So, at long last and after much delay, Tyler finally transformed into a werewolf. An edited video of the transformation scenes is below. As for the quality of the transformation...well, it started promisingly. The acting was perfect--Michael Trevino conveyed the pain of the change most convincingly (and in human form he's very easy on the eyes)--and the computer-rendered chest-squeezing and foot-into-paw morphs were excellent. But then the character crawls into the shadows and the TF peters out in shadows or off-screen. It was a bad sign when Trevino reported having spent only a couple of hours getting prosthetics (and damn if I could see them, everything was so dark). Though the producers trumpeted this transformation to the skies, their budget obviously didn't stretch toward more CGI or Being Human-style animatronics (almost a lost art).
Part of the problem is that the character is supposed to transform into just an ordinary wolf, not a man-wolf beast or a monster wolf. With a man-wolf TF, you can just show the actor hulking out and then have a shot of his face contorting into a muzzle, since the creature is anthropomorphic. But a full wolf is so different in shape from a human that you need more time, ingenuity, and special effects if you want to show the transformation onscreen. And most TV shows don't have that sort of budget (or imagination) so they cheat on showing the process and use shadows, poofs, cutaways, or blink-and-miss-it effects. That's partly why the transformations in True Blood, Twilight, Blood and Chocolate, and The Gates were all huge disappointments and crushingly unimaginative. What Vampire Diaries did was slightly better but still too little, and I doubt Tyler's future wolf-outs will be much better. Ah well--let's hope for better things from the remake of Being Human (plus the third season of the original) and Teen Wolf.
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