Tale of The Yinyang Monsters
Tau Films Art Director/Concept Designer Alfonso de la Torre describes the process of designing the two monsters in Weiran Li’s, “The Yinyang Master” (2021).
In a fantasy world, where monsters frequently cross paths with humans, there’s bound to be some kind of kinship between the two. For Tau Films Art Director/Concept Designer Alfonso de la Torre, the Red Monster was one such character, and one of the first that he designed in 3D. He recalls that it was fairly easy to achieve the look that Director Weiran Li needed in a relatively short period of time.
“Probably, one of my favorite parts about working on this creature was that there was more of a clear vision from the Director about what he wanted to see,” noted Alfonso. “His vision made my job a lot easier since there was not a lot of room to guess what color or size. It was super rewarding when you got to nail the main design without much resistance from the creative decision makers. I was told that it was the first time that the Director had seen one of his creatures for the project thus realized in 3D and it made him very happy. I was over the moon.”
After he had seen Alfonso’s Red Monster design in 3D, Director Li requested a few more changes to the Red Monster to make him appear heavier and corpulent. “I love the idea of the Red monster because he is very unusual, and at the same time very familiar to audiences,” said Alfonso. “I especially love the fact that he is a large, heavy guy, which in China (or, so I'm told) is a sign of strength and confidence. He is both cute and scary at the same time and it was just a lot of fun working on him.”
The Yinyang Master (2021)
For Alfonso, The Giant Hand Monster offered a different kind of challenge in order to get it to where the Director wanted it to be. Nevertheless, Alfonso remembers making positive gains in the early stages of the monster design. ”The Cool thing was that I nailed the initial silhouette in the first round,” he recalled. “It was obviously a hand, but at the same time, it also resembled a land octopus or something. Super strange, and for me there is nothing better than to push the envelope and try to be as original as possible.”
Alfonso noted that Director Li thought that it “would be cool” for the creature to be fully armored. “I think it's because I had showed him some of my personal work which is a lot of alien insects that have gnarly armor and at the time he gravitated towards that,” he said. “But that was ultimately not what he really wanted once he saw it. So we did more of a monster-skin creature for the textures. The overall shape did not change at all and so my core ideas stayed fairly the same.”
The rigor of the iterative-design process associated with character design, offers grist for Alfonso’s creative mill. “It was quite difficult to get to the final look but I'm always happy to work on difficult creatures even if they take more than six months to a year to arrive,” quipped Alfonso. “It’s more work for me which is always good because I love my job.”
The Yinyang Master (2021)
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The Yinyang Master (2021) on IMDB https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12151820/
The Yinyang Master (2021) on Netflix https://www.netflix.com/title/81403965/
Behind The Scenes-Tau Films https://vimeo.com/showcase/8229569
About Tau Films, LLC (2021)
Tau Films is an international creative content and visual effects group formed by a diverse team of exceptional artists, technologists, and visionaries. We are known for creative solutions in an ever-changing landscape of story, media and content, and we service high-end feature film, theme park, commercial, television, special venue, and museum clients in the global marketplace.