We have seven kingdoms of the underwater world.
And one of the kingdoms is known as the Fishermen Kingdom.
These are more like merpeople. They're peaceful, docile people.
[Johnson-McGoldrick] The Fishermen people are more intellectuals,
scholars and artists.
They are the ones that want to make peace with the surface-dwellers.
[Justin Raleigh] The initial design work had started,
I think, early on with James and a couple illustrators.
But way down the line,
even into filming, we were still redesigning those characters.
They need to be more grounded and give them a bit more humanity,
so we went and redesigned them
and kind of created class systems as well.
Like you see the soldiers, they're very fish-like.
Where you look at the royal kingdom, they're very evolved, more human.
[Wan] The Fishermen people are basically a combination
of practical makeup effects
and a lot of visual effects augmentation.
We did full-body suits from the waist up with silicone hand appliances
and full silicone face pieces, cowls, contact lenses and teeth.
The only part that we may have
in visual effects is a little bit of gill movement,
but, overall, it's a full prosthetic makeup.
Prepare your army, Your Royal Highness.
We move against the Brine Kingdom atonce.
The Brine Kingdom are literally the bottom-feeders of Atlantis.
They are the most maligned and Iooked-down-upon
of the other societies.
[Bill Brzeski] They were humans. They turned into crabs,
so they're kind of like what we want for dinner.
And they got multiple legs, and they're kind of brutish,
and they live low on the ground in caves.
[Wan] The Brine people, they don't swim, they walk.
And these creatures are big, heavier people with massive armor.
And so we started with that idea, designing what the king would look like.
There's quite a bit of inspiration
that came from really early deep-sea diver suits,
but he's not wearing a suit, that's his natural form.
Death to the Atlantean hagfish!
[Wan] The ocean is a magical place, but it's also terrifying as well,
and so l wanted this movie to be able to reflect our feelings
of the great and powerful ocean.
I love the ocean.
It's something that absolutely scares me and draws me in.
It's super spooky.
If you've been in the middle of the ocean and you just look down,
it's pretty terrifying ‘cause it's all the unknown, right?
You never know what's down there.
[Wan] With the Trench Kingdom, I had a great starting-off point
because they're featured very prominently in Geoff Johns‘ New 52,
and so I used that to dive into the world of the Trench Kingdom.
They're scary, trench-dwelling, cannibalistic creatures,
but through that idea,
I started to develop something that's a bit different.
In the comic book, they have big, giant eyes,
but I started to realize that these characters probably would not have eyes
because when you're so far down, the sun doesn't penetrate that far,
and there's no light.
If anything, they're afraid of bright lights.
And so then that started informing what the creatures would really look like.
[roaring]
The Trench creatures really allow me
to lean into the horror aspect of the ocean.
The Trench are a super dangerous group.
And James has an incredible sequence.
It harkens back to his pure horror days.
It's like Creature from the Black Lagoon,
but the 2018 version.
Down here, we have a legend about the Karathen,
an ancient sea monster so powerful that even King Atlan himself feared it.
And now, the beast has awakened.
This creature is nearly as old as time itself.
[Mcllwain] First and foremost, it's ginormous.
In real-world scale, from the tip of the nose
to the end of its longest tentacle, it's two miles long.
We needed to design a creature that is big enough
to take on Orm's entire army.
[screeching]
There's some aspects to it that are crab or lobster-like.
It also is part giant squid.
We pull from design aesthetic from the ocean
infusing it with my love for H. P. Lovecraft
to create the most powerful creature on Earth.
[roaring]