Picture Credit: Netflix / Mr. X
Below is catnip for seaside horror fans. The show continues to thrive on Netflix, where its characters and mystery equally entertain. One of those characters being, of course, the cephalopod. In creator Jesse McKeown’s show, hero Calvin Penney (Josh Harnett) audiences go from fearing to understanding the creature.
VFX supervisor Matt Glover helped make that arc happen. Glover, who works for Mr. X, found himself in Newfoundland – working on bringing grounded yet magical sights to life.
“We never really put up a blue screen around a boat or anything, even the nighttime scene,” he told What’s On Netflix. “And we obviously did some smart stuff where we cheated stuff closer for safety and all that stuff, and we erased stuff, but it was always people in boats on the water. We took over a whole town and built on top of it all this beautiful art directed stuff, and then we could add the iceberg to it. For sure, it was an adventure.”
Recently, Glover took What’s on Netflix behind-the-scenes of his adventure on the high seas monster series.
You spent 18 months working on Below. What does month entail?
I got to go out and visit St. John’s with Jesse, the showrunner, and some of the executive producers and Chris Hatcher, the producer here in Toronto. We were still in the process of trying to find the location where Snook’s Arm could be. It had to satisfy so many different things narratively.
A big part of that, and more so than usual for a show like this anyway, there were some visual effects implications. The iceberg obviously was in the script, so where could that fit and be present in all the characters’ minds, but not too close to the shore that it had to be there all the time?
And likewise, once the creature shows up, how do we keep the threat active? We needed to find interesting ways to still get characters in and around the water without just being like, “Well, why wouldn’t they just not go near the water?” So, we visited a lot of different coves in Newfoundland and tried to find one that would fit the bill and work for everything that they wanted to do, which was amazing.
Where does work begin on the creature exactly? What are some questions you have for the showrunners when it comes to the sea monster’s behavior, maybe even personality?
That was the biggest piece of the puzzle. Jesse had done a lot of research. They had consulted with some marine biologists, and we did the same too. We reached out for someone who’s got a PhD, writes books on cephalopods. And so, a lot of it was in the script already, things like the hard shell. Jesse knew we wanted it to be really old, so prehistoric cephalopods had hard shells. So okay, we knew that was a feature.
What about the scale of it?
We knew roughly how big it wanted to be. But besides that, there was a lot of room for interpretation, which was great. I would be like, “Oh, I love the shape of the eye in this one and the length of the arms looks pretty good here.” We slowly whittled our way down through a lot of different options and refined it until we found one that was plausible and realistic.
It wanted to be a slow reveal. We also wanted to smartly come up with maybe different silhouette choices. Is it a whale? Is it a shark? Is it something else? You catch a glimpse of tentacle. Okay, is it a giant cuttlefish? Is it an octopus? So we wanted these differen [reactions]t, oh, you see a head fin, that could be something else. We wanted smart design choices that we could use to help the buildup of her reveal across the first few episodes.
Towards the end, the most we may understand about the creature is from the close-up of her eye, when she and Calvin (Josh Hartnett) possibly share a look of understanding. What did you and the VFX artists want that final shot of the eye to communicate?
For us, we wanted to be very naturalistic and we never wanted to lean too anthropomorphic. We always wanted to leave even that shot at the end of six, which is they’re looking at each other. is pretty specific, but also, what is she really seeing or thinking?
You want to set it up so that the audience fills in the blanks. She’s not winking at them or anything like that. Luckily for us, her physiology is so different. It’s easy to not really push it too anthropomorphic if you’re doing even something vaguely humanistic, like a cat or something that has ears and eyes.
Why’s that?
Those features where you can maybe get a little uncanny quickly. Also, her scale makes it a little more majestic, but yeah, towing the line and the eye, our little running joke was always her eye needs to contain multitudes. It wants to look like you’re looking into a galaxy or something. It needs to be awe-inspiring, but also convey meaning and story, but very subtly and let the viewer fill in the gaps.
She’s looking at Josh pretty specifically because that’s the last time they’re going to be in each other’s presence. So, we did play the eyeline pretty hard, but in other shots we really tried to… Even if she’s looking in the direction past the camera, her eye darts away and she looks around. We tried to keep the animalistic intention there while also still trying to tell a pretty strong narrative story between her and the rest of the cast.
When she is fighting or killing to protect her children in the iceberg, did you and the VFX artists study similar actions and behavior from other creators?
We looked at cephalopods feeding and a lot of reference for that for the actual physicality of it. You learn so much that when you deep dive on something like that, that they use jet propulsion, they swell their mantle with water and shoot it out of a siphon. Also, how they use their arms and have long feeding tentacles. They do what’s like a tentacular strike, which we see in the night vision shots where she grabs the hikers. It’s basically firing a harpoon. We looked at a lot of references in terms of how the mechanics of it would work.
How brutal did you want to make her strikes?
Early on, we keep it pretty brutal. It’s more suggested than seen, but even then you want to save that reveal as you learn it alongside the characters that she’s not the biggest threat. She’s just looking out for herself.
Luckily, the story feeds into that because cephalopods do live in the cold water and the deep. So, she’s been somewhere so warm and she is slowly deteriorating and she loses a lot of her color. We also play up the idea that cephalopods can change their color. She’s very pale when she’s up against the iceberg for most of episode six. She’s moving a little more lethargically. She’s losing some faculties.
I think it made her feel pretty naturalistic, but also, you started rooting for her. She’s holding on for dear life by the end of six, which was the story intent.
The team at Mr. X clearly loves making monsters. There’s an affinity there for when. When you work on the creature from Below, how much pride do you get seeing her take final form in the end?
For sure. I was someone who grew up as a horror movie fan and really found a love for filmmaking with Jaws, Jurassic Park, Alien, all of these films or more traditional horror movies where there’s a monster. I mean, if you’re into it, then it’s great because it’s a dream job. It’s always cool to try to help bring a new cinematic character to life. And it is also very cool when you can try to start…
Blending VFX with reality?
The whole mandate for the show, we’re shooting on the ground in Newfoundland in boats on the water. Even the iceberg, 60% or more of that iceberg, that huge iceberg is based on LiDAR. We flew drones around real icebergs in iceberg alley early in the summer when they’re drifting down these 10-story, floating buildings made of 10,000-year-old volcanic glacial water and stuff.
They have all the sediments and they’re just amazing, and we just wanted to root everything in science and in the landscape and everything. So, we try to do it with the iceberg. We try to do it with the creation of her, too.
So it’s really fun to try to build a character that tells the story because that’s obviously what it’s always about – servicing the story and the vision of the showrunners and the directors and the producers. It’s always great when you get to help design a new monster, a new creature.
