In the late 80s, Raffaella de Laurentiis began proposing to various Studio Executives her pet project — a fantasy film set in the 10th century, about the unlikely alliance between a Dragon and a Knight. Written by Charles Edward Pogue and based on a story by Pogue and Patrick Read Johnson, Dragonheart was a project that for many years was unable to be realized, due to the complexity of its main character — a talking Dragon. Named Draco (after the latin term draco, in turn derived from the ancient greek word δράκων), the creature demanded an unprecedented special effects complexity — mainly due to the human range of expression he should be able to display.

An animatronic test was initially commissioned to Jim Henson’s Creature Shop; though impressive, given the limitations, the attempt proved fruitless in trying to convince studio executives. With the theatrical release of Jurassic Park in 1993, De Laurentiis was convinced that digital effects could effectively be able to bring Draco to life. Universal, with whom the producer had secured a development deal, hired several effects companies to produce an animation test for the Dragon. At Industrial Light & Magic, the task was assigned to Steve Price, visual effects supervisor, and animators James Straus and Jim Mitchell.

Time restraints did not allow the artists much creative liberty, and as such they had to resort to a seemingly bizarre solution. Straus explained: “we had only two weeks to complete this test. We didn’t have a Dragon model and we didn’t have a technique for doing lip-sync — but we had to come up with something in that two-week period. So we took the T.rex model from Jurassic Park and quickly modified it, yanking its brows around to create torns. Then we took the wings off the Pterodactyl model from The Flintstones and stuck those on. We were cutting and pasting, trying to come up with something that looked remotely like a Dragon. What we ended up with was incredibly primitive, by today’s standards, but it was promising. When we showed it to Universal, the response was very enthusiastic. Everyone was amazed by it. Considering the limitations we had then, I can’t believe we actually pulled it off.” The test was enormously successful, and ILM was attached to Dragonheart.

For the design of Draco, Rob Cohen, attached as a director, hired Phil Tippett — who had brought Vermithrax to the screen many years before. Tippett recalled: “Raffaella called late in 1993, right after Rob had been assigned the movie. I’d looked over the script, so I understood what kind of movie they were making — basically, a buddy picture. Eventually, they both came up to talk to me; and Rob and I clicked. We spoke the same language, and he seemed comfortable entrusting me with finding a character and personality for the Dragon.” Tippett worked alongside his crew, mainly sculptor Peter Konig, as well as illustrator Doug Henderson, to design the creature.

20 to 30 maquettes were sculpted by Konig before a final design was actually selected; several factors were discussed: “we went through a series of thousands and thousands of design issues,” Cohen said. “The wings, shape of the wings, his color. What shape should his pupils be? How big should the eyes be? His teeth. How old is he? Should he have cracked teeth, worn teeth? Did he get into fights? Does he have scars? All these things that I wanted to do.” He also added: “I wanted him to be like a Swiss Army knife. I wanted him to have a resting tail and a fighting tail. I felt Draco needed to use his hands; so he had to have feet and hands, not just his wings and feet.” Draco would thus represent a traditional, six-limbed Dragon, as opposed to the “anatomically sound” Vermithrax from a decade before (a design that  eventually spawned a trend in cinematic Dragon designs).

Tippett estabilished the Foo Dog, a figure from Chinese folklore, as the first design inspiration. “We went into a whole long series of things,” Cohen said, “and Phil said, ‘you know, the place we should start is with the Foo Dog.’ With the temple guardian dog of Buddhist shrines which is a lion mane… It’s half lion, half dog. And the Foo Dog, the beautiful thing about it [is that] has a certain lion-like elegance, a fierceness — but it’s ultimately an incredibly proud and visual… visually powerful creature.” Since Draco was a sentient, emotive creature, Tippett strayed from wholly reptilian designs, and infused human traits in its face. He recalled: “our job was to make an archetypal Dragon that could act. Draco was much more than just a threatening primordial beast. For one thing, he had to talk — which automatically presented design problems. There aren’t very many facial types that allow for speech, so there was a great deal of thought that had to go into the design of the face and mouth. To accomodate the dialogue, we came up with a muzzle area that was something between a highland gorilla’s mouth and a human mouth. We also gave him retractable teeth so that he could look threatening at times, then tender at other times. That was always the difficulty with this character — he had to show a whole range of emotions and attitudes.”

The size of the creature was also thoroughly discussed. “It’s a buddy picture,” Tippett said, “and one buddy is this big and the other is that big. You’re gonna have problems in framing the shots. So, ‘what kinds of things can the Dragon do?’, really became an issue.” He also added that “I was thinking also a great deal about the release format of the film, what the rectangular frame was going to be. And so a great deal of the Dragon design was taking that into account as well — how it would be framed on a shot-to-shot basis.” Draco’s size was finally estabilished as 18 feet of height, 43 feet of length, and 72 feet of wingspan — which could allow both to display of the Monster’s imposing nature and to shoot it alongside Bowen in medium shots. For this very reason the Dragon’s jaws could also extend —  a trait inspired by serpents — in order to be able to keep Bowen inside of it, during a key sequence of the film. “I kept drawing from nature — from boa constrictors, and I watched how they removed the pins from their jaws to open their jaws wide to swallow a creature two or three times the size of their head. And I said, ‘why can’t Dragons have detachable jaws?’ So in the scene where he swallows Bowen, before he swallows him you see the… the pins push out, and the jaw distends so you could justify having a smaller head.”

A considerable issue also regarded Draco’s wings, on a both aesthetic and biological level. Tippett recalled: “we calculated how big the wings would have to be to make something of this size actually fly. We figured he would need a 125-foot wingspan — which was too big to be practical. So we played with that, minimizing the wingspan as much as we could without making the Dragon look ridiculous. We also had to work out the engineering problem of how the wings would fold out and expand, making sure they looked good in both configurations. In some of the designs, the wings looked great when they were out and flapping; but once we folded them in, they lookd all wrong. A lot of effort went into figuring out what would work functionally, both in a flying mode and in a terrestrial mode.” Ultimately, those design issues were resolved with what Tippett defined as “cheating”. He took inspiration from the Lassie films: “there were twenty different Lassies, and they looked entirely different to the trainers, but to the audience, they all looked the same,” he said. “Audiences had never seen Draco before, so they wouldn’t notice small differences.” The maquettes closer to the final design were sculpted with detachable wings, which in turn were sculpted in closed and open configurations.

The final maquette.

The selected design proved to be particularly complex to be translated into a digital model. Tippett said: “we showed the final maquette to Rob, and he said: ‘that’s it! That’s it!’ He was very excited — but I could just see the faces of the ILM guys drop: ‘oh, my God…’ I knew this design was going to be a pain in the ass for them when I was doing it; but it was what Rob wanted. I kept their requirements in mind, but I didn’t let the tail wag the dog. Engineering, whether it is computer generated or practical, has to come second to design.” Tippett also provided digital animatics to visualize certain key sequences of the film, which were used in combination with traditional storyboards. The first estimation of visual effects sequences amounted to 300, a number that exceeded the possibilities offered by the budget; the story was thus rewritten to accommodate 180 shots — a more manageable number.

The Draco digital model was supervised by visual effects artists and supervisors Scott Squires, James Straus, Alex Seiden, Euan MacDonald, Kevin Rafferty, and Judith Weaver. Straus recalled: “the Dragon model was so complicated and so highly detailed — with scales and spikes and all these things to make him interesting to look at — that to recreate it in the computer we had to go to a level of complexity never before achieved. The amount of data that had to be incorporated just to render one picture of the Dragon was unbelievable. Draco was four times more detailed than the T.Rex in Jurassic Park. There was as much data in Draco’s head as in the entire T.Rex. Since he was a major character, there were going to be tight close-ups on him throughout the film — and he would have to hold up. It didn’t leave us much room for doing computer tricks or shortcuts. We couldn’t cheat at all.”

The Draco maquettes were used as a starting point, but the digital model was manually built in Alias software. Four modelers were given the task: Paul Giacoppo, Paul Hunt, Bruce Buckley, and Dan Taylor. Each one of the artists began from a different portion of the Dragon’s body. MacDonald recalled the complexity of the process: “it was difficult to coordinate so many people building one model. Ideally, it would have been done by one or two people — but we were under time constraints. Even with four people, it took a full five months to build this model.” The digital model artists met the same design issues that Tippett and Konig had encountered before in regards to the appearance of Draco’s wings, and ultimately employed a similar solution. Straus recalled: “Tippett’s maquettes of the closed wing looked beautiful, as did the open-wing maquettes. But we soon discovered they weren’t really the same wing. We built the open wing on our computer model, then animated it to close — and it didn’t look at all like the closed-wing sculpture. In other words, that open wing could not fold into the configuration of the closed wing. Basically, they had cheated the sculptures a little bit. We looked at the structure of this wing and realized that it was an impossible setup — but we had to make it work anyway. We built a model of the open wing and a separate model of the closed wing, hoping we could find a way to ease one into the other.” MacDonald and his team devised a system of corrective shapes that would ease the transition between one wing configuration and the other during animation, introducing folding shapes into the wing anatomy.

Digital artist Carolyn Rendu was assigned with the task of recreating the maquettes’ characteristic textures and color scheme in the digital model; with the technology available at the time, the Dragon’s then shimmering and vibrant colors could not be fully translated digitally. “I had the five-foot long maquette to work from, which was beautifully painted, with all the detail,” Rendu said. “My job was to bring that same detail to life on the CG model. We couldn’t match it exactly in the virtual world, of course, because that is a world that only approximates reality. So we had to make certain adaptations, while keeping the spirit of the original model. I was primarily concerned with making him look beautiful and powerful.”

Straus added: “we retained a little of the [iridescent quality] and it was written into the main shader for the Dragon: but in most cases, you don’t see it. The iridescence pulled the character too much out of reality and into fantasy. We had enough problems with all the different textures on this thing. We had horns, scales, a dozen different types of skin, each of which had its own reflective qualities, et cetera. The gold shimmer tended to complicate all of that, visually.” Quite in fact, certain elements were erased from the model in order to ease the animation of Draco. “We ended up shortening the distance between Draco’s eyes,” Straus said, “and also changing the size and shape of the eyes a bit. We also eliminated the tiny feathers at the edge of the wings and large, thumb-like points on the wings — both of which interfered with the animation.” As a last addition to the model, the connotations of its face were modified following those of the actor that had been casted for the voice of Draco — none other than Sean Connery.

One of the main characteristics that had impeded Draco from being brought to the screen before the advent of digital effects was his expressivity and ability to talk — which implied the necessity for lip synchronization. Discarding early the motion capture technology available at the time, software designer Cary Phillips devised a new program — labeled Caricature, or Cari — which allowed the animators to animate complex movements by combining different shapes. “With Cari,” Straus said, “we could do the broad expressions; but then, on top of that, we could go in and get all these tiny little movements, all over the face. It was so fast and interactive, we ended up using it for more than the lip-sync. We could use it to touch up animation on the body. We could use it as a viewer for all the little details, such as wrinkles and muscle movements.”

