Underworld (2003)

Patrick Tatopoulos was the creature designer for Underworld, and acted as supervisor to the sculptors and fabricators of Tatopoulos Studios. Underworld's director Len Wiseman had first met Tatopoulos when both were working on Roland Emmerich's Stargate, and had admired Tatopoulos' artwork; Wiseman was adamant that Tatopoulos design the film's monsters.

According to screenwriter Danny McBride, 'Patrick wanted the (Lycan) werewolves to be sexy, and he pulled it off'. Tatopoulos said that he also wanted the Lycans to be 'somewhat more cat-like'. Among the Underworld team, Guy Himber was the creature FX supervisor, with Steve Wang as the creature FX art director. Gabe Bartalos acted lab technician supervisor. Norman Cabrera and Don Lanning also did sculpting duties.

Wiseman was adamant that the Lycans be practical suits; 'When I was pitching (Underworld), I did really want everybody to know that I wanted to go back to doing practical creatures. I wanted a guy in a suit! We referenced, brought in footage of Alien, Aliens, Pumpkinhead, Predator. I just think that there's something you just get from a guy in a suit and I wanted to bring that back. I never saw that that was going wrong. A lot of movies have gone CG when I thought that we had been getting better with the prosthetics so I really wanted to just bring that back.

Wiseman also stated, 'I didn't want that long nose snout thing (...) I wanted something different, Patrick was really into the idea of making something a bit more cat-like. And that's the direction that we went, something where you saw a bit more of the muscle tone, more lik a pitbull even.

The Lycan suits were constructed from foam latex. Wiseman wished for the werewolves to be mostly furless, 'I came to Patrick and said I really don't want a lot of hair on these werewolves, because I actually want to see the structure. I'd seen a lot of (...) phases of different creatures being built, or other werewolves, and you see the actual definition of the muscles. Then you put a bunch of hair all over it and it's all lost'.

Yak hair was punched in the suit heads in a laborious process as each individual strand had to be placed in. The hair strands were sealed with silicone so that they would stay in the suit longer.

Leg extensions were created for the Lycan suits. Tatopoulos' team had previously utilized leg extensions for the Godzilla suit in Emmerich's 1998 film.

The suits were fitted with animatronic heads capable of moving the lips, muzzle, brow, eyelids and jaws, to be fully expressive. The receivers and servos for the head were contained in a vest worn underneath the foam rubber suit. The heads were also fitted with a comlink allowing the lead puppeteer to talk to them and give them script cues.

Wiseman found the conception of the vampire-werewolf hybrid Michael Corvin to be particularly difficult as he did not want it to be some 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer thing'. Wiseman's initial vision was a human covered entirely in fur 'like the nose hair of a cat'; Tatopoulos liked the concept but the only way to realize it was via 'flocking', something Tatopoulos had used when realizing the miniature mice for Stuart Little.

This was shot down due to having been never tried on a human actor before, and thus would be too unsafe; Wiseman instead decided that Michael's hybrid form would be utilized via prosthetic makeup applied to Scott Speedman, to show he had the skin and musculature of a werewolf, 'like elephant skin'. A more canid-like facial prosthetic was also applied during his brief transformation in the police car.

A life cast had to be taken of Bill Nighy's face, arms and torso to create the upper body prosthetics he wore as the aged vampire Victor. Two phases of makeup prosthetics were created to show his stages of rejuvenation.