Whoa! Look what just washed ashore. No, it’s not a zombie shark, it’s an inflatable recreation of an extinct shark known as the Megalodon, or Sharkzilla as it was recently dubbed. Make no mistake, those are not braces, they’re stainless steel jaws of death.
Measuring up to 52 feet in length and weighing approximately 100,000 pounds, these prehistoric predators were the size of a humpback whale. However, unlike the placid humpback, the megalodon had 250 six inch long teeth, set in jaws six feet wide and eight feet tall, enabling it to exert a stronger bite force than any other creature in our planet’s history. Watch as a crew including MythBusters’ Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Tori Belleci, come together to reconstruct this million year old marine monster and put its massive hydraulic jaws to the test.
This ultra custom inflatable shark was an engineering challenge for special effects company Technifex. For this very special product, Technifex produced the hydraulic mechanical jaws, and PDG produced the fully digitally printed inflatable body and head. This prehistoric custom shark was engineered to be part inflatable and part machine.
Digital printing on inflatable products is something they specialize in. As such, they were entrusted to create a spectacular inflatable design for this prehistoric beast of a shark. Their inflatable design team worked almost 20 hours on a daily basis for 14 straight days to create this life-like prehistoric Megalodon shark. Their talented designers worked tirelessly on this time sensitive project to achieve maximum realism by creating a life-like skin surface appearance or “texture” by using the latest design and art programs available. The realistic shark skin could only be achieved after meticulous hours of creating art, piece by piece and template by template. After the skin was printed it was coated with a special UV coating to prevent the artwork from fading. This will ensure years of use without fading or cracking.
After two short weeks of production, all the hard work finally paid off, and the end result was frightening. This giant inflatable shark was one scary looking beast!
They used the hydraulic metal teeth to bite and crush beer kegs and pieces of wood, simply to illustrate the colossal strength of the prehistoric beast’s bite.
Thank you for visiting our website! We hope you will find something of interest on our website. Watch the video in the below:
Video resource: Technifex