“You couldn’t possibly pronounce it in your tongue.”

Where Cari provided the finer kinds of movement, Draco’s broader motion was still animated in Softimage, which was more interactive; the complexity of the digital model, however, made Cari a quite useful addition: it was a faster program, and could also animate a shaded model with varying levels of detail (as opposed to a standard wireframe). The initial animation was thus created in Softimage, and then imported on Cari — where it was refined. “That made a huge difference in the animation,” Straus said. “It takes a lot of experience to know what you are looking at when you’re animating a wire-frame. After a while, all the lines start to blur together. Being able to animate with a fully shaded model was just incredible — the next step in this technology. We’d been able to do that before with simple models, but not with anything as complex as Draco. The software continued to evolve as the show went on — it just kept getting better and better. Cari was the big technical breakthrough on Dragonheart.”

To ease the animation process, Cohen had built a reference library containing Connery’s various film performances. Straus recalled: “the library gave us nice references of Connery when he was angry or flirting or whatever. We were able to pick up subtle character traits from those images, which was very helpful. Subtle moments, when there isn’t much discernible action, are the hardest things to animate. Broad action requires more actual work — but at least you know what’s going to happen. The subtle moments are like being presented with a blank piece of paper — what am I going to put there? When the Dragon is talking for extended lengths of time, or just lying there listening, what do you have him do? Linda Bel and Chris Armstrong did a wonderful job on those types of shots — some of the most extended, subtle character animation I’ve ever seen. Watching that stuff, there are moments that make me want to cry. He’s just alive.” Straus also added: “[Rob] didn’t just want a plodding type of Monster, the kind of dumb animal we had done before. He wanted a very agile, dynamic, quick and graceful creature. But at the same time, he had to be true to the Connery persona — powerful and confident. Rob did not want us to feel restricted in our animation by this immense body. He also wanted to go all the way in terms of the facial expressions and the body language. He wanted us to draw on all the strengths of Sean Connery’s vocal performance. The most important thing he stressed to us was that this Dragon had to have a soul. We could occasionally go into the comedy realm with the character — but, throughout, there had to be a center of dignity.”

Particular concern was posed by Draco’s eyes: “no matter how much expression we got on the face, if the eyes weren’t right, it wouldn’t look right,” Straus said. “Once we got the lip-sync down, and once the audience was accustomed to that, they were going to stop looking at the talking and start looking right into Draco’s eyes — the soul of the charactter. They had to look real and wet, as if they had depth.” MacDonald added: “the eyes were an ongoing concern; they changed a lot throughout production, mainly in terms of texture and reflectivity. Finally, Barry Armour wrote a shader that was based on one used in Casper. It gave us control over different parts of the eyes; and it allowed us to do a lot with reflections and highlights.” Last touches in the animation included pupil dilation, based on felines. Specific digital shaders were written to portray complex effects such as the translucency of Draco’s wings, or the impression that the creature’s scales are wet and dripping with water. Draco’s fire was a combination of digital fire and practical fire elements filmed on set.

A test sequence was first shown to Cohen and de Laurentiis for approval. “For the test, we chose a shot of Draco at a waterfall,” Squires said, “for a variety of reasons. It involved a background plate that didn’t have any people in it, so there was no worry about whether that particular take would be used. We also chose it because it was in daylight — a worst-case scenario in terms of lighting. We wanted to work that problem out, right from the beginning.” With the sequence approved, ILM began the animation work, which lasted a year. A poseable maquette of the Dragon on set aided the director in estabilishing what he wanted in a specific shot.

The first Draco scenes included the waterfall scene, where the creature is first seen camouflaged as a rock. A practical rig, on which Pete Postlethwaite sat, was first built, and then replaced with a digital counterpart when the Dragon rises. “The shot of the stone Dragon was always a bit vague, conceptually,” said Squires. “Was he actually encrusted in the rocks? Was he supposed to change shape and form? Those issues hadn’t been fully hammered out when we started the shot, so it took some careful thinking and planning to get it.”

The first reveal follows shortly after. The following shots portray Draco in flight — some of the most complex to animate. Straus explained: “the wings were huge, with a membrane that had to move with some controllability and realism. It was very difficult — especially when he had to carry on a dialogue and fly at the same time. I had thought there would be three or four good, powerful, slow pumps of the wings, and then he would be gliding the rest of the time. But Rob said, ‘no, my Dragon is muscly and is always moving.’ He wanted Draco to be very active while he was flying — always pumping and thrusting with his wings. Rob sent us hilarious videos of himself acting out the flying. He’d be pumping his arms, yelling: ‘like this! Like this! Like you’re on the Nautilus machine!’ We kept pumping up the animation to meet his requirements, and we ended up with a very active flying motion.”

When the Dragon was on the ground, the animators had to determine the weight of his performance. Squires explained: “Draco’s size and mass dictated a certain kind of slow movement, but it is hard to get an interesting character out of something that is lumbering around. As it turned out, we had to determine his weight shot by shot. His weight varies, depending on his actions and his interactions with people and the environment.” Certain animation sequences were also influenced by the weight of the creature, and changed according to it. Cohen’s original idea was a creature made of starlight, as explained by Squires: “Originally, Rob wanted us to see the Dragon flying upside down as he circled Bowen — as if he was made of starlight. One of the dichotomies of this character was that sometimes he was heavy, falling down and causing all this debris to fly up; but other times — such as this scene — he was supposed to be light as air, flying on his back right next to Bowen, almost backstroking in the air. When Rob first brought up the idea, Phil Tippett said, ‘that’s not going to work.’ Then Steve Price said, ‘that’s not going to work.’ And finally, I said, ‘that’s not going to work.’ And once Rob had the film cut and saw how the other shots were progressing, he realized that it was not going to work. We had to estabilish some rules of consistency for the creature. He couldn’t be big and lumbering in one scene, and floating in the next.”

The full size jaw set.

The full-size reference head.

Despite the major use of digital effects, Dragonheart also employed insert practical models, among which a full size hand model used when Bowen is held down by Draco. A full size mouth interior rig was also built for the first fight scene, where Bowen is taken into Draco’s jaws. Mike Steffe engineered the functions of the jaw, whereas Eben Stronquist worked on the tongue motion. He recalled: “the jaws were cantilevered out quite a bit, supported by two hydraulic pistons, and only closed about six to ten inches. That was partly for safety — we didn’t want to crush Dennis Quaid insite this thing.” The tongue was mechanized with hydraulic cylinders and linear potentiometers — and was fully articulated; it could perform a wide range of organic movements, puppeteered by four ILM crewmembers. In the final film, the model was surrounded with the digital Dragon head, at the cost of a continuity incongruence — as said by Squires: “we ended up rebuilding the CGI head to get it to match the jaw rig better. We’d had to cheat the scale of the practical jaw a little to get Dennis Quaid to fit inside; so we had to manipulate the CG head a bit, as well.” The scene was particularly complex, due to the needed tracking of the practical mouth section: the digital animation had to be precisely synchronized with it, and blend seamlessly. A number of other models — namely a tail section — was also built and filmed, but ultimately replaced with digital effects. Others were used purely as reference for the digital creature — such as a full-size head filmed for the scene where Draco emerges from the river and looks on a herd of sheep.

In the end, Draco dies and becomes a spirit, ascending to the Stars with the rest of its kind. Cohen wanted a unique representation of the sequence. Squires explained: “at the start of the show, we had collected videotape of all different types of spirits and glows from various movies. But Rob didn’t want anything like that. He didn’t want a hard-edged, ‘effectsy’ look to it. He wanted something entirely new. We experimented with Dynamation until we got a spirit look that was completely original.” Kevin Rafferty, part of the crew, added: “Tony PLett did a fantastic job on this sequence. We checked into the new particle renderer that was developed for Twister by our software department, and saw that it could add a certain finesse to the Dynamation package. Tony went for it, and the outcome was startling.”

Straus’ favourite sequence in the entire film remains Draco’s monologue at Avalon, as it exemplifies the special effects philosophy of the project: “that shot was animated by Doug Smith, and I think it is my favourite of the show. It is subtle, and yet powerful. Draco has an intensity about him. It is night and he is glistening from the rain. You see all these little changes in his expression as he is speaking; you see it in his eyes and all through his face. That shot represents exactly the type of thing we wanted to do on Dragonheart. You can’t look at that scene and say, ‘that’s a really good effect,’ because you are completely engaged by this magical, beautiful character. It never ceases to send chills up my spine.”

Rob Cohen also commented on the achievements made with Draco: “With the help of Phil Tippett and Steven Price, our first visual effects supervisor, I was able to get my Dragon put together in a way that I thought was very successful, unique, and ultimately functioned well to be the first computer graphic actor.”

Special thanks to Eric Hanson, who provided additional information, quotes and pictures for this article.

For more images of Draco, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Draco

El Laberinto del Fauno (inappropriately translated overseas as Pan’s Labyrinth) was independently written, produced and directed by Guillermo del Toro, with a budget of approximately 16 million dollars. The film’s effects were created by Everett Burrell’s CafeFX — which animated the digital effects — and David Marti’s DDT Efectos Speciales — which built the extensive practical effects. Since the beginning of the project, Del Toro estabilished Victorian Illustrator Arthur Rackham’s art pieces — which represent fantasy characters in dark and seemingly emotionless atmospheres — as the main visual inspiration for the film. In its conceptual stage, the film featured a greater number of creatures compared to its final incarnation. Several characters were excised from the script, including a Nerve Ghost (Fantasma de Nervios) and a Goat Monster (Monstruo Cabrion).

In the final film, the first (and interestingly enough, last) creature to be seen is a fairy (la hada) — in the form of a fictitious Phasmid, designed combining elements from two stick insects (nicknamed Cheech and Chong) kept at the CafeFX facility as reference. The creation of the insect fairy was assigned to CG supervisor Akira Orikasa and animation supervisor Ron Friedman. When the creature visits Ofelia in her bedroom, she shows it an illustration of a fairy — and it promptly transforms into a configuration similar to the drawing. “Guillermo wanted the fairy to be very girly,” said visual effects supervisor Edward Irastorza, “so we tried to get some female characteristics into the stick bug before it transformed. When Ofelia shows the bug the picture of a fairy, the stick bug combs its wings back, kind of like a human looking in a mirror admiring her own butt. That was the very first humanoid movement that it did, before transforming.” The actual transformation was achieved with keyframe animation, as explained by visual effects supervisor Everett Burrell: “we used a procedure in Softimage XSI called ‘shrink wrap’. It wasn’t a traditional morph by any means. We took totally different geometry and wrapped it around the fairy, like a fairy wearing a stick bug suit.”

Curiously enough, the stand-in for the digital fairy was a Bratz doll, painted green and with its hair cut off. The actual fairy, designed by Sergio Sandoval, was initially conceived during the production of Hellboy (a prototype appears, unseen, inside Rasputin’s gauntlet). It presents a similar color scheme to its stick bug form, and a faintly translucent skin. Two other fairies are also seen, in blue and red variants. The design tried to stray from overtly traditional configurations. “I wanted them to look like little monkeys,” Del Toro said “like dirty fairies. They eat meat. They scratch all the time.” Artists at CafeFX suggested the concept of leaf-like wings, an idea Del Toro approved immediately.

