Sommers was adamant about maintaining the actresses’ faces and expressions within the final, hellish creatures as they fly directly at the camera. To accomplish this, production would shoot the scene (minus the Brides) with ILM blocking out the area where the final Brides would be. The actresses, dressed in motion-capture suits and special effects makeup from the neck up, would then film their parts against a blue screen; both live-action filming of their faces and motion-capture filming of their body movements would be executed simultaneously. Ultimately computer-generated bodies would be created, fashioned on the actresses’ movements caught during motion-capture filming, and “attached” to the live-action footage of their heads. The resulting shot blended the worlds of live-action, motion-capture and computer-generated imagery, marrying the nuance of human-generated facial expressions and body movements with the other-worldly, flying “vampire” bodies.
To facilitate this process Sommers, Ducsay and ILM designers would sit down to scheduled bi-weekly “transmissions”—video conferences between ILM and the Sommers Company—to discuss the visual effects shots within a cut of the film, sometimes with Sommers using a Barbie doll to illustrate a desired movement for a Bride in flight. Also indicative of Sommers’ approach to re-interpreting the mythology of the legendary filmic creatures is the creation of Dracula’s ultimate form…The Hellbeast, a gigantic, winged demon fully deserving of its name. The filmmaker muses, “In the old movies, Dracula turns into a bat, but I’m not afraid of bats. So I had a thought…what if our bat had a 15-foot wingspan? Now, that’d be different.” The fully-realized CG creation owes it look to a variety of design influences—ancient images not only of bats, but also winged ghouls, harpies and gargoyles.
Sommers and Ducsay worked closely with all of the designers on all aspects of the monsters’ (re-)creation. Ducsay explains, “It was a matter of being somewhat reverential to the original characters, but at the same time, being open to doing something new. Our Hellbeast is radically different from anyone’s concept of the creature. The Wolf Man designs are quite different from the Universal versions, because he is more wolf than man. With Frankenstein’s Monster, there are departures from his classic look, but we wanted to keep the feeling of the original.”
Van Helsing’s resulting Frankenstein’s Monster is truly a collective effort—early prototype sketches began with the filmmakers working on concepts with illustrators McCreery and Tatopoulos, as well as special makeup effects house Captive Audience and ILM. Once the Monster’s look was cemented, his makeup was executed by Captive Audience (special makeup effects consultant Greg Cannom, makeup effects producer Keith VanderLaan and special effects makeup supervisor Brian Sipe), the company also responsible for the special effects makeup for the Brides, Dracula and Velkan that aided in transforming them into the CG-assisted creatures (The Brides) or fully-realized CG monsters (The Hellbeast and The Wolf Man).
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