Rob Bottin's work in "The Thing"

After Rob Bottin was introduced to director John Carpenter, he became involved in one of his earlier films "The Fog". He was responsible for the special effects and makeup of this film, he even had a small role as Captian Blake.

After "The Fog" Rob's popularity and reputation grew, he was offered to work for John Carpenter again on his next film "The Thing". His dedication to this film was huge, he worked seven days a week including late nights he also stayed over night in the studio, for a year and five weeks. He worked so hard on this film that by the end of production he was admited to hospital.

When you're first introduced to the monster in "The Thing", you see a dog transforming into this horrible thing as it tries to absorbe and infect the other dogs. The monster in the thing wasn't designed freely, even though it is very creative and unique. It had to be created around the concepts which would make it possible, with the invent of CGI a modern version of this film would have more freedom to create the monster. The technology used in this film to animate this monster was basically a hand puppet with a animatronic head, this very simlistic technique is used to full effect in this film and made it no less effective.

Albert Whitlock

This very famous matte artist who was made famous by Alfred Hitchcock because, of the films they did together. Matte artists make backgrounds for films before CGI backgrounds came about, this very skillfull way of making epic landscapes for cinematic films. For this technique the artist creates the background and combines it with the moving film to create a fake sense of location. Albert Whitlock was the matte artist for the thing, this gave the film a sense of scale which would not have been acheived with out him.