In a new featurette from the Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters Blu-ray, viewers get to see how exactly the illusion of Tyson’s single eye was created.
MTV got the exclusive clip, which you can watch below:
“Once we had Douglas, the task became, ‘How to we make him into Tyson?'” says director Thor Freudenthal, speaking of Douglas Smith, who plays the cyclops in the film.
It turns out that Tyson was a mixture of practical and digital effects. When Tyson wore his sunglasses to cover up his single eye, Smith actually wore a practical forehead prosthetic. This was because the entire shape of your forehead would change if you only had one eye, and so they had to create the effect of a single eye even when we couldn’t see it.
As for the digital part, the team behind the creation of Tyson scanned Smith’s face digitally so they had a 3D sculpture of his head to work with. This allowed them to morph his face until they got the effect just right, allowing for an believable image of a cyclops in the Percy Jackson world.
If you want to see more concept art from the film, you can check out our previous article, which shows some of the other cyclops characters and the various incarnations they went through before a final decision was made.
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters was released in theaters this past August. Though critics and fans were both skeptical of the Lightning Thief sequel, praise was high for the second adaptation of the Rick Riordan series. While Sea of Monsters was by no means a perfect film, it did a fantastic job of improving over its predecessor, and possibly even laying the groundwork for a third film in the franchise.
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