According to Burrell, the animation of the fairies was inspired by several Harryhausen characters. “We looked at the Homunculus from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and the Trog from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger,” he told CGSociety. “We tried to get those Harryhausen moments.” There was also a difference in behaviour between the first green fairy and the other two: whereas the former was more humane in its behaviour (dancers were even used as visual reference), for the latter characters “we were thinking of primate behavior” said animator Ron Friedman, “or even cavemen. It was as if they hadn’t yet learned the refinements of how to carry themselves.” Ultimately, he adds, “it was a fine line trying to incorporate something that felt elegant, but still animalistic and not totally human.”

The aged Faun. Notice the broken horn, pale golden hair, and eye cataracts — traits that rejuvenate as the film progresses.

The fairy leads Ofelia to the core of the Labyrinth, where the Faun (el Fauno) is revealed. The creature was inspired by recurring dreams experienced by Del Toro in his youth. In an interview with The Guardian, the director recalled: “We have a small gothic temple in Guadalajara — that’s like you having an Aztec pyramid in central London. Some people from Opus Dei erected this temple in the middle of my city and it’s called the Expiatory Temple. So I would hear the temple bells ringing midnight, and as they started chiming, I would see the human hand of the Faun come out from the armoire, then the smiling face of a goat, and then the hairy leg of a goat. I would clearly see him pulling his body out of the armoire and I would start screaming, repeatedly, every night that I slept in that bed.”

VOICE
It’s you — it’s you! You’ve returned!

The VOICE is cold and full of sibilance. The cloud moves aside…

On its hind quarters, in the shadows, is the twisted and sinister figure of a FAUN. He’s covered in roots and moss.

Ofelia backs away, speechless.

-Guillermo del Toro, El Laberinto del Fauno script (translated)

In the film, the Faun is played by Doug Jones, who had already collaborated with Del Toro on Hellboy (in the role of Abraham Sapien). Although Jones’ voice was replaced with Pablo Adan’s in post-production, the actor still provided correct lip synchronization. He explained to CHUD.com: ” was comforted to know that there would be a voice actor to save me. In fact, Guillermo said, ‘aw, you can count to ten for all I care, just give me the right pauses, we’ll be fine.’ But I couldn’t leave him with my lips, going one two three four…and have them try to sync it up later, it would be like a bad Godzilla dub. And I had an English translation of every scene, so I was able to figure out the sentence structure and where to emphasize.”

One of Sandoval’s Faun concepts.

Responsible for the character’s design was conceptual artist Sergio Sandoval in collaboration with the director. The Faun combines traits of a human and a goat, with bark-like skin and features on its body. On the Faun’s skin are spiral engravings, similar to those found in several character designs in the Hellboy films, including Hellboy himself and Sammael. Unlike those, however, the Faun’s engravings represent the Labyrinth itself. “We carved in spiral engravings on his face and chest,” Marti said, “representing the Labyrinth in ancient ritual markings. Whenever Doug was resting on set, he looked like a weird wooden effigy, not a living animal.”

The aged Faun.

The Faun was sculpted by David Marti (for the head) and Pau Loewe, Arturio Balseiro, Jose Menenses and Nelly Guimaras (for the body). DDT built two suits and an animatronic head extension — an understructure containing the mechanisms animating the Faun’s face — which was then covered in foam latex skin. Only Jones’ lower head portion was directly seen in make-up. The actor also wore dental prosthetics. Marti recalled: “it took about two hours to put on the head, then two more hours to fit him in the suit. We added the horns last, on set, because it was difficult for Doug to fit through the door frames wearing those.” The motion of the creature’s eyes, nose and ears was controlled by servo motors (devised by mechanical designer Xavi Bastida) contained in the horns themselves. The position of the Faun’s eyes only allowed limited visibility through small openings in the creature’s tear ducts. A separate neck piece was applied at the collarbone and blended with the head make-up.

Jones as the Faun, filming one of the last sequences for the film.

The Faun’s legs are digitigrade, with a rather extended metatarsal section. In order to properly portray them in the film, the special effects team combined practical and digital effects, with a system devised by the director himself: Jones wore leg extensions that covered his thighs and then protruded backwards, simulating the anatomy of the creature, only to reconnect at the feet. To puppeteer them, Jones simply had to move his legs in different manners, depending on the kind of motion a specific shot requested. The unsuited portions of his legs, when seen in the shot, were covered with cloth of varying colours (depending on the shot), which enabled CafeFX to remove them and present the Faun’s legs as intended. Clean plates were used to recreate obscured portions of background. When the Faun was seen from the front, however, almost complete digital legs were employed. Irastorza said: “on side shots it was fairly easy for us to clean up [the Faun]’s legs. The prosthetic legs were behind Doug’s stilts, and Doug’s shin area was covered in green, blue or black material, depending on where we were shooting. Wherever we had full frontal shots, though, we had to completely create digital legs because Doug’s legs obscured the prosthetic.” In the full suit, Jones as the Faun stood almost seven feet tall.

The last touches added to the creature were digital enhancements for certain expressions. Irastorza recalled: “Doug had pretty good freedom of movement on the set. Most of Pan’s expressions were practical, but when he squinted, he never completely closed his eyes, so we helped him out there digitally and added minor facial expressions.”

The rejuvenated Faun, with lively goat eyes and brown hair.

Throughout the course of the film, the Faun actually undergoes a rejuvenation process. Marti explained: “the regeneration was subtle. In early scenes, we covered [the Faun] with a skin overgrown with moss and little branches. Then, as [the Faun] appeared over eight scenes, we removed pieces to make him look cleaner.” Other details were added to enhance this progression: the Faun’s skin is initially aged, and its eyes display a cataract design — only to rejuvenate progressively. The colour of the creature’s hair also changes from pale golden tones to earth-like browns, and its broken left horn progressively grows back to its original state. This artistic choice was not explained by Del Toro; even members of the crew conceived their own explanations. “My interpretation is that [Ofelia]’s been away from the underworld for so long [that it] is waiting for her return, and decaying in her absence. I’m a reflection of that. The more tests she passes, the more she believes her destiny and trusts her instincts, the more young and powerful I become.”

The Toad animatronic.

In the first task assigned by the Faun, Ofelia faces a giant toad (el sapo), an inclusion in the film inspired by the 1953 film The Maze. Originally conceived to be much smaller, the toad was sculpted by Montse Ribé (Marti’s wife), Alberto Alberto Hortas Lopez, Lorenzo Tamburini, and Aleix Torrecillasand. It was built as a five-foot long animatronic. It was puppeteered on set by Ribé herself through a hole in the set floor. The toad had a fully articulated head, as well as bladders to inflate its stomach and ear recesses. As complex as the animatronic was, its performance on set proved limitative; as such, CafeFX was assigned the task to duplicate the toad digitally. Where the original intention was to use visual effects only for the tongue and for the creature’s demise — when it turns inside out — the final film features mostly the digital version of the toad. When the creature vomits its insides out, the sequence is entirely digital — and then cuts to the practical ‘deflated toad’ and phlegm. Marti recalled: “The phlegm was solid gelatin. It was so heavy, we couldn’t prepare it earlier and transport it to set. Instead, we brought the mold to set, filled it with gelatin and opened it in place.”

Ofelia is at first reluctant to complete the second task, due to the increasingly worse condition of her mother. The Faun gives her a Mandrake root that, in a bowl of milk and fed with blood, heals Carmen; Ofelia uses the Mandrake actually after the second task. The creature was brought to the screen as a featureless dummy at first, and then as a cable-controlled and radio-controlled puppet — mechanized by Bastida. The controls for its mechanisms were concealed inside the bowl of milk the Mandrake is put in. Many shots of the creature were also digital. “The Mandrake was real only in the scenes where it was tossed around,” Irastorza said. “Guillermo wanted the movement to be a little more fluid, so we used the puppet more as reference and re-created it digitally.” The Mandrake also mimics Carmen’s movements, a complex animation sequence. “When she turned from side to side and adjusts her feet, the mandrake had to mimic those actions almost exactly,” Friedman said. “But because there’s a time delay the audience sees the mother moving first, so we had the mandrake perform the same thing with a broader movement to move the audience’s eyes there.”

Jones and crew.

It is during the second task that Ofelia unwillingly awakens the Pale Man (el Hombre Palido), a metaphoric embodiment of the fascist government and the corrupted Church. Again played by Doug Jones, the Monster “represents fascism and the Church eating children, when they have a perversely abundant banquet in front of them,” Del Toro said. “There is almost a hunger to eat innocence.” The director was really specific about the same actor playing both the Faun and the Pale Man. Jones commented: “Guillermo wanted the same actor to play [the Faun] and the Pale Man because, as he said on set, ‘you know, in my sick mind I think that the Pale Man is kind of a creation of Pan.’ And that makes sense, because he’s part of one of the tests Ophelia had to pass that Pan set up for her.”

The design was influenced by Francisco Goya’s painting Saturn Devouring His Son (1823) and, curiously enough, by an acquaintance of Del Toro and Irastorza. The latter commented: “the idea was for a man who had been very fat and lost a lot of weight quickly. This was based on a producer Guillermo and I had worked with, who was very old and had sagging, disgusting skin. This guy had been around for so long, we used to say he had been a production assistant on Battleship Potemkin — at least, that was the joke we made, lovingly.”

Tuiten’s Pale Man maquette, showing the suit-only option (left side) and ‘puppet’ option (right side).

Similarly to the Faun, the Pale Man was brought to the screen with an amalgamation of practical and digital effects. Marti recalled: “we had two ideas to achieve the Pale Man: one was to have a skeletal puppet in front of the puppeteer, like bunraku puppetry from Japanese theater. The other was to do him as a make-up. Arjen Tuiten, one of our lead artists, did two maquettes — one for a make-up, another as a puppet — and Guillermo chose a mix of both. We did the upper part of the body as a make-up, and the legs as a puppet. We put green legs on Doug Jones, then applied skinny legs on top. It worked perfectly with frontal shots; but in profiles, CafeFX had a lot of work to do.”

The Pale Man was sculpted by Arjen Tuiten and Arturo Balseiro Santos, both of whom also contributed to the make-up applications. To portray the creature’s head, a vacuform understructure was positioned on Jones’ head (flattening his nose in the process), and then covered with foam latex skin. Again, only Jones’ lips were directly visible in make-up, and the actor wore dental prosthetics portraying the Pale Man’s small, crooked teeth. Most of the Pale Man’s skin was foam latex, whereas the hanging folds of drooping skin on its face and arms were casted in silicon gel. Making this mixture of materials blend under a single paint scheme proved rather complex; Marti explained: “it was almost impossible to make foam latex look like silicone. We used transparent washes on the foam, and then overpigmented the silicone, trying to avoid a waxy look to make the materials match.”

