Our latest blog comes from school student Ernest, who has working us in the museum this week. Ernest writes about British monster movie Gorgo. We have a number of items on the film, including the poster, which you can see above and a number of contact sheets from the production as part our Pamela Davies collection. Pamela was the Continuity Supervisor on the film.
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During my week of work experience here at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, one of my tasks was to scan contact sheets for a researcher in New Zealand, which contain behind the scenes photographs from the 1961 movie Gorgo, directed by Eugène Lourié. Much like Godzilla, this movie features a large reptilian monster destroying one of the world’s major cities (in this case London). This is a film that relies on special effects, but during the time before the development of CGI how did they get the monster to look so big, and realistic?
How Did They Do It?
The immense scale of the creature was achieved by two main techniques: miniaturization and suitmation. As well as this, the film was shot on slow-motion cameras to further amplify the sense of scale and make the creatures seem huge. The slow-motion cameras did this by making it look like the creatures were moving slower. For a creature so massive, it would require a lot of effort to move. So, you would expect it to move slower and this creates a more realistic effect.
What is miniaturization and suitmation?
Miniaturization is where you make something smaller. For example, instead of recreating the Elizabeth tower, which houses Big Ben, at a 1:1 scale for Gorgo to destroy, you may instead create a much smaller model of the tower for a person in a Gorgo costume to wreck. The team wanted Gorgo to be a slightly smaller monster, this meant that they were able to build up the models larger than usual. This would also allow them to recreate the buildings to a greater degree of accuracy. Suitmation is a technique developed in Japan for the making of Godzilla where an actor wears a creature suit, and acts as if they are the monster. Meaning that when you watch Gorgo, you aren't seeing a puppet or a stop motion animation. Instead, you see a person in a costume destroying smaller scale replicas of buildings from London (inside of a studio).
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EXEBD 71596 Contact sheet of production images of Gorgo destroying the Elizabeth Tower, containing Big Ben.
In conclusion, to make Gorgo look so enormous, Lourié and his crew used the three techniques of: slow-motion cameras, miniaturization and suitmation. Overall Gorgo’s special effects may not seem too astonishing today but for an audience back when the movie was first released the special effects would have left the audience in awe. I am very happy to have discovered this film, I find it fascinating as to how the team making Gorgo were able to create a monster that looked so ginormous but also realistic. Now I think I can properly appreciate the various methods used to make a giant monster, such as Gorgo, come to life.
Sources: Bill Douglas Cinema Museum Collection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgo_(film)