Lovecraft Country is an American horror drama television series developed by Misha Green based on and serving as a continuation of the 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff.
Starring Jurnee Smollett and Jonathan Majors, it premiered on August 16, 2020, on HBO. The series is produced by Monkeypaw Productions, Bad Robot Productions, and Warner Bros. Television Studios.
The series is about a young black man who travels across the segregated 1950s United States in search of his missing father, learning of dark secrets plaguing a town on which famous horror writer H. P. Lovecraft supposedly based the location of many of his fictional tales.
Framestore was responsible for designing, asset building, and animating the series’ Shoggoths, the supposedly ‘indescribable’ creatures from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
Framestore’s work was led by Framestore’s head of CG and project VFX Supervisor Grant Walker. Walker has a long history of realising fictional and fantastic creatures, as evident in the spider/human hybrid creature in the Black Mirror episode ‘Playtest’ and the amorphous ‘Shapeshifter’ from the Shell advertising campaign. Walker sculpted the 3D model of the Shoggoths, using input from the client-side VFX team and from concept art and references from the Framestore Art Department.
The art department’s work on the series included creating several iterations of the Shoggoth, as well as an array of other-worldly creatures and ghosts. Each of these ghosts had a gruesome visual representation of their human forms’ death, work that allowed the team to really imagine the character behind their designs.