Jones as the Pale Man. The portions of his legs covered in greenscreen cloth were erased in post-production, with the missing background recreated with clean plates.

Jones could only see through the Pale Man’s nostrils while cross-eyed. “I had no eyes in my head,” Jones said, “since they were in my hands, but the nostrils were up kinda high and kinda big, and that’s what I looked out of. I could see out of the right nostril with my left eye and the left nostril with my right eye. So it was a disorienting cross-eyed thing going on.” To ease the performance and shooting schedule, the Pale Man was also built as a featureless dummy for the scenes where the creature sits still, slumbering, at its banquet. An insert animatronic arm was built to portray the creature inserting its eyeballs in its palms. In post-production, CafeFX also added a blinking animation; the eyes were digitally augmented in all the shots featuring them in close-up.

When the Pale Man grabs and violently devours the two fairies, Jones enacted the sequence by biting condoms filled with artificial blood, which were then replaced by digital fairies in post-production. The most complex digital augmentations in regards of the creature were however used in profile views of the creature walking. CafeFX created a digital double of the Pale Man’s waist and legs, animated them matching Jones’ performance, and rotoscoped them accurately. As in the Faun’s case, clean plates were used to recreate the missing portions of background.

Compositing Supervisor Tom Williamson resumed the crew’s feelings towards the film concisely: “I’ve worked on 40 motion pictures,” he said, “and I can count the ones I’m proud of on one hand. At this point, Pan’s Labyrinth is number one.”

Special thanks to Arjen Tuiten, Arturo Balseiro, and Joe Nazzaro for providing additional information.

For more images of the Creatures from the film, visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Las Criaturas del Laberinto del Fauno

Happy 25th Anniversary, Tremors!

We have interviewed the author of the Kaiju size chart that has been doing the rounds in the internet lately (and which you can see above, completed)!

Monster Legacy: Let’s start with the basics; what got you into illustration?

Jaroslav Kosmina: I’ve always been a huge science fiction enthusiast; and for me, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park and Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla sort of jump-started my interest with these fictionalized beasts — ultimately becoming a strong emphasis in my works. I began coming up with alternate compositions at a very early age of specific scenes, and from there, I started branching out into other areas in the art world, in terms of subject matter and aesthetic. I’m currently completing my BFA in fine painting at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in New England. My goal is to bridge the aesthetic gap between the two art forms.

Monster Legacy: Who are, in your opinion, the best creature designers and artists in the film industry?

Jaroslav Kosmina: For me, my favorite, who usually worked with the legendary Stan Winston, will always be Crash Mcreery. I love how his concept art is always presented as a finished piece with using the tone of paper as an atmospheric agent in the piece; and his studious rendering of creature anaotmy and skin textures are essential to selling the idea of this ‘thing’ actually existing. Another artist I like looking at, out of so many, is Wayne Barlowe. So many of his complex compostions with insane creature designs (Like his work for Dante’s Inferno) just leave you wanting to see what’s next on his plate. I Absolutely love the kaiju designs he helped introduce for Guillermo Del Toro’s recent Pacific Rim.

Monster Legacy: What are your favourite Monster Movies and designs?

Jaroslav Kosmina: Controversially, my favorite monster design is from Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla in 1998. I know a lot of people smash the hell out of that movie, but it is one of my favorites. Patrick Tatopoulos’ design team behind that movie did a fantastic job working on making a naturalistic and believable animal that could exist in our world. The use of animal references was so intricately implemented in the design, down to crocodile-like skin on the cheek bones and sailfin dragon blue-ish color scheme. Even the traditional use of suitmation and animatronics (which was unfortunately absent in Gareth Edward’s Godzilla) was a wonderful use of special effects for the film. It’s kind of obvious to me that from that movie on, movie monsters have been drawing design inspiration from Tatopoulos’ work in 1998. Just look closely at some of the creatures from Pacific Rim, Zathura, or even the new 2014 Godzilla. To me, it is one of the few daring and strikingly successful redesigns of an iconic character out there; enough to garner endless critique- even 17 years after its release.

Monster Legacy: What techniques do you usually employ for your illustrations?

Jaroslav Kosmina: Even though I’m a painting major, I’m a line guy, so prefereably like to work in graphite and more recently in ball point. I enjoy getting into the rendering of different surface textures and atmospheric gradiation. I do like working with color and explaining form and space in that way, as well as playing with skin patterns on my creatures as well, but defining through calligraphy has always been my thing in my art.

Monster Legacy: When you design an original creature, how do you approach the process? Where do you start?

Jaroslav Kosmina: My process has always been playing around with interesting shapes that create a defining silhouette. I then begin to simply improvise with forms that begin creating a structure for the creature’s skull shape; likewise for the rest of its anatomy. From there, I’ll begin rendering skin textures and and shadow planes that help bring the character out into three dimensions. I’ll sometimes look at real animalia for design inspirations and/or expressive postures for these monsters, which usually helps to bring out the character.

Monster Legacy: What makes a Monster design effective and, conversely, when does a Monster design fail?

Jaroslav Kosmina: I believe a good monster design should bring something new to the table with out too many dishes. Look at Godzilla for example; the design, even for the orignal’s time, was pretty basic — a T.rex with Stegosaur plates and Iguanodon arms. A simple combination withing the same group (dinosaurs) however, it was an effective impression on audiences and became easy to point out who this new creature was. Of course, it also has to do with time and how often the design is showcased in media to become familiar, like with anything, but I believe if you want that to ever happen with your design, it should be simple and strking at the same time. Over-doing your creatures with exessive limbs, heads, spikes, etc, has sort of become a gimmick on the internet with fan art. Make sure you’re carefully designing and reworking all details of your character until you get the most simplified product; and be aware of whats already out there too!

Monster Legacy: You have not been involved in the production of a motion picture yet; what kind of Monster would you like to design for a film as your first project?

Jaroslav Kosmina: Of course, my dream would be to work on a Godzilla or Jurassic Park film, haha, but I’ll honestly take whatever first oppurtunity I can get, just to build my resume and have as much experience under my belt as I can get. I would love to be able to work on any further Pacific Rim sequels as well, since it’s a generally new property with open invitation for new kaiju designs. I am currently working with an original kaiju I designed named “Sobura”, which I’ve spent the longest amount of time planning and designing the creature – I believe 14 hours in total. I tend to work quickly, which is a high demand in the professional field, so it was a long assignment for myself, haha. I’m still developing the story idea behind this character, and I’m even working on an original score for him with a friend composer, Francois Gratecap, whose also worked on some pretty big projects himself. We’ll see what turns out with Sobura.

Sobura.

Special thanks to Jaroslav Kosmina for the interview! Be sure to visit His Facebook page.

Dan O’Bannon’s original Alien sketch.

During the pre-production of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon witnessed the concept art work of Swiss surrealist Hans Ruedi Giger — who had been hired to visualize Arrakis’ architecture, barren landscapes, and Sandworms. Whilst the film was short-lived, the airbrush paintings portraying grotesque amalgamations of organic and mechanical parts (what Giger called “biomechanics”) made an impression on O’Bannon. He recalled in his essay Something Perfectly Disgusting: “[Giger’s] visionary paintings and sculptures stunned me with their originality, and aroused in me deep, disturbing thoughts, deep feelings of terror. They started an idea turning over in my head — this guy should design a Monster Movie. Nobody had ever seen anything like this on the screen.” Years before, O’Bannon had wanted to write a horror film set in outer space; initially called StarBeast, it was finally titled Alien. ”StarBeast is one of those titles that you think of and then you… you throw  them away. l was running through titles and they all stank. l didn’t like any of them. One morning at three o’clock, [in] Ronny [Shusett]’s apartment, l’m typing away and the characters are saying the Alien this and the Alien that — and suddenly that word ‘Alien’ just came up out of the typewriter at me. l said ‘Alien. lt’s a noun and it’s an adjective.’ l said ‘Yes, that’s it! l have the title!’ lt’s simple, it’s one word, no one’s ever used it — and it never changed from that moment on. The title stuck and that was amazing to us, just that aspect of it.”

The project’s basic storyline was inherited by O’Bannon’s first screenwriting credit — the commercially unsuccessful dark comedy Dark Star (which, interestingly enough, also marked John Carpenter’s directorial debut). Giger’s art inspired the screenwriter to resurrect the project — which had been considered again in a meeting with Alien producer Ron Shusett — and write a new script. “When I got back to America [after the trip in Europe for Dune] I was still haunted by his work,” O’Bannon said. “It was on my mind, and when we sat down to do Alien I ended up visualising the thing as I was writing it — I found myself visualizing it as a Giger painting.”

The story and the nature of the creature were heavily influenced by classic science fiction, as well as the tales of Cosmic Horror of H.P Lovecraft — of whom O’Bannon was a big enthusiast. The Alien represented the primal Fear of the Unknown. “One especially insightful critic – I wish I remembered who – wrote that Alien evoked the writings of H.P. Lovecraft,” he said in Something Perfectly Disgusting, “but where Lovecraft told of an ancient race of hideous beings menacing the Earth, Alien went to where the Old Ones lived, to their very world of origin. He was right, that was my very thought while writing. That baneful little storm-lashed planetoid halfway across the galaxy was a fragment of the Old Ones’ homeworld, and the Alien a blood relative of Yog-Sothoth.”

Alien Monster IV, from Giger’s Necronomicon.

Before even seeing Giger’s art, O’Bannon had conceived the creature as “some sort of psychic force” that would use the crew of the spaceship as hosts. The idea later changed to an actual, physical creature. “It was Ron [Shusett] who finally broke the ice,” O’Bannon told Cinefex. “He brought up an old idea I’d had about gremlins harassing a B-17 bomber crew on a night mission over Tokyo and suggested I make the Alien creature physical and have it stalking the crewmen on their own ship.” From then on, the idea of the Alien changed radically.

Inspired by parasitoid wasps, O’Bannon and Shusett conceived the Alien’s life cycle as following: an egg opens to reveal a creature — the ‘Facehugger’ — that latches onto the host’s head and forces a proboscis down its throat, depositing an embryo in the process — a plot device conceived by Shusett to actually get the Alien inside the ship. said in an interview for midniteticket.com: “Dan said to me, when I first read the script, ‘I know what has to be done, but I don’t know how to do it. If you can help me do it, we’ll get this script done and it will be up to its potential. We need to figure out how the Alien gets on board in a way that nobody’s ever seen before.’ We worked together for months and we just stared at the wall.” The inspiration came to Shusett, suddenly, in his sleep. “I [woke] up at three o’clock in the morning, and I came into the living room, and I said to Dan, ‘I think I’ve cracked it. I think I know how it gets onboard in a way that nobody’s ever seen in their whole life: it impregnates one of them. When they were down there looking they didn’t know what they would find; they find some almost primordial life. It’s prehistoric but it’s moving; that [would be] the egg. They’re going to try and open it up.’ We know what happened. Something jumps on his face and puts a tube down his mouth and impregnates him. They can’t see it on X-Ray because — like an octopus produces ink — it blocks out what’s growing in there. We know it’s breeding in there and then in the middle of the movie it comes bursting out his chest.’ Dan and I just looked at each other. We knew that would have to happen. Once implanted you have to operate or it comes bursting out the chest. Dan and I just pictured that and we were amazed. We looked at each other in shock. We said ‘nobody’s ever seen that on screen!” Within three weeks we had the whole structure exactly as you saw it in the film, once that one moment came to me. Dan was right. He knew that would unlock the rest of the movie.”

