Wrath of the Titans is probably going to make back it’s $150 million budget. The film grossed about $33 million in the US (behind The Hunger Games’ $58 million) and $78 million overseas for a total of $111 million.

One reason people are seeing it? The monsters. The film promises more awesome mythical monsters, and for the most part it delivers. The film features a minotaur, a chimera, makhai, a couple cyclops and the mighty titan Kronos. And they all look pretty spectacular. But how did they do it? The New York Daily News found out.

The design process for the monsters started 6 months before shooting did, director Jonathan Liebesman told the Daily News.

“In mythical lore, creatures were described in a certain way. And a lot of us have interpreted them with certain bells and whistles. And we wanted to take them back to basics.

“Storytellers, like Homer, describe them a certain way,” he adds. “So we just wanted to take the tactic of, ‘What did these things really look like?’”

The Minotaur in the film was Welsh actor and stuntman Spencer Wilding in prosthetics. “I’m sure it was at least four or five hours of makeup a day,” Liebesman tells the Daily News. “And very physical. It would get hot in the suits. And I’ve discovered that the more wet a prosthetic looks, the better it looks. So we watered him up at all times so that it has maximum impact for the frames.”

The Minotaur was the only monster that required a real person. The rest of the monsters were computer generated magic. For example the mighty titan Kronos, who smashes through friggin’ mountains and has lava coursing through his skin, took a long time and a lot of effort to make.

“Kronos consists of about 200 million particles of lava,” Liebesman says of the completely computer-generated creature. “We actually had to work through Christmas break in order to get all those shots down. They’re just so intensive.

“We just wanted to create fluid effects that were more realistic than things seen before,” he adds. “It was also, ‘How do you show the scale of a 1,500-foot monster and how does that monster interact with the world around him.’”

As for the giant cyclops, it may have been tempting to go Lord of the Rings and use camera tricks, the filmmakers opted for a CG giant. They wanted it to look like it was a real person so they honed in on the details.

“So it was making sure the textures were right, the dust falling off his hand,” Liebesman said. “The more interaction you have, the more you sell something is really there.”

The other big question mark is Pegasus. How the hell did they do that? Well, in two ways: they used a real horse stand-in and added CG wings to it for scenes where the horse is just standing around. When star Sam Worthington rides on Pegasus though? That’s an animatronic horse designed by Neil Corbould, who made a similar horse for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse.

No matter what you think of the movie, the special effects were pretty amazing. With 3D they’re even better. Now you know what it takes to build the mythical creatures of ancient Greece. You can head over to the source to read the whole story. [New York Daily News]

special effects, wrath of the titans