The Technology of "At the Mountains of Madness"

Guillermo del Toro has been saying quite a bit lately about the upcoming film version of Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness." In this recent discussion with Fearnet.com, del Toro goes into depth about the monumental technological effort that will be required for creating convincing Shoggoths and other Antarctic horrors. Most impressive of all is that H.P. Lovecraft may get a new innovation in CGI technology named after him. The filmmaker is prospectively calling the new graphic design methods, which will require shifting models-upon-models to render complex realistic forms, "The Howard." Although no fan of most cinema during his own day, H.P. Lovecraft would've found it highly amusing to know his name would be lended to a new movie making technique.

"Part of the arrangement with Universal – in being essentially there for now until 2017 – part of the arrangement was they would finance research and development for Mountains of Madness. And we are doing it. There are many technical tools in creating the monsters that don't exist, and we need to develop them. The creatures, Lovecraft's creatures, the tools that exist for CG and the materials that exist for makeup effects, you need to push them to get there and we're going to push them. Well, the fact that the shape-shifting implicit in the novel and implicit in the creatures... if you think in technical terms, digitally, that means normally you generate, for example, one model per creature. If you talk about shape-shifting to the degree that these creatures do, then you're talking about, essentially – if you're using traditional tools – you're going to need to generate 30, 40 models fully rendered per creature. That's A, limiting and B, incredibly expensive. So what we are trying to do is we're developing sort of a Swiss Army Knife approach to modeling. The details are going to be evolving, but it's almost like a Chinese box approach to the models, where we can encase one model on another one and make them modular. And the tools that we need for that to be fluid don't exist. We're going to need to write digital code we need to develop, the way Peter [Jackson] had to develop software for Lord of the Rings."

Del Toro the fan (the alter ego of Del Toro the director) quickly added about the new technology: “We are thinking of calling it The Howard. For Lovecraft."

-Grim Blogger