“That was one of the ideas that made it possible to make [the film] worth doing at all,” O’Bannon said. “This is a movie of Alien interspecies rape — that’s it, that’s scary, because it hits all of our buttons, all of our unresolved feelings about sexuality.” When fully developed, the baby Monster would then violently burst from the chest of its victim — earning the crew nickname ‘Chestburster’ — and finally grow into the adult Alien. “It was our idea that it would be the life cycle of an insect,” Shusett said in an interview with Cinefantastique. “The way a wasp will sting a spider, paralyse it, and lay its eggs in the spider… that we did want [for the Alien’s life cycle].”

Early Facehugger illustration.

Key trait of the Alien is its acidic blood, included as another plot device that would forbide the crew to kill or even wound the Monster. The screenwriter wanted the creature to be mortal, and was radically opposed to making it impenetrable (a trope common in earlier Monster films). Ron Cobb, who designed the human technology for the film, eventually suggested the idea of a creature with “acid for blood”. O’Bannon recalled: “Ron Cobb gave continual input to the film right from the very start. He gave us one of the major plot elements: the monster has an incredibly corrosive bloodstream. One of the reasons the monster can’t be cut up or fired at is because its blood would eat right through the ship. That was Ron’s idea and I want everyone to know it — I wanted the thing to be, in every respect, a natural animal, which means yes, if you shoot it, it’ll die.” A scene removed in the final film involved the Alien having its left arm cut off, resulting in a portion of the ship being compromised.

Otherwise, the Alien’s appearence, as well as other traits, varied from version to version. In one of the drafts, for example, the Chestburster is described as a “worm with legs… and tentacles,” and the adult Alien as a six-feet tall creature, “ghastly beyond imagination, squamous,” and equipped with “razor-sharp tentacles” to grasp its prey. Curiously enough, it is also described as moving “like an over-sized bird.”

O’Bannon’s original intent was also for the Aliens to be an advanced civilization, a concept lost in the final version of the film. Cobb elaborated: “in Dan’s original conception the Alien race had three entirely different stages in its life-cycle. First, the egg, which is tended by third-stage adults and housed in a lower chamber of the breeding temple. When ready to hatch, the egg is placed in the middle of a sacrificial stone and a lower animal, the equivalent of an Alien cow, is then led on to the stone. Sensing the warmth, the Facehugger springs out, attaches itself to the animal and deposits a fetus into the stomach. The Facehugger soon drops off and the fetus develops inside, eventually chewing its way out and killing its host. This creature, the Chestburster, is the Alien’s second stage, and it simply runs about eating, mindlessly carnivorous. At this stage the creature is still controlled and nurtured by adult Aliens, until the Chestburster begins losing appendages and becomes more and more harmless. Finally — its bloodlust gone — the Alien becomes a mild, intelligent creature, capable of art and architecture, which lives a full, scholarly life of 200 years. At some point a cataclysm causes the extermination of the adults of this unique race leaving no one to tend and nurture the young. But in a dark lower chamber of the breeding temple a large number of eggs lie dormant, waiting to sense something warm.”

O’Bannon further elaborated: “I saw the inhabitants of this planetoid as tough and primitive, and with an extremely complicated sexual cycle. Reproduction was very difficult for them and had therefore become central to their religion. And this pyramid was a temple to reproduction. When the astronauts come upon this crumbling structure covered with ugly angular carvings, they begin to realize that they are in the presence of real antiquity. They’re unable to find an entrance at the base, so they scale the pyramid and discover at the top a flue that goes straight down from the peak. This was where the Kane character set up his tripod and winch and lowered himself down — way below ground level — to the floor of this chamber. Using his suit lights, he looks around in the darkness and in the middle of the room finds a huge stone plinth with blood drains in it. All over the walls are Alien hieroglyphics. Also in there, centrally located, are these eggs — spores really. See, these Alien beings had two sexes of their own, but they needed a third host animal to reproduce. So they’d bring in an animal. put it up on the plinth with a spore, and whammo! Then they’d lead the inseminated animal off to an enclosure somewhere to await the birth. But the planetoid was now dead and this civilization had been gone for a million years. All that remained of it was this pyramid and the spores — which can survive dormant for incredible lengths of time under even the most adverse conditions.” For reasons of pacing and budget, the pyramid was excised from the film and blended into the Derelict spacecraft — the eggs would thus be found in a lower chamber of the ship, making their true origin ambiguous.

Dan O’Bannon.

Once completed, the script went through a wide array of rewrites; when it was passed to David Giler and Walter Hill, the duo removed all otherwordly elements — transforming the Alien into an earthly biological experiment. Supported by Shusett, O’Bannon strongly opposed the change: “Ronnie Shusett had feverishly rushed up to [Scott] and shoved a copy of the original draft of the script into his hands because Hill and Giler had begun to rewrite it. We were disturbed by the content of the rewrite. Ridley read it and went, ‘0h yes. We have to go back to the first way. Definitely.’ So it was Giler and Hill’s turn to be disturbed. As a result, the entire remainder of the production became a battle between camps. One camp wanting one version of the film and another camp wanting the other version.” Scott ultimately combined traits from both versions, with the conception of the creature reflecting O’Bannon’s vision of an otherwordly menace. Its origins are left ambiguous, and the final film does not delve into the background of the Monster.

Whilst concretely shown only by the third chapter of the series, the notion of the Alien inheriting traits from its host was actually seeded during the creative process for the first film. “The Alien life form lived to reproduce,” Scott said,  “and in reproducing took on the characteristics of its last inhabitant and its new host. Thus the Alien on board the Nostromo had the characteristics of the Space Jockey on the Derelict and Kane. If the facehugger had hit the cat, it could have been a hybrid of the Space Jockey and the cat.”

Since the beginning, O’Bannon wanted Giger to design the Alien in all of its stages, and drew the first Alien sketch as a means of creative input for the Swiss artist; Giger himself made preliminary designs for the Facehugger stage. The producers of the film, however, did not agree with him over the choice; he told Cinefex: “when I tried to get Giger on the picture, I got a lot of resistance. They hired Ron Cobb and Chris Foss at my request rather readily — even brought foss over from England — but there was just something about Giger; they didn’t want to touch him. I think maybe Walter Hill didn’t like his work.” For this reason, artists already attached to the project, including Ron Cobb, were assigned with the task of designing the creature.

Ron Cobb’s Alien concept.

“I’m afraid Ron Cobb’s ego was sorely wounded when he didn’t get to do the Monster,” O’Bannon said in an interview with Cinefex. He found Cobb’s concepts visually interesting, but nowhere close to what should embody the Alien. He continues: “he was endlessly frustrated because he could design Aliens without number, and they were all convincing and all unique and all startling to look at. The only problem was, he’s a rationalist. I noticed this when we first started designing the picture. All these different things were coming out so well that I decided to have him take a crack at the Derelict spaceship. But when I asked him to come up with an irrational shape he got very disturbed. He couldn’t handle that. He kept coming up with convincing technology for a flying saucer or some other kind of UFO. And when it came to the Alien, he had the same problem. His designs just weren’t as bizarre, or as bubbling up from the subconscious as the stuff Giger was doing. Cobb’s Monsters all looked like they could come out of a zoo — Giger’s looked like something out of a bad dream.”

After Ridley Scott was attached to the project as the director, he had the last word on the matter — and finally chose Giger as the creature designer. In the foreword to H.R. Giger’s Film Design, he said that “I was first introduced to H.R. Giger’s art work while in the very early stages of pre-production for Alien. The writer and co-producer Dan O’Bannon showed me a copy of H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon book, and I immediately saw the potential his work had to offer the project. The executive producers were a bit hesitant in initially committing to his art until they had a director locked up. In this case that wound up being me. My enthusiasm with regard to the film increased significantly as I realized we had the ability to create a Monster that would be superior to most of those from the past.” With Giger hired for the project, the Alien finally started to take shape.

For more images of the early Alien sketches and designs, visit the Monster Gallery.

Next: Part Ia: Alien, the Egg and the Facehugger

When Hans Ruedi Giger was finally hired as a designer for Alien, he was assigned the task to conceive all the othewordly aspects of the film — the planetoid, the Derelict and its Pilot, and the Alien itself in all of the stages of its life cycle. Obviously unable to also construct all the needed creature effects within the tight schedule of the production, Giger was aided by special effects veterans attached to the project. First hired was Carlo Rambaldi, in the wake of his special effects work on John Guillermin’s King Kong. Though enthusiastic about the project, Rambaldi’s availability was limited, due to having already committed to other projects (such as Nightwing). Also hired was sculptor and modelmaker Roger Dicken, who had collaborated with associate producer Ivor Powell during production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dicken also provided some of the sound effects for the Alien, in collaboration with Percy Edwards.

SPORE PODS: These are leathery, egg-shaped objects about one meter tall, which contain the larva of the Alien. They have a small “lid” on top which can pop off when a victim approaches.

-Dan O’Bannon, original letter to H.R. Giger

First seen in the film is a batch of eggs, stored deep inside the Derelict spaceship, “like termite [eggs] inside the walls of a house,” according to Giger. The final egg design reflects the Swiss artist’s early concepts for the most part, save for its opening: as originally conceived, the opening was overtly vagina-like in appearence, something that the filmmakers, including Scott himself, found too explicit. Nick Allder, special effects supervisor, recalled: “Ridley had seen [the original egg sculpture], and we were sitting there having this meeting and I think — I can’t remember who it was — somebody said ‘what do you think of the egg?’ And Ridley’s exact words [were], ‘I think it’s fucking obscene'; and there was this deadly hush, and everybody looked around at each other. Gordon Carroll said ‘Ridley, what do you mean by ‘the egg looks obscene?'; [Ridley] said ‘well, it looks like some great fanny’. Then Gordon Carroll said, ‘Ridley, you have the Alien running around with a three-foot penis on his head, the alien spaceship has got three fifteen foot tall vaginas that the space people are walking through and you call the egg obscene?’ That just cracked everybody up!”

Giger’s original egg concept.

Regardless, Giger eventually changed the egg design, implementing a splitting opening with four petals — which, when seen from the above, “has the shape of a starfish”. Most of the eggs, including the hero egg used for the opening sequence, use the four-petal design — whereas some background eggs, out of focus in the film, actually display a design closer to Giger’s original intention. A total of 130 eggs, including the main egg, was fabricated by Giger himself (aided by Nick Allder’s special effects crew) in fiberglass for the main body, and foam latex for the upper portion.

