How Alt.vfx delivered the sinister Helen creature for ‘YuYu Hakusho’. A new excerpt from befores & afters magazine.
One of the fearsome creatures appearing in the Netflix series YuYu Hakusho is a monster dubbed ‘Helen’, a quadruped with menacing jaws and gruesome teeth that was born out of a facility experimenting with genetic mutations.
Behind the CG creature was Alt.vfx, which worked with the show’s director Shō Tsukikawa and visual effects supervisor Ryo Sakaguchi to bring Helen to life.
“We received some early concept designs from production that looked like a cross between Godzilla in the body, a man in a suit with a tail, and a mouth that could really open up and out, like the creature from Predator or the flower mouth creature from Stranger Things,” outlines Alt.vfx VFX supervisor Andrew Hellen.
“At first production also wanted it to be able to move like a bear or a big cat, so it would run on all fours, but, like a bear, could stand on two feet and get upright and be big and intimidating. We ran with this idea for proportions of front and back legs but as we progressed we kept lengthening the tail, so it was becoming more lizard-like but with more substantial front legs.”
There was a desire for Helen’s jaws to be able to open extremely wide, somewhat beyond the normal mechanics of a mammal’s mouth. “We wanted it to be able to split both vertically and horizontally, and also fold outward,” states Hellen.
“We researched lots of real-world mammals and then also went into the insect world for ideas, settling on a leopard seal for how wide she could open her mouth and then incorporating a funnel web spider’s fangs that could also open out, tucking up inside the mouth when closed and folding out like fingers when open with lots of saliva.”
Further concept design carried out by New Holland Creative refined that jaw design and how the creature would bare its teeth. The modeling and texturing process then began, with Alt.vfx referencing hairless apes and lizards.
“We really examined the mottling of the skin, skin damage and peach fuzz on certain areas,” discusses Alt.vfx CG supervisor Jordan McInnes. “We even looked at how the skin folds when snarling. We also looked at lizards for the more wet look and how the tail should move in relation to the rest of the body. All of that was taken into consideration when rigging. Anatomically, the build was similar to an ape with a lizard squished inside of it.”
Walk and run cycles were then crafted to establish the weight and speed of the creature. Although Helen had the proportions of a bear, the reference for movement remained as big cats like lions and tigers, especially in terms of speed and agility. “It had to be fast enough to almost get at a character,” says Alt.vfx head of animation Chris Rentoul, “yet clumsy as well to consistently be just missing out on making a meal of the actors. It was one part bear, two parts big cat with a dash of overzealous puppy.”
Read the full article in issue #18 of befores & afters magazine.
