Shark Night 3D didn’t screen for us, so it was tough to tell you ahead of time what to expect. Nick and I would have loved to discuss it in the new video, but alas we didn’t make it to our destination (perhaps a theater playing both of the week’s new horror releases?). So while you’ll have to venture out unprepared if you plan on the seeing fishy adventure, and though the PG-13 ratings means these sharks may end up oddly toothless, we can at least be sure that the film will have earned its existence for its special features alone thanks to a new piece out there…
Sharks are damn cool, as evidenced by the success of the week devoted to them, and to see how far in shark replication technology we’ve come since Jaws is both eerie and awesome. A new Popular Mechanics feature includes a nice interview with Walt Conti, the guy in charge of assembling the mechanical sons of Bruce. It’s a really cool and effective process they’ve put together to make it easier than ever to imperil actors with deadly sea creatures.
He built two different models of shark, a “swimmer” and an “attacker,” each of which required very different internal mechanisms. “Sharks are this total contrast of stealthy, cruising lurking and these intense bursts of power,” Conti says. “We split those two behaviors into two different types of models, and optimized each to do one of those things best.”
There’s also some really cool behind-the-scenes video below. I don’t know if it’s enough to get you into a theater, but it definitely is worth a few minutes marveling at the neat stuff people are doing on the fringes of special effects…
Will you be seeing the film, or is this one of those cases where the rating really does matter? Twitter, comments, and the forums are all lovely places to drop your chum…
(via the Twitter feed of Erik Davis of Movies.com)