Mucous material is seen dripping upwards from the egg. To achieve this effect, Scott simply filmed an insert shot of the hero model upside down. When Kane points his light at the inside of the egg, the Facehugger is seen writhing inside. This insert shot (one of the last creature sequences of the production) was achieved by filling the egg with cattle and sheep stomachs, as well as KY Jelly; Scott himself simulated the awakening of the creature, putting on rubber gloves and moving them from under the egg. Allder’s crew fitted the egg with a simple hydraulic mechanism to make the petals split coordinately. Once open, its innards are actually organic — with sheep stomachs and cow hearts.

THE ALIEN, FIRST PHASE: This is a small, possibly octopoidal creature which waits inside the Spore Pod for a victim to approach. When someone touches the Spore Pod, the lid flies off, and the small Alien (First Phase) leaps out and attaches itself to the face of the victim.

-Dan O’Bannon, original letter to H.R. Giger

Once the egg opens, the Facehugger erupts out of it. Giger’s very first designs for this stage of the Alien were actually conceived before he was officially hired for the film. “As an idea of what he wanted,” Giger told Cinefex, “Dan O’Bannon sent me a sketch he had done of this thing popping out of an egg — it looked kind of like a flying omelet. To me, the appearance of something should be determined by its function, and since this creature had to jump out of an egg and grab onto someone’s face, I first thought about what it would need to do this action. I started out with a body that looked kind of like a large sex organ — which is what it was, really — and I added two hands to hold the head and a long coiled tail that worked like a jack-in-the-box spring.” Whilst those paintings further convinced O’Bannon  that he was the man for the project, they were not entirely like what he had envisioned; the screenwriter, in fact, wanted the Facehugger to “fit on the face like a glove,” covering it and not engulfing the whole head.

One of Giger’s original Facehugger designs.

The paintings were used as a starting point to design the Facehugger — the construction of which was assigned to Roger Dicken. Ultimately, the final design was the product of a collaboration between Scott, O’Bannon, Dicken, Cobb and Giger. “There was a big meeting,” O’Bannon said, “and everybody was talking at the same time and trying to tell Dicken what the hell [the Facehugger] should look like. Finally, Ridley pulled out Giger’s book and said: ‘look. I want these fingers here on this page; and I want that over there for the back; and then I want the tail from this other page.’ And Dicken was just confused. He couldn’t absorb it all the way — it was being thrown at him. So I asked Ridley if I could take a try at it. and he said, ‘go ahead.'” O’Bannon and Dicken then began to sketch a single, cohesive design that would combine the traits from Giger’s paintings that Scott wanted to see in the creature.

Another version of the Facehugger.

“While we were doing this,” O’Bannon continues, “Giger came in — his plane had arrived from Switzerland — and he had some new designs for the Facehugger. And they were very similar to what we were putting together on the drawing board — not identical, but similar. His had an eye on the back, and the shape of it was much more like the palm of a hand. I looked at them and I said, ‘Oh, that’s good.’ Then Giger looked at the thing I was sketching with Dicken, and he said, ‘no, that’s better; that’s much better.’ I was really flattered. So I said, ‘Then I should continue with it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes.’ So we went on. When it came to trying to figure out what kind of a skeletal understructure the thing would need so the fingers could hook up, I got Ron Cobb over and he scrawled out his ideas — which, as usual, were excellent. Then I cleaned the whole thing up a little and did it in ink — exact size — and that’s what we went with. I was really pleased, because I had kind of eclectically constructed the Facehugger out of the things that Ridley wanted and the things that Giger wanted, and some good ideas from Cobb and from Dicken.”

“We wanted to be sure [the Facehugger] looked like an animal,” Scott said, “so we designed it very much from the point of view of something which had just come out of the womb. For that reason, we decided to use natural flesh tone. We tried coloring it in various other ways and it always looked hokey — and less frightening, somehow. I think it’s very effective now — the half armadillo, half hard-shell back; the pair of testicle-like lungs; and the real killer is that stinger tail.”

Dicken’s own idea of the Facehugger differed from the creature that was portrayed in the film — the appearence of which he found too ‘delicate’. He explained: “my own concept of the Facehugger was something a little more spiny, with claws – something you couldn’t get ahold of even to try and pull it off. Self-preserving, in fact. To me, those long skinny fingers just didn’t give the feeling that this thing had the strength to really cling onto someone’s face like that. But that’s how Ridley wanted them — thin and smooth. I’d also liked to have seen some kind of barbed fingertips rather than the smooth human-type nails they wanted.” Giger also tried to build his own version of the Facehugger, but could not finish it in time — considering the estabilished schedule for the construction of the adult Alien. He recalled: “it was going to be very smooth and slimy, with eight long, fine, but very strong fingers. The main difference was that mine was going to be translucent. I wanted the inside to be visible because it had a sort of skeleton under the skin. After I’d started building the two small ones, though, the producers stopped me because they were worried that I wouldn’t get the big one finished in time.”

Upon Scott’s approval of the final design, construction of the Facehugger began. Dicken first sculpted the creature in plasticene. “I made a plaster cast,” Dicken recalled “and a slush rubber mold which I strengthened with fiberglass on the underside, ending up with a hollow crab-like shell. Inside was a metal spine going down the middle, with little metal sections on it to hold the articulated fingers. All eight fingers were cast from the same mold and were latex-covered, with aluminum armatures pinned at each joint so they would be absolutely flexible. These were sprung closed under tension. Then, from the tip of each finger, there were wires going up the inside, so that when you pulled on
them, off-camera, the fingers would open and it could clip over the actor’s face. To help hold it on, I put little eyelets in the fingertips and we ran rubber bands between them – under the head where they wouldn’t show. The tail was just a flexible cord covered with foam and latex.”

Dicken built a total of five Facehuggers; a completely articulated hero Facehugger, one for shots of its underside, and three stunt Facehuggers with poseable fingers. The hero Facehugger’s tail was puppeteered with a piano wire for the scene where it coils around Kane’s neck. Scott recalled: “you could leave that thing sitting on his face all day and nothing much would happen, but that tail gave it punch — made it alive. And articulating it was dead easy. We just covered the tail with vaseline to make it slippery, fastened a piano wire to the tip of it, and then pulled from below so it slid across his neck and tightened at the same time.” The Facehugger’s lung appendages were also fitted with simple bladder mechanisms to simulate its breathing. The creature was the second stage to go before cameras — for its reveal in the infirmary.

The ‘underside’ Facehugger, used for the brief autopsy sequence, was actually filled with real animal entrails. Scott explained that “you can’t build something like that. You could spend months on it, and it still wouldn’t look right; so I sent a guy off to the market every morning and he’d come in with plastic containers of offal and lungs and some stuff we call Nottingham lace — which is the covering of a pig’s tongue that they peel off like skin, and people eat it. It is beautifuL though. In fact, it’s so beautiful, it almost looks artificial. We also brought in bucketfuls of stuff from the local fishmonger. Then we had it cleaned and steamed — it was like an operating theater in there. Roger Dicken designed a rubber casing for it, and then Patti Rodgers would place the stuff in there and arrange it. She kept coming in while we were shooting saying ‘what do you think of this?’ — and if there were strangers on the set, we’d get some pretty amusing reactions. The most interesting results, we found, came from arranging miniature squid, thinly sliced, with mussels and clams and two large oysters. Just staring at it was enough to make audiences uncomfortable, and that’s what I wanted.”

When Kane inspects the egg, the Facehugger sprints towards his helmet. This sequence was one of the last to be filmed in the production. “I wanted it to happen so fast you could never really see it, like a snake when it attacks,” Scott said. “I wanted great violence; and I wanted it totally, absolutely lethal. That’s the whole reality of a creature like that. To get the effect I wanted, we placed an explosive charge inside the egg. Over that we put about forty feet of pig’s intestines — connected to an airline but deflated and coiled around the top of the opening. Then we laid Nottingham lace around the sides. When the explosive charge went off, we hit the air at the same time and the intestines went whoosh! If you run the film through slowly, you can see the intestines billowing out like delicate gossamer pipe with beautiful markings. At [the proper] speed, though, it’s lightning-fast. There are actually four very specific cuts in there, but it all happens so quickly the effect is almost subliminal.” Allder added: “we mounted the egg upside down on the stage, and then shot up into it. After all the intestines and membranes were blown out, we got a Facehugger which was made of rubber and fitted it to a glove. Then we had a guy climb up on top and thrust his hand straight down through the base of the egg and actually wrap the Facehugger right around the lens of the camera. Everything was so fast, though, that when the two pieces were cut together it looked like one continuous motion.”

The highly acidic properties of the Alien’s blood are discovered when Ash tries to sever one of its legs, only for a flow of blood to fall on the floor and begin corroding through the Nostromo’s decks. For the initial cut, “one of the fingers had a special joint where you could unclip it and take it off,” Dicken said. “For the acid scene, I made about six replacement fingers with tubes inside so we could cut into them with the laser and the acid would run out.” Dicken initially proposed a specially treated metal girder that would corrode upon contact with water; ultimately, however, the task of creating the acid effect was assigned to special effects supervisor Brian Johnson. He elaborated: “we had sections of the deck made out of styrofoam and painted silver; then we produced a mixture of chemicals that actually was pretty corrosive — you wouldn’t want to get it on your skin, you know.” The mixture was in fact mainly composed of  chloroform, acetone, cyclohexylamine and acetic acid, with other compounds in minor quantities. “That stuff just ate right through the styrofoam, but it left enough color behind so it really looked like metal,” Johnson said.

For more images of the Eggs and Facehugger, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Prologue: Alien, Dan O’Bannon’s Cosmic Horror
Next: Part Ib: Alien, the Chestburster

THE ALIEN, SECOND PHASE: Once the Alien (First Phase) has attached itself to the face of a victim, it lays eggs in the victim’s stomach, and the egg grows into the Alien (Second Phase). This is a small creature which bites its way out of the victim’s body.

-Dan O’Bannon, original letter to H.R. Giger

With the Facehugger dead, the crew of the Nostromo has one last dinner before returning to cryosleep; unexpected to them (besides Ash), a creature violently erupts from Kane’s chest. To first conceive the appearence of the baby creature, Scott directed Giger at Francis Bacon’s painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). Giger told Cinescape: “Bacon did a crucifixion in [1944], and there is a kind of beast in it that has a head that is only a mouth — Ridley said he wanted something like that. It was logical; this beast has to come out, to chew and claw its way out suddenly, unerringly.” The first concepts, however, proved to be underwhelming; Giger himself was unsatisfied, labeling them in retrospective as “chickens without feathers.” Dicken, who had been assigned the construction of the Chestburster, was also less than impressed. “To me, it looked like a plucked turkey,” he said, “a veined, repulsive-looking thing with fangs. I said: ‘you want me to make this? It looks like a turkey.’ And they said, yes, that’s what they wanted. Well, there wasn’t a need for anything very complicated, since all it had to do was force its way out of the chest and then flop onto the table; so we figured the best approach was to build it as a hand puppet, about three times life-size so I could get my hand up into the neck. Obviously, you couldn’t get something the size of a large turkey out of a human chest, but initially they were going to cheat it somehow.”

