Customer Reviews

Designing Movie Creatures and Characters: Behind the scenes with the movie masters

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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Length:: 0:21 Mins

The full title of the book is Designing Movie Creatures and Characters: Behind the Scenes with the Movie Masters. The title cannot be more accurate.

The movie masters included are ADI, Aaron Sims, K.N.B. (Robert Kurzman, Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger), Carlos Huante, Steve Wang, Patrick Tatopoulos, Mitch DeVane, The Art of Making Molds, Monster Materials, The Science of Appliance, Kazuhiro Tsuji, Mark Setrakian, Jon Dawe, Beth Hathaway, Jeff Himmel, Spectral Motion (Mike Elizalde), Brian Steele, Weta Workshop, Cristina Patterson Ceret and Walt Conti.

Through each of them, they have create creatures, models, sculptures, animatronic characters, make up for countless blockbuster films. Titles include old movies like King Kong, Jaws to modern day blockbusters King Kong (Peter Jackson), Chronicles of Narnia, Hellboy, etc.

Each design studio or artist is given a few pages of coverage in this book. They talk about their production process, sculpting the models, mold making, doing make-up for actors, the type of equipment they use, challenges they face and compromises made. Each studio has they unique way to creating these characters and their specialty. The work is always different, depending on the plot requirements. The huge number of studios, artists and movies provides much insight into how these movies are made.

This book is great for sculptors, animators, or anyone with interests in movie making involving non-human characters.

(More pictures are available on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

Where reading an article about a certain effects studio is nice, it's great to finally meet the real people and unsung heroes inside the studios/big names that actually are doing the work. Great book! Cheers to Richard Rickitt!

I haven't been disappointed by any Focal Press title I've purchased (and that's quite a few) and this one is no different. The book is organized by artist and I like this approach. If you want more in depth analysis I suggest buying titles specifically on that artist (e.g. WETA Workshop). This is a great overview of different facets of creature creation exemplified by specific artists.

This book is stocked full of pictures...as for what content is covered. Don't expect step by step guides, its more like "spoken" knowledge...the book is a great inspiration...and the artists give subtle inside info, which can be quite valuable. Still good and highly recommended.

I was actually surprised how much I liked this book, I shouldn't have been. I had expected a nice little coffee-table book with good pictures and a little spiel. What I actually found was in-depth interviews with a whole range of very talented people and great photos of their contributions to the field. As a Makeup FX professional myself, I took away a whole range of invaluable tips and methods that these multi-talented people have developed in their constant pursuit of improvement.

Richard Rickitts other book, Special Effects, The History and Technique, has a similar attention to detail. A great selection for my research and reference collection.

As a special effects sculptor, I found this book fascinating. There are a very small number of books that cover the subject of actual FX artists and how they work, and this is a welcome addition. Anyone considering a career as an FX designer, sculptor, or FX makeup artist of any sort really needs to see this book.

Real good source of info on who is in the fx industry.

Is a very irregular book because the pictures are important but in this case many photographs looks bad, with bad resolution like taken directly from the internet. I'm very dissapointing also because the introduction with the famous monsters in the 50's cinema is too many brief. I thought that the book was about classic monsters: harryhausen, the 80's...but no, the book is about predator vs. aliens, blade 2...etc. A pity (at least to me).