BRINGING THIS ‘BEAST’ TO LIFE

Visual effects supervisor Gene Warren Jr. and his company, Fantasy II (“Terminator 2”), began working on “Peter Benchley’s ‘The Beast’ ” more than 13 months ago.

“It’s the type of picture which is loaded with effects,” says Warren, who also was second unit director on the four-hour thriller. He and his crew came on board before preproduction, “in order to conceptualize [the squid] and figure out what could be done for a miniseries budget. If you really want to deliver the goods on TV, you have to be creative.”

Parts of the squid, such as the tentacle tips, were made full scale and transported to location in Australia. The smaller-scale models of the squid “work in conjunction with miniature boats. Then some of those are composited in with live scenes and others play with full miniature scenes.”

Fantasy II constantly had to make modifications while building the models.

“If the squid only lived in the water, that would be one thing,” Warren says. “We could have done it a lot easier. But it likes to get out of the water, where people are. These animals were not designed to be out of the water. There’s a reason--physics. The same thing holds true when you try to build something to [come out of the water]. So it was quite a challenge.”

Working in water, Warren says, made it even more of a challenge. “Water makes everything heavier,” he says. “You go into a turtle mode when you are working in water because of the crews, the cast and moving things around. The extra support boats. The weather. The waves get bigger. They get smaller. Everything makes it tougher to shoot, even when you are in a tank. We did a lot on water, but a lot in tanks. It’s a question of time and money. If you tried to shoot this whole movie out on the open water, we would still be shooting. It would be, like, ‘Waterworld’ revisited.”