The World After: making The Nightwatcher

In this article, I will detail how the Nightwatcher from The World After was made, from the design ideas to the making of the actual monster.

When we made the Visual Novel, we needed assets for the characters. At first we imagined a Slenderman-like character. We knew it wasn’t going to be the final look, but it was a good placeholder for the prototype.

Original designs

We then reached out to Constance Savelli, a very talented SFX artist to bring us some design ideas. Here are some of the designs she drew, we opted for the last one.

She designed monsters that were more expressive than that we originally imagined, and from that we went to a more military-driven design. Here is a little photoshop we did back then.

In the original script, the monster that came to be called the Nightwatcher was supposed to hold a hand torch every time he appeared. Due to legal restrictions, we unfortunately couldn’t do that. Meanwhile, Constance started the making of the head in June of 2020.

Making of the mask

First, Constance made a sculpture of the Nightwatcher in clay on top of a plaster head. Then she molded it with plaster, and finally poured latex into the mold to make a mask. She added a coat of paint, and with lighting and VFX for the eyes we had our final design.

After she painted the mask, we shot the first lighting tests in the backyard of my father’s house.

Then we added lights inside the monster’s eyes in post-production to make him more alive.

Bonus: a joke poster we did featuring the Nightwatcher. Can you see the inspiration?

Thanks a lot to Constance Savelli for providing these pictures and for her amazing work! If you liked it, you can follow Constance on her instagram and check her portfolio.