MPC: Icons of Horror - Part 1

This week we’re looking back at Prey, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Prometheus, Bates Motel, and Candyman.

Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks as we revisit more of our favorites.

PREY

MPC’s global team, led by VFX Supervisor Chris Uyede and VFX Producers Lachlan Christie and Cleo Dessureault delivered a total of 632 shots for the Predator movie, Prey, from 20th Century Studios and Director Dan Trachtenberg.

MPC provided almost every VFX scene in Prey. This included digital augmentation to the Predator itself, as well as heightened gore, CG arrows, and various environmental enhancements. The team was also tasked with creating a small zoo’s worth of CG North American wildlife, including a grizzly bear, mountain lion, cougars, and a wolf, to name but a few.

Find out more here.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre

After nearly 50 years of hiding, Leatherface returns to terrorize a group of idealistic young friends who accidentally disrupt his carefully shielded world in a remote Texas town. MPC’s Toronto and Bangalore teams worked on over 200 shots, including CG gore enhancements, chainsaw animation, and DMP environment extensions.

Dawn of the Dead

Providing pre-production creative design, previsualization, on-set supervision and digital effects, MPC was chosen not only for its creative expertise but for its prowess in providing all-around production support. The studio’s creative team brought its significant feature experience to the project, supplying CGI, digital matte painting, VFX compositing, and post-production and visual effects supervision at the highest levels.

“The entire production team has done a fantastic job of defining the world of the film — everything, from set design and art direction to Dave Anderson’s utterly realistic makeup effects, sinks the viewer into a post-apocalyptic world where rotting, ragged monsters reign,” comments Visual Effects Supervisor Aaron Weintraub. “Our job was to take this world to the next level, giving the film a larger scope by providing shots that show tens of thousands of zombies and massive widespread destruction — shots that without CGI would otherwise be impossible to capture on film.”

Prometheus

Ridley Scott, director of ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner,’ returns to the genre he helped define. With Prometheus he creates a groundbreaking mythology, in which a team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a thrilling journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race

MPC VFX Supervisors Richard Stammers and Charley Henley and VFX Producer Marianne Speight led the team, delivering 420 shots in native stereo. Stammers served as the production’s Overall VFX Supervisor, with Charley Henley leading the team at MPC who served as lead VFX vendor.

MPC’s main areas of work included creating the alien planet LV-223, space environments, the human crew and alien space-crafts, an explosive crash scene sequence, plus bringing to life the alien ‘Hammerpede’.

Find out more about our work here.

Candyman

“We were so honored to have the opportunity to work on Candyman. A huge congratulations on the success of the film and a big thank you to Nia DaCosta, Monkeypaw Productions, James McQuaide, Universal, and MGM for allowing us to be a part of this special project.”

Alexandra Daunt Watney, SVP MPC Adelaide

Find out more about our work in the Aus Film article here.

Bates Motel

A prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho (based on Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same name), Bates Motel depicts the lives of Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) and his mother Norma (Vera Farmiga) before the events portrayed in the film.

MPC’s Toronto team provided VFX across a number of episodes for the show.