Sumith Prasad
In the buddy cop film ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die,’ Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett are forced to fight with an albino alligator named Duke while trying to save the former’s wife from the hands of James McGrath. Duke is presented as the largest albino alligator on the planet. Even though the reptile tries to eat Marcus alive, he somehow manages to escape from his threat. However, Adam Lockwood is not as lucky as his colleague. As the movie concludes, Duke kills the corrupt district attorney to display his dominance. The large reptile succeeds in terrorizing the viewers, but we don’t have to, as he doesn’t exist in real life!
Duke: A Fictional Monster
Duke is a fictional albino alligator. First of all, albino is an extremely rare type of alligator. Every known albino alligator is in captivity. No one is left out in the wild like Duke, especially in an abandoned alligator park. In ‘Bad Boys: Ride or Die,’ it is presented as the largest albino in the world. In reality, that distinction is mostly attached to Claude, a twenty-eight-year-old albino. Unlike Duke, Claude is not scarring people off in an isolated water park. Instead, it lives in the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California. The alligator, which has seventy-six teeth, weighs 222 pounds and measures a length of 9 feet 5 inches.
Even though Claude was hatched in 1995, it was taken to the California Academy of Sciences only in 2008. When it comes to Florida, the principal setting of the ‘Bad Boys’ movies, there are albino alligators at Gatorland in Orlando. They are named Cottontail, Moonshine, and Pearl. Like Duke, the abandoned alligator park also doesn’t exist in reality. Dom Hellier of visual effects giant Framestore collaborated with production VFX supervisor Kris Sundberg to create the park by augmenting an existing building in Atlanta, Georgia, one of the main locations of the film. The establishment’s top floor and thatched roofs were made by Hellier and his team.
The VFX Behind Duke
To shoot the scenes with Duke, the production department did not rely on an actual albino alligator. Instead, they used an animatronic puppet. “The original brief for us was to replace this puppet in certain shots and to augment it in other shots,” Hellier told VFX magazine befores & afters. “But then there was a creative decision to make Duke larger, after the fact. I think the initial puppet was around a nine-foot gator. Just to sell the menace in the sequence, they wanted to go a bit larger, so we ended up something closer to 14 feet for Duke. That meant that we ended up having to replace him more than originally intended,” he added.
After taking a LiDAR scan of the puppet, Framestore’s technicians made Duke as authentic as possible. They added scars and algae on the body of the reptile to highlight his unsupervised existence in the wild. Hellier wanted to make him appear “more gnarly and nasty.” Attention to detail was key for the visual effects supervisor. “When we get into the shots where he is more active, it was really about us making sure that he had a sense of weight and scale and making sure that his movements felt motivated from the right position,” Hellier said in the same interview, highlighting Duke’s “battle” scenes with Marcus and Lockwood.
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