Giger’s “plucked turkey” Chestbursters.

Regardless, Dicken built an initial version of the Chestburster and presented it to the filmmakers for a test. “Dicken reproduced [Giger’s first design] very faithfully,” Scott recalled. “The problem was that what looked great on paper didn’t in actuality. Dicken normally works everything like a glove puppet, and so he brought this thing in and propped it on his knee. And while he was talking, he kept moving the head around so the bloody thing kept looking back and forth across the room — from Gordon Carroll to me, and then up his nose. The whole thing was entirely comical — it looked like some kind of a plucked, demented turkey. I was frankly terrified at the thought of getting a giggle at this time in the film, so we ditched the whole concept and started again.” The creative team had to redesign the Chestburster in an appearence that would be appropriately frightening for the scene, which had to be a key moment of the story.

“I wanted more of a biological link between the baby, which is what we were really designing, and what the final creature would look like,” Scott said, “and I wanted it to be a very smooth object. The other was all wrinkled and ancient-looking, like some malevolent Muppet. And when it came out, I wanted it to look very rude — and totally carnivorous.” Dicken elaborated some designs in plasticene in his workshop; concurrently, Giger also tried to envision a new Chestburster. O’Bannon commented: “he was trying to do all of them. He was, of course, working on the big one; but on his workbench he was also well underway on both the face-hugger and the chest-burster. They were exquisite pieces of sculpture, too. Better, I think, than [those] that were used in the film. Especially the Chestburster. Giger really gave that thing a nasty mouth. It was much larger in proportion to the rest of the body, and the teeth were like oversized fangs, fully extended — a set on both top and the bottom. I mean he was building something designed for biting its way out — those fangs looked like they would go through a piece of steel!”

Giger’s unused Chestburster design.

Ultimately, however, it was one of Dicken’s designs that was used as a base for the final portrayal of the Chestburster. “Ridley ran over to Roger’s house one day to have a look at it,” O’Bannon said. “It had a head that was pretty much a miniature version of the big one, and kind of an elaborate body with legs – like little dinosaur legs. It was just in clay at that point; and Ridley looked it over a bit and then reached out and pulled off the legs. Then he wadded up little pieces of clay like dolphin flippers and stuck them on either side behind the head, and said, ‘there — that’s it.” Also removed from the design were the black, bulbous eyes based on Giger’s early concept paintings of the adult creature.

The final Chestburster, with skin just out of the mould.

“The final thing ended up looking sort of porpoise-like,” Dicken said of the Chestburster. ” The head of the big Alien with a tail on the end was literally all it was.” Construction of the model for the sequence it stars in proved complex, due to the slender anatomy of the creature — which Dicken could not build as a hand puppet. “What I came up with was a curved metal rod which ran down into a hand grip,” he said. “About halfway along — up where the neck would have been if it’d had one — was a flexible steel spring, and then the rest of the rod went up into the head area and then down underneath the jaw to give it strength. I ran a wire, through a series of eyelets, along the whole length of the rod and then down into a ring which fit around my finger; so when I pulled on the ring, the spring would make the front section bend over. On the front section, also, were the mechanisms for making the jaw open and the little arms move out. These were just activated by air. I ran little air tubes through the model and connected them to rubber squeeze bulbs, so all you had to do was squeeze one to activate the mechanism. There was also a little bladder inside the thing’s chest so it could breathe, and a bladder on each side of the head so the ‘gills’ would pulse. Then I ran another tube up to the mouth and connected that to a bottle of fluid, so that when you squeezed the bottle, saliva would run out. The teeth I made out of epoxy, and they were then metalized in a centrifugal vacuum machine. Everything was really very simple. What was difficult was getting it all to fit in this narrow sausage shape. It was also very difficult to hide anything. Normally, if you’ re working with a dinosaur, or something like that you can slash him open and stitch him back up- you’ve got all kinds of scales and folds to conceal whatever you’ve done. But this thing was so smooth, with hardly any detail that if you made a mistake it was damn near impossible to get inside it again without destroying it.”

A red smear of blood BLOSSOMS on the chest of Broussard’s tunic.

Their eyes are all riveted to Broussard’s CHEST as the fabric of his tunic is ripped open, and a horrible nasty little HEAD the size of a man’s fist pushes out.

Everybody SCREAMS and leaps back from the table. The cat spits and bolts.

The disgusting little head lunges, comes spurting out of Broussard’s chest trailing a thick, wormlike tail — splattering fluids and blood — lands in the middle of the dishes and food on the table — and scurries away while the men are stampeding for safe ground.

-Dan O’Bannon, Alien draft, 1976

The Chestburster was actually the first of the three Alien stages to be filmed. It demands birth in a gruesome sequence, where the creature erupts from its host and scuttles away. The set-up included cutting a hole through the dinner table, and positioning John Hurt at an angle (“in a pretty uncomfortable position,” according to O’Bannon) so that only his head and arms would be visible. A fake fiberglass chest was constructed for the key shot of the creature emerging, blended into Hurt’s neck and arms, and bolted into place. Dicken initially wanted to perform the bursting himself, maneuvering the hero Chestburster from under the table; however, Scott wanted a quick initial burst — not achievable by simple hand puppeteering — so the special effects crew decided to build a mechanical effect, and a specifically designed stunt Chestburster along with it. “I made a slush rubber cast of the Chestburster — without the tail — and filled it up with plaster and put a metal rod in it, which had a hole on the bottom so they could bolt it into something. There was also a loose lower jaw with a pin through it, and a piece of wire to pull it open.” Allder designed and built a cantilever device that would thrust the stunt Chestburster upwards with enough force; the mechanism was inserted under the cutaway table, between the underside of the fake chest and Hurt’s actual body beneath. Once the creature was rigged, the chest was filled with actual animal organs, and fitted with hoses that would pump out spurts of artificial blood. To cover this set-up, a chemically-prepared white shirt was used, in order for it to withstand one punch from the mechanism before breaking. A total of six crewmembers was needed for the sequence — one operating the device, two holding Hurt in place, and two operating the blood pumps.

Besides Hurt, the rest of the cast was not allowed on set, and had only read about the sequence in the scripts. “What happened on the table was, after all, just an effect,” Scott said, “and we could reproduce it as many times as we needed to get it right. It was simply a matter of fiddling with it and shooting it again and again and again until it was perfect. The reactions to it were going to be the most difficult thing. If an actor’s just acting terrified, he never quite goes over the top and you don’t get that genuine look of raw animal fear. What I wanted was sort of a hardcore reaction, and I thought it best to give the actors an edge by not familiarizing them totally with what was going to happen. So when we started the scene, all three cameras were on the actors rather than the table.” About four takes of the scene were taken due to technical issues on the shirt (which, unexpectedly, also needed cuts to be broken through).

Once the actual bursting was filmed, the air ram mechanism was removed, and Dicken operated the hero Chestburster animatronic from under the table. He recalled: “that was quite an experience. I was in overalls and goggles; there were air hoses and blood lines running all over; and John Hurt was kind of half-crammed in there. too- so we were all legs and feet and kicking each other in the teeth . I worked the pistol grip and the jaw, and various effects guys helped out with the appendages and the saliva and all. Forcing it through the prelacerated shirt wasn’t a problem at all because it had the metal armature running through it.” After an additional emerging shot, Hurt was removed from his position — as the following shots were close-ups of the Chestburster — allowing Dicken more freedom to puppeteer the creature. The Monster scuttles away from its gruesome birth site, something allowed by the central slit in the table. Dicken explained: “the table was a circular one, slit through the middle; and they raised one half up a couple of inches camera-side so they could shoot from a low angle without the gap being seen. I was lying on my back on a trolley underneath holding the Chestburster up through the crack; and then during the take, they’d just whip the trolley across the floor. The original tail was hanging straight down through all this. What you saw was another one I had made up which was fitted with a piece of polythene tubing, and then just simply tied around the bottom of the model and around my wrist. Effects technician Allan Bryce connected the tube up to a compressed air bottle and when the air was turned on, the tail thrashed about as the creature made its exit, knocking over cups and food containers placed along its path.” Scott originally intended to show the Chestburster slithering away, leaving a trail of Kane’s blood and pieces of innards — but had to drop filming such sequence due to a lack of time in the shooting schedule.

For more images of the Chestburster, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Part Ia: Alien, the Egg and the Facehugger
Next: Part Ic: Alien

THE ALIEN, THIRD (MATURE) PHASE: Having left its victim, the Alien promptly grows to man-size, whereupon it is terrifically dangerous. It is very mobile, strong, and capable of tearing a man to pieces. It feeds on human flesh. This creature should be a profane abomination. Our producers have suggested that something resembling an over-sized, deformed baby might be suffieciently loathsome. In any event, we wish you to feel free to create your own design.

-Dan O’Bannon, original letter to H.R. Giger

The Chestburster rapidly grows into the adult Alien, the embodiment of the primeval fears of the Unknown — a living nightmare. The creature, nicknamed by the crew ‘Big Chap’ and ‘Big ‘Un’, was the first concern of the filmmakers, and expectedly had the longest design phase in the entire production. “When you take on a subject like this, after the initial flush of excitement, the problem of what the hell it’s going to look like suddenly starts hanging over you like a thundercloud,” Scott said. “How do we do the beast in its various forms? We had a similar problem with the alien transmission over what it should sound like. We never did sort that one out, and finally we decided to ditch it rather than have something hokey. But of course we couldn’t ditch any aspect of the Alien – one had to see it at some point or other. So I arrived in Hollywood with this misgiving and ended up going through about seven months worth of pre-production drawings without finding anything I really liked. There was the usual blob and clawed creature and all that sort of stuff, which wouldn’t have been right even if we’d done them well. I would have been embarrassed by them rather than proud. I had visions of screwing around with this for months; but as it happened, it worked out very quickly. Just after I got to Hollywood, Dan O’Bannon came in with a copy of Giger’s Necronomicon and said, ‘what do you think of this?’ I started leafing through it until I came to this one half-page painting, and I just stopped and said ‘Good God, I don’t believe it, that’s it!'” In particular, Scott was “impressed with [Giger’s] Necronom IV,” saying that it “conveyed both horror and beauty,” and labeling it as a “a painting of a demon with a jutting face and a long, extended, phallic-shaped head. It was the most frightening thing I [had] ever seen. I knew immediately that here was our creature. [That painting] was the basis for the Monster.”

Necronom IV, the starting point of the Alien design.

Giger recalled: “in the beginning we had no idea what the Alien should look like. In most horror movies, the Monster looks very unbelievable and sometimes ridiculous – and once you see it, the film is over because it looks just like a man in a suit. Ridley Scott and I didn’t want this. We wanted a very unusual Monster — a believable one — and Ridley planned to show it only in little bits, detail by detail so it wouldn’t be given away from the beginning.” Initially, the filmmakers considered portraying the Alien through complex special effect techniques such as stop-motion and elaborate animatronics — but neither budget nor production time allowed such methods to be employed.

