Nvizible’s digital model featured realistic skeleton and muscle simulations. The Moder was fully digital during complex actions or distant shots. In bringing the creature to the screen, a hybrid approach was taken. The maquette was sculpted by Anthony Stewart and painted by Mark Villalobos based on Thompson’s designs it served as reference for the visual effects team at Nvizible to build the digital version of the Moder. And then you kind of come in the office every day and you keep thinking oh man, but that!” Once the design was chosen, Russell Efx devised a small-scale sculpture of the creature. “I loved it instantly, but kind of put it on the wall as one of those things that you can’t possibly do. The final creature “was one of his original designs based on our conversations that he had passed across,” according to Bruckner. So, what you’re seeing is how it desires to be interpreted, and it’s part of the way it intimidates and controls.”īased on the conversations, Thompson devised several different iterations of the Moder. Because the idea of these kinds of shape-shifting Norse gods is that they can kind of choose how they want to look to you. “How would you obfuscate the difference between animal and human, and how could an animal form read with a human intelligence?” He also added: “we had to kind of literalize not just how it looks, but how it chooses to present. “We knew that it was gonna be some sort of animal god, and, but we also talked a lot about it would have a sentience, and how would you give it a human quality,” Bruckner said. The Moder chooses how to be perceived to those in its presence - in a manner that is not fully understandable. So it sets up a visual mystery in that regard.” You’re not sure what you’re dealing with beat to beat. It felt close enough to what Adam had imagined but gave us a little room to experiment.” He also added: “when you read a book - usually when you encounter something in the shadows - every time it shows up on the page, you imagine it a little bit differently so I wanted something you could play with in that sense. In reading the descriptions, Bruckner conjured different, contrasting images in his imagination, and wanted to represent that kind of thought process in the actual creature design for the film adaptation. “I wanted to preserve my own experience of reading the book, wherein the creature’s design is somewhat shifting,” Bruckner said, “or at least you have competing ideas about what it might be. We dug into Norse mythology and discovered a Jötnar clan of giants that were known as shape-shifters and would sometimes present with combined human and animal qualities. The other approach is that the monsters are fabricated nightmares and part of their fears and you design this creatures both visually and archetypically as a counter point to a characters journey and it gives you licence to explore and in the movies there should be something refreshing about it, you know, kind of, ‘I’ve never seen that before and I can never unsee that!’ and so for that reason we were very interested in Keith.”Īdam Nevill’s novel described the Moder as a nightmarish female goat-like creature with certain human qualities - an overall image that unwinds as the novel progresses. There’s no concrete idea that you’re trying to bring to life necessarily. Some are metaphors and you choose what path you want to go down. “You can start with the pre-existing myth and then you service that myth in some way. “There’s one way of thinking about monsters in the movies,” Bruckner said. Thompson was brought in the project because of his ability to conjure nightmarish visions with his illustrations. There are many movies that I admire that are withholding until the end, and like I said, we just felt that wasn’t this film.”Ĭoncept artist Keith Thompson was hired early in pre-production to design the monster, brainstorming with the director to come up with its look. Whatever that means. So we always knew that we wanted to reveal, in one way or another, what it was. “Maybe it was just a gut instinct,” said David Bruckner, director of The Ritual, “but we always knew - maybe it had something to do with the fact that it’s about masculinity in crisis - it’s sort of this old Norse Viking nightmare that these modern men have wandered into that the movie should always go for it, in the end.
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