Electra -- as herself -- joined
by Adam West as the appropriately-named Dr. Harryhausen, an atomic
scientist and island recluse who reveals the island's previous
use as a testing ground, which has produced giant mutated ants
and praying mantis, all of which were created through stop-motion
animation or full-size puppets.
To
realize the creatures, Perez and his producers hired Bowes Productions,
a stop-motion animation effects company based in Vancouver. In
early meetings with the Bowes principals, Perez stressed that
he didn't want the creature designs to be spoofy or silly. "I
didn't want Caveman creatures, dinosaurs with big bug eyes.
I wanted the design of the creatures to be fairly straightforward
-- Them! being the model for the ants, and The Deadly
Mantis being the model for the praying mantis. Overall, I
wanted Bowes to look at this as if it was the 1950s, and they
were being contracted to make a straight-ahead monster movie.
And because of that, we would deliberately avoid all CGI. That
was the whole point. The reason for going back to these old techniques
was that I was so bored with CGI. The only thing CGI was good
for on this picture was compositing, and perhaps a little atmosphere
-- if I wanted stars or clouds or something like that. But, essentially,
I wanted to keep the project pure and to avoid any CGI in the
creature work."
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For
direct interactions with the actors, Bowes built a full-size,
fully-operational, mechanical queen ant, two soldier ant
heads and legs, and a full-size praying mantis claw. The
live creature effects were employed on set in Vancouver,
where live-action was shot in a 22-day principal photography
schedule. Bowes augmented the Vancouver sets and locations
with a variety of miniatures. "Again, I wanted the
feel of the old Kong," Perez explained, "so
we had miniature jungle sets, with gorges and bridges. The
whole island was a miniature, in fact, used for establishing
shots. There was a ton of miniature work." The jungle
set featured more than 1,000 hand-made trees and plants,
some of which were articulated to bend and fall as creatures
moved through the foliage.
These
miniatures served as the settings in which Bowes' animated
its 16- to 18-inch stop-motion puppets. In addition to praying
mantis, queen and soldier ant puppets, Bowes built and animated
a flying ant -- the creature that first makes off with Carmen
Electra -- mounting the puppet on a modelmover to create
flying scenes. "The flying ant shots were the only
instances in which the models were shot against bluescreen
and then composited, rather than shot in the miniature sets."
One
of the key creature animation scenes is a fight between
two giant praying mantis. "That becomes kind of the
Kong-vs-Allosaurus fight, with a lot of intense interaction
between the two creatures, all staged on a miniature military
facility set." In the scene, Electra's bodyguard provokes
chase in a bulldozer to distract the praying mantis. Bowes
animated the action on the miniature set, using a scaled
bulldozer and bodyguard puppet -- one of several puppet
actor replicas that were employed to create in-camera interaction
between the human characters and the creatures. "We
had a Carmen Electra puppet, as well as indigenous people
puppets for a scene at the end of the movie -- the enslaved
islanders fight against the giant ants, and there are shots
of them in the clutches of an insect. I always loved that
in the Harryhausen movies. Whenever somebody was grabbed
by a creature, the animated creature would cover the live
actor in the composite; and then, when the creature spun
around, it would be carrying a miniature character, kicking
and screaming. We did exactly that for the scene where Carmen
Electra is grabbed by the flying ant." In order to
make the MTV airdate, all the stop-motion animation work
was completed in an eight-week period.
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"More
than anything else," Perez concluded, "I did Monster
Island as a conceptual piece. And for people who are fans
of that genre and these techniques, it makes perfect sense to
have made it this way. For the 13-year-old MTV watchers, it may
not make as much sense -- but it introduces them to effects techniques
that they probably haven't seen before." The Monster Island
DVD, which features a behind-the-scenes documentary on the making
of the movie, is available at major video outlets.
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The
Best of 2004: Click
here for The Hollywood Reporter's take -- 'with
an eye towards Oscar' -- on the best visual effects work
done in 2004, including the lowdown on Spider-Man 2,
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and The Polar
Express, among others.
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Next:
Variety reports Nicolas Cage will star in, and
Lee Tamahori will direct, this action thriller for Revolution
Studios based on The Golden Man, a story about
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Goldman, who adapted Dick's We Can Remember It For
You Wholesale into the 1990 action thriller Total
Recall, is writing the adaptation. Cage will also
produce.
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Elektra:
Click
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Dark
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here to view an Ain't It Cool News presentation of
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The
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Harry
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and Peter Pan -- adapting the fifth Potter
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fourth in the series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of
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Star
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the new heavy in George Lucas' upcoming final installment
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Son
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here to see a trailer for New Line Cinema's upcoming
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Technicolor Digital: The Hollywood Reporter
states Sony Pictures Studios and Technicolor have entered
into an agreement for Technicolor to operate their digital
intermediate facility at Stage 6 on the Sony Pictures
Studios lot in Culver City, giving Sony 'preferred customer
access' to the Technicolor DI lab, while still remaining
open to business elsewhere. Technicolor currently operates
out of Burbank.
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In our special 100th issue collector's edition, a who's
who of visual effects artists will engage in a probing assessment
of the state of the art and the future of visual effects.
In addition, there will be feature articles on The Polar
Express and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate
Events.
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We're giving our CWU subscribers the first opportunity to
preorder copies of Cinefex 100. Issue Ships December 15.
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