Adam Johansen makes monsters for a living.
After growing up on a healthy diet of Alien, Star Wars, Gremlins and The Thing, in 2002 Adam and his co-Director Damian Martin founded Odd Studio, and got to work with their heroes.
“I was obsessed with Star Wars and obsessed with Darth Vader,” Adam says.
“And I was one of the five people that worked on the Darth Vader suit for George Lucas for Revenge of the Sith. It was crazy — my little self was just going nuts.
“Working with Ridley Scott on an Alien film … was a pinch myself [moment too].”
Tucked away in a workshop in Marrickville, many locals might be surprised to learn this Australian team are also behind hits including Mad Max: Fury Road, Where The Wild Things Are, Aquaman, Thor: Love & Thunder, multiple films in the Matrix franchise and loads more.
In their decades in the industry, Adam and Damian have created some of the most iconic moments in film; from prosthetic make-up to animatronic characters and practical effects.
Their latest challenge? Creating a pregnant werewolf for Isla Fisher’s character in the new season of TV show Wolf Like Me.
The odd beginnings
After doing work experience for a puppet company, one of Adam’s early jobs involved building animatronic puppets for theme parks like Warner Brother’s Movie World on the Gold Coast.
As a kid, he “would never have dreamt” he’d end up working on blockbusters at home.
“I didn’t even know this was an option in Australia, it was always a Hollywood thing.”
But before long he had his first film under his belt; Babe: Pig in the City was followed by “a whole flurry of things coming through from the US”, aligning with the opening of Fox Studios at Moore Park in Sydney.
Adam and his business partner Damian met on the Channel Nine sci-fi show Farscape, “which was awesome — we were just building aliens and monsters every week”.
Since founding Odd Studio over two decades ago, the pair have had their pick of local and international productions.
The challenge of a pregnant werewolf
Comedy-drama Wolf Like Me starts with your classic boy meets girl: single dad Gary (Josh Gad) meets Mary (Isla Fisher), whose baggage is a little deadlier than most — she’s a werewolf.
Odd Studio created the auburn-haired wolf for the show’s initial season. They have a range of versions, including a soft wolf puppet head for close-up attacks, a human-length wolf suit for stalking prey and an animatronic wolf that can sniff, snarl and snap at your fingers.
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In the recently released season two, Mary is pregnant, which means Andrew Crawford, the creature performer in the wolf suit, “gets put through the wringer”.
Squeezing into the wolf, Adam says Andrew’s “vision is really impaired, it’s really really hot, he’s on all fours, walking through a house with arm and leg extensions”.
“Season two wolf is heavier than season one wolf because there’s obviously this big pregnant belly and boobs.”
The wolves are mostly made of silicone and punched hair — a laborious and meticulous process that literally involves punching each individual strand of hair into the prop.
Most props and masks are sculpted on a computer before being 3D printed, with features like detailed skin tones hand-painted on.
With every monster, Damian and Adam will try on suits themselves as they build, to ensure they’re as comfortable as possible, but also to make sure they can come on and off “really quick”.
“There’s access panels so that, after a take, we can all run in with fans and get some air moving through,” Adam says.
“Some suits, depending on the size, we can have a fan in there, or things like a cool suit, which is a vest with some tubes running through that we pump chilled water through to keep his core temperature cool.”
CGI isn’t the enemy
While CGI has developed in recent years, so too have practical effects.
“The standard has gone so high, especially with the [higher] resolution of filmmaking, you can’t get away with subpar colouring or skin tones — it has to look real,” Adam says.
While CGI was all the rage when it was first introduced, in recent years, Adam says “it’s actually swung back the other way”.
“It becomes an aesthetic choice for some people,” Damian says.
“Stop motion is a pretty slow and laborious way to make something, but it’s an aesthetic choice that has its own rewards, and I think practical effects are a similar thing.”
These days, the pair say most projects use a mixture of computer generated and practical effects.
“Like any approach to an effect or an illusion, if you just choose one trick, you’re limiting yourself,” Damian says.
If they’re fine-tuned or even completely replaced in post-production, practical effects give actors something to work with, lighting designers something physical to light off and are, overall, a “really rewarding” reference tool.
Adam adds that directors sometimes like to stick with practical effects “to have that limit of what looks real — because it is real”.
“Some of the scariest and best films of all time have practical effects, people in suits coming out of the shadows, which is suspense building and great and terrifying.
“If you see this big CG thing running around from the first act it’s kind of like: ‘Oh, OK’ … so sometimes [those] limitations can actually assist in storytelling.”
US strikes ‘really affects’ Australian industry
Damian says the Odd team has been fortunate to work on a lot of overseas productions.
“When they come through, they buoy the whole industry — there’s a lot of jobs.
“So when something like the writers’ or actors’ strikes in the US happen, that really affects us here.”
While the local industry has fallen into a bit of a slump, Damian’s confident “it will rise again … there’s incredible filmmakers here and the talent of local crews is phenomenal”.
Adam says it’s given the team a chance to work on some new Australian content, adding that we’re currently in “a bit of a global pause [that] can’t last forever”.
When it does get busy, pinning down local artists becomes the difficulty. Luckily for them, the next generation is being trained up already.
“My youngest daughter Charlotte has started working with us here, she’s sixteen,” Adam says.
“I love having her here, and she’s shown extreme talent already — and I’m not just saying that as a proud dad.”
Damian’s seven-year-old isn’t quite up to werewolf creation yet, but is starting to think her dad’s job among the monsters and aliens is “pretty cool”.
“It was scary for her at first, but now she’s embracing that.”
Wolf Like Me is streaming now on Stan.