Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters Episode 3 Unleashed Its VFX Boss' Favorite (If 'Computationally Expensive') Creature
The following contains spoilers from Episode 3 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which got a pre-Thanksgiving release this week on Apple TV+.
Talk about a chilling development.
Episode 3 of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which has been streaming on Apple TV+ since Wednesday, saw Colonel Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell) of the 2015 timeline ultimately lead Cate, Kentaro and May to the spot in Alaska where Hiroshi's plane presumably crashed. Except, everyone came to realize, Hiroshi's plane in fact landed safely, and Cate and Kentaro's father had even set up a tent/workplace nearby.
That happy-ish epiphany was interrupted by Lee's pilot pal discovering that one side of Hiroshi's plane was perforated with giant gashes, created by claws of some kind. Alas, just as said pal went to start back up the gang's own plane for a speedy escape, from beneath the frozen tundra burst a giant... um, armadillo meets Mind Flayer?
Or as Monarch: LoM VFX supervisor Sean Konrad better described for TVLine the MUTO's inspiration, "a star-nosed mole crossed with a pangolin."
"I mean, I really love our ice monster that's in Episode 3 and 4," Konrad said when asked to name his favorite CGI creation from the Apple TV+ series. "That one was really interesting."
"Sometimes the scripts had vague directions" about what a MUTO should look like, Konrad explained, "but in this case, we wanted it to be an arctic creature, and in the script there was really clear direction of 'star-nosed mole crossed with a pangolin.'"
A pangolin, Konrad noted, "is this really cute mammalian creature that lives in Asia, and it's got this armor plating over its body. If you get close up, it's really beautiful, almost like a lacquer-ish material that grows out of its body, and then it's got little hairs that are used almost as mini-whiskers."
A star-nosed mole, meanwhile, "is this fascinating, weird thing where it has, like, tentacles growing out of its face, that it uses that to feel around as it's tunneling."
Put those two real-life creatures together, supersize the result, and then give it the superpower of cold breath, and you get "this tunneling, burrowing monster with armor that comes in handy during a fight — or when you're facing off against Kurt Russell," Konrad said.
Not that conjuring such an ice monster is any easy, CGI feat.
Getting technical, Konrad explained, "The simulation of all those [armor] plates is really difficult because there are procedural ways that you can simulate hair, where you simulate 1 out of 100 and the whole thing generally looks pretty good, and there are structures for simulating the surfaces of skin, because you can estimate muscle and fat. But full collisions for something like a plate means you're calculating really dense geometry, and that is computationally really expensive and really hard."
Konrad said that the team at Framestore — a VFX house based out of Vancouver whose recent clients include Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Barbie and The Little Mermaid — rose to the "big challenge" presented by Monarch's ice monster. "They have this history of working on complicated monsters, so they knew what they were doing," he raved. "They really brought it to life and gave it a personality."
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