Are you craving a shark movie starring Jason Statham being Jason Statham? Then maybe you saw The Meg (dir.  Jon Turteltaub) in August and my second show at Double Negative Vancouver!

Near the beginning of the film, there are scenes of submersibles exploring undiscovered depths of the ocean. Double Negative was responsible for bringing these trenches to life, populating the scenes with a myriad of fish, crabs, whales and of course, a giant shark – THE MEGALADON.

Big bad Meg. Source: Family Guy Wiki.

On this show I had about 32 shots. The Leads (Justin Henton and Ricardo Silva) and other departments were great at figuring out ways to make our workflow more efficient, to the point where I could populate a shot with a huge amount of cached creatures (say 20+) in a day, which is a great turn-around. Two of the shots involved individually placing 90 baby squid! Crazy but true.

I think the most fun part of the show was creating a walk cycle for the spider crabs.

It took me a while and a lot of maths to figure it out but it was a fun challenge.

And so I went from working on spiders with The Mummy to working on spider crabs on The Meg. It was a challenge to transition from generally working on 2-4 leg creatures to 8 legs, but now I welcome the 8-leg challenge!

FOUR LEGS GOOD

EIGHT LEGS BETTER