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Del Toro begins his creature creation with "the National Geographic approach"

Striking that balance requires study in physiology and evolution and a meticulous use of sculpture, computer modeling and 3-D animation. Case in point: the 10-inch homunculi that star in this summer’s thriller Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, written and produced by del Toro and in theaters August 12. Del Toro knew the nocturnal creatures scurried through the walls of an abandoned Victorian mansion. But what would such creatures “actually” look like? How would they move?

After drafting the screenplay, del Toro and several designers combed magazines, books, nature documentaries and science journals for reference points. The naked mole rat, a nearly hairless burrower from East Africa, inspired the homunculi’s saggy, translucent skin. Human skeletons twisted by arthritis inspired its spindled limbs, and its gait was modeled after an ape’s. In some cases, del Toro concocted bits of evolutionary history. He reasoned that after generations of living in the dark, the homunculi would need night vision and concomitant protection from the occasional burst of bright light. His designers came up with “sphincter-like” eye sockets that squeeze oversized eyeballs outward and “foreskin-like” eyelids to shade them.

At del Toro’s favored fabrication house, Spectral Motion in Glendale, California, sculptor Mike Torres shaped the movie’s star homunculus in clay. Some filmmakers go straight to CGI, but del Toro prefers more-traditional methods. “If you’re doing flesh, bone, hanging tissue and pockmarks, you’re better off bringing in that fallibility of flesh through a sculpture,” he says. From the clay creature, Spectral cast a more durable, urethane-resin maquette, which was then scanned to create a high resolution, 3-D digital model.

At Iloura, an Australian CGI firm, technical designers reengineered the digital maquette into a living, clawing creature. Informed by del Toro’s original concepts, the team retrofitted a virtual skeleton and musculature within the digital model. That architecture, paired with footage of spiders, roaches and other alarmingly fast creatures, guided the homunculi’s movement.

Finally, Iloura’s technical directors refined the creatures’ outward appearance with custom “shaders,” algorithms that define how light should play over a given surface on a pixel-by-pixel basis. For example, skin calls for a great deal of subsurface scattering as light penetrates various translucent layers, from peach fuzz through the epidermis to the veins. After months of work, the creatures were finally ready for the big screen. The question is whether you will be ready for them.

Social media predictive power might also extend beyond box office success

Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs kept track of movie mentions on among 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million users for three months. Their sample focus included 24 movies such as box office king Avatar and Twilight: New Moon.

For opening weekend, their computer model monitored the rate of tweets near a movie's release date and also factored in the number of theaters showing the flick. That allowed the model to predict the opening weekend revenues with 97.3 percent accuracy, compared to the Hollywood Stock Exchange's 96.5 percent accuracy.

For the second weekend, the model examined both tweet rates and the ratio of positive to negative tweets. That different approach reflects second-weekend performance success based on word-of-mouth, rather than opening-weekend performance buzz. Again, the model delivered quite splendidly with 94 percent accuracy.

There's a few caveats to keep in mind, such as the fact that the Twitterati represents a certain self-selecting slice of society. One expert told Fast Company that he suspected Twitter might do better for predicting "upmarket" films aimed at somewhat older audiences, given the social media service's user base.

But there's an exciting possibility for extending Twitter's predictive power beyond movies, the researchers say. A similar model could apply for any number of commercial products beyond Hollywood fare, and might work especially well for products or trends that lack prediction markets such as the Hollywood Stock exchange. Presidential election results, anyone?

Twitter might even go beyond a mere forecasting service for commercial success. Technology Review suggested that the social media service could also allow marketers to directly influence the success of their product by boosting tweet rates -- although we assume that strategy would require more savvy than using obvious Twitter bots.

There's also a good opportunity here for savvy prediction market players, if they can apply a bit of Twitter analysis to how they play the Hollywood Stock Exchange. We hear that HSX has recently transitioned to real money.

[via Fast Company]