MUTANT CHRONICLES
Mutant Chronicles is sci-fi adventure movie, which tells the story of a group of soldiers who embark on a mission to seek out and destroy a deadly machine the rests deep in the earth. The machine, thousands of years old, mutates human beings from men into Mutants!
The project really got off the ground when Simon approached producer Ed Pressman (The Crow, Judge Dread, Wall Street) back in 2005. Simon proposed a short teaser film which would show the mood and style of the main film. It would also use post production techniques to create a world, with extensive use of models, set extensions and matte paintings. The teaser film took nearly eight months to shoot and post produce.
FEATURE FILM 2008
Mutant Chronicles was perhaps the most complex visual effects movie ever made on such a budget. With nearly 1800 visual effects shots the movie was a post production monster. 18 months were spent creating the world in which the movie was set. Simon envisioned a fun B movie in the best of Saturday morning Flash Gordon traditions, but also a movie that would look very different from what we see today.
“I felt if we tried to recreate what the giant blockbusters do then we would fail badly and worse than that, we wouldn’t have anything fresh to see in our movie. So I went back to what I know and love, which is a more expressionistic approach. The use of old fashioned techniques like miniatures and matte paintings. Of course some will think it looks fake and indeed much of it does, but it look soft and gentle unlike the hard lines of CG created environments. We used ultra style and an expressionist approach to create a look, this gave the film something distinctive. German film makers did the same thing in the 1920’s, it’s not a ‘photo-real’ world but a stylized make believe world. It’s always a love hate affair with the audience but I like it!”
Simon Hunter
Click on the picture above to see a selection of concept art for Mutant Chronicles.
Mutant Chronicles was shot at Shepperton Studios and on the Isle of Man. The movie was shot in the summer of 2006. The film never used a frame of film, everything (including the high speed photography) was shot digitally. The production used many cameras, principally the Thompson Viper camera shooting onto S2 hard disk recorders. Some of the visual effects plates were shot on a prototype Phantom camera and some pick up shots were with the Sony F23HDCAM-SR camera. Most sets were only partly built and many scenes were shot virtually. With a very tight budget there was no cash for previsualiaxtion and the first cut of the film had mostly green screen backgrounds. Approximately thirty artists at the UK visual effects house ‘MEN FROM MARS’ created the shots over approximately a year. Additional work was done at BASEBLACK visual effects and DINAMO in Cardiff.
(Dan Lightening lining up a shot on the miniature unit.) CLICK on the picture above to see more ‘behind the scenes’ photos.
Various posters have been designed for Mutant and it will be up to the individual distributor to choose their favorite or commission their own. Dav Allcock, Mutant Chronicle's concept designer created several different designs.
CLICK on the poster (left) to see more poster concepts for Mutant Chronicles
During post production a rough trailer was cut together - several of the big sequences were unfinished at this time.
Andrew Mackays feature length documentary “legion - the making of Mutant Chronicles” charts the entire production process - a movie in itself, it will be included on the Mutant DVD. Watch a clip here for the first time.