It was decided to create the Alien as a suit worn by a performer. Scott initially wanted a feminine creature that would actually be played by a woman. “I remember one of the tallest models,” Powell said, “and quite a well known model of the time, was this woman called Verushka; she came in, and well literally there she was in a little pair of knickers and we asked her to crouch down — Ridley had this idea that it would be like a sort of praying mantis, and the way when you crouch down, the knees are impossibly high like a grasshopper.” The production crew was however unable to find a tall enough woman, and the concept was ultimately dropped. Scott also briefly considered creative variations on the standard creature suits — including using multiple contorsionists in a single costume. “I had a guy come into my office,” he recalled, “who ran around on his hands with his head tucked in and his feet stuck out. He looked like some strange sort of crab. He ran all over the top of my desk, and then hopped off on his hands and scuttled across the floor. It was amazing, but he was limited in what he could do. I even brought in a whole family of contortionists with the idea of taking an adult contortionist and then somehow carefully strapping two very small children, who were also contortionists, onto him in various ways. You can imagine if you did that, and then covered them all with some sort of a suit, you’d get a very strange-looking object. It could really scare the shit out of you coming down a corridor.”

“Finally, we decided to make a very elegant creature,” Giger explained, “quick and like an insect. Ridley Scott had an old photo of Leni Riefenstahl with a very tall Nubian; and he was impressed with that, so we decided to make a suit for a tall, very thin man. Ridley still loved the Necronom in my book and wanted something like it, which was nice for me because I could use my own designs and had not to put some body’s else’s work into my own style.” Ultimately hired as the performer inside the Alien suit was Bolaji Badejo, a Nigerian art student. Scott told Cinefantastique Online: “we started with a stunt man who was quite thin, but in the rubber suit he looked like the Michelin Man. So my casting director said, ‘I’ve seen a guy in a pub in Soho, who is about seven feet tall, has a tiny head and a tiny skinny body.’ So he brought Bolaji Bodejo to the office. I said, ‘Do you want to be in movies?’ and he said, ‘sure.’ And he became the Alien.” Bolaji prepared for the role with mime classes. He was not, however, the only suit actor chosen for the film: Eddie Powell portrayed the Alien in the scenes of Brett’s death and Dallas’ abduction, and Roy Scammell played the climax sequence where the Alien is ejected from the Narcissus.

Bolaji Badejo in the Alien suit.

A life cast of Badejo was used as the starting point for the Alien maquette that would be the base for the suits. Initially, Dicken was assigned to the construction of the adult Alien, and tried to reproduce most faithfully the appearence of Necronom IV – which resulted in practical complications. “I set the [cast] up in my lounge and spent a few days building up muscles and tissues on it in clay,” Dicken said. “I even did a wire mesh and cardboard mockup of the head — which looked ridiculous, because in order to maintain the scale from Giger’s picture, the head had to be almost six feet long. It was just much, much too big to mount on a human form.” Giger was disheartened by the results, saying that “When I got to England, I saw the version of my large Alien and it looked terrible — like a dinosaur from Disneyland. I was very depressed because I don’t like to do a nice design and then have it turned into something awful.”

Dicken works on his rendition of the Alien.

Due to Giger’s disapproval of the designs, Dicken’s first — and ultimately only — attempts were rejected. As a result, he sent a letter to the producers, explaining that he could not — and would not — build the Alien. ”I’d already had enough hassles with the Chestburster and the Facehugger to know that I just wasn’t going to be able to come up with something workable in the amount of time I had left. So I ended up writing a letter to the production office and telling them that they’d better get somebody else to do the big one. Pandemonium set in, and they said I was letting the picture down. But I just told them I wasn’t going to give myself a nervous breakdown trying to create this damned thing in the time required and under those circumstances. If I’d been left to my own devices, perhaps — but not with all the continual changes and setbacks I’d come to expect after nearly three months of sweating blood over the smaller ones.”

Convinced that no one but him could really translate his Alien concept into a three-dimensional character, Giger took the task upon himself — not without difficulties. He recalled: “sculpting something is much more difficult than painting, because it has to look good from every angle. It’s even more difficult if the object has to move. My style of painting is a combination of art nouveau and technical stuff. I call it biomechanics — kind of a surrealistic mixture of biology and technology — and I wanted the Alien to have those same qualities. So I started out with kind of a statue of Bolaji, and directly over that I modeled the shape of the Alien in plasticene, with bones and tubes and lots of mechanical things. The head I built up from a real human skull using plasticene and flexible piping and stuff.” The sculpture of the head included a real human skull, in line with the concept of inheritance of traits from the Alien’s host. Also included among other details were real Snake ribs (for the Alien’s sternum and tail), real metallic pipes and portions of the engine of a Rolls Royce, and painted bottle caps.

One of Giger’s Alien designs, still with the black eyes.

The tongue.

At this stage, Giger decided to further elaborate his design, defined by Scott as “like a rather beautiful humanoid biomechanical insect.” Inherited from Necronom IV was the Alien’s elongated head, a trait that also inspired the inclusion of an inner jaw. “I liked very much the long head,” he explained, “but I kept thinking that a head this long needs to have a certain function. So I gave him a very long tongue, also with teeth — so there are tongue teeth and mouth teeth. I think it’s very impressive in the film to see the lips open and then the jaws, and then you see the tongue come out with its teeth — an escalation of movement.” The design of the tongue itself was based on Giger’s own concept of the Chestburster. Both the inner and outer jaws displayed human-like, metallic teeth. Giger told Cinefantastique: “those teeth are also in polyester. They were chrome-plated, so as to give them a metallic shine. I imagined them that was because for me the Monster is both human and mechanical — more human than mechanical, though. So giving him steel teeth was a way to convey this two-fold nature.”

One of the major changes applied to the design was the removal of the bulbous black eyes that were prominent in Giger’s early concepts. “In the first design for the Alien,” the Swiss artist said, “he had big black eyes. But somebody said he looked too much like a… what do you call it… a Hell’s Angel; all in black with the black goggles. And then I thought: It would be even more frightening if there are no eyes! We made him blind! Then when the camera comes close, you see only the holes of the skull. Now that’s really frightening. Because, you see, even without eyes he always knows exactly where his victims are, and he attacks directly, suddenly, unerringly. Like a striking snake.” As such, the eyes were replaced with a “translucent shell that covered the top of its head.” Also included in the final design were traits to make the appearence of the Alien stray from a basic humanoid form; those included the four back pipes and the “head rest” protrusion — also conceived to better balance the suit’s elongated head. Originally, O’Bannon wanted the pipes to grow out of the chest, but Scott ultimately chose to make them protrude on the back — much like in Necronom IV. The Alien’s tail was implemented to add more movement and life to the creature. Following a suggestion from O’Bannon himself, the Monster was also given two opposable thumbs on each hand.

Giger’s final Alien design.

Aided by two assistants, Giger sculpted the Alien starting from Badejo’s cast. The Alien suit was initially intended to be translucent, in a manner that would closely imitate Giger’s own painting style. “I agreed with Scott to make the Aliens translucent,” Giger said. “One should be able to see the skeleton, the blood circulatory system, the organs.” The Alien sculpture was thus cast in hot melt vinyl multiple times, but the material was not as resistant as the sequences required; ultimately, the idea was discarded, also due to a lack of time in the production schedule.

One of the test translucent suits.

Italian Maestro Carlo Rambaldi was assigned with the task of building an animatronic Alien head that would be used for close-ups of the creature. The artist would remain in England — where production was being held — for a number of weeks, before returning to his work on other film projects — and leaving one of his assistants Carlo De Marchis at helm. Based on the scripts and Giger’s artwork, Rambaldi elaborated an initial idea of the needed mechanisms. He said: “I figured the head would require seven different movements, so I proposed a series of mechanical joints and muscles activated by flexible cables. The front portion needed to pivot up and down and side to side, independent of the rest of the head. I wanted the lips to curl back; and of course, the mouth had to open and close. Inside, the tongue needed to move out and back, and its teeth had to open and close. And I also thought there ought to be a pulsating jugular movement at the throat.” Initially, Rambaldi wanted to build the entire suit — but due to a lack of time, it was decided that he would only build the animatronic head — with the rest of the suit built in the studio by a crew led by Eddie Butler.

Rambaldi’s animatronic head.

Rambaldi was sent a fiberglass cast of the Alien’s head as a starting point, and elaborated from there how the mechanisms of the animatronic should be included. “Since an actor had to wear the head it was very important to
make it as lightweight as possible,” Rambaldi elaborated. “I used fiberglass for the skull and moving parts, and aluminum inside for support. The tongue, for example, was fiberglass mounted on geared metal tracks and could extend about twenty centimeters – either very slowly or very fast. Each moving part was connected to a special sheathed cable- like hand brakes on a bicycle, only more flexible – which ran out through a hole in the base of the head. Normally, each moving part would require only a single cable, but the sideways movement of the head and the mechanism for the tongue required two opposing cables — kind of like reins on a horse. So there were nine all together. The cables were seven meters long and connected to hand-operated levers mounted on a wooden panel. By operating the levers in various combinations, a great many moves were possible.”

The fiberglass understructure of the Alien head was covered with polyurethane, cast by Ralph Cobos (one of Rambaldi’s assistants) from a plaster mould. The material employed a particular formula that had been perfected by Rambaldi himself — allowing it to be a quarter of an inch thick, and at the same time resistant and life-like. Cobos elaborated: regular polyurethane has two components — a base and a catalyst. Ours has seven. For some applications we might need more strength; for others we might want more elasticity. Since each additive controls a different variable, we can alter the characteristics of the polyurethane by varying its components. One of the things that makes Carlo’s figures so unique is that his polyurethane has a nice skin on it when it comes out of the mold. lt wrinkles like real skin and stretches like real skin. Regular polyurethane doesn’t have a skin at all — it’s just kind of spongy.”

Rambaldi and his crew built a total of three heads, and brought them to London. Two were fully articulated hero heads (one for back-up), whereas the third was a stunt head with only articulated lips. Upon arrival, the animatronic head had to be modified: the mechanisms functioned, but it needed an artistic revision. The independent movements of the front portion of the head were removed, and the face itself was tweaked; Giger initially found that “it resembled an ape” — an impression derived from minor alterations, made strictly to arrange the mechanisms inside the head. The animatronics were painted by Giger himself. Finishing touches included the replacement of the lips with transparent rubber, and the addition of chrome-plated teeth. The muscles and tendons of the Alien’s jaw were “made out of stretched and shredded latex contraceptives,” and the dome was cast in translucent vacuform plastic. The production crew also built three stunt Alien heads for long, elaborate shots of the creature that did not require close-ups.

David Watling was also concurrently assigned with the task of creating an animatronic Alien head (in case Rambaldi’s did not function properly) and an animatronic tail; both models, which were radio-controlled, did not fit the requirements for the sequences they had to be shot in. The tail  was lacklustre, and was immediately discarded. It was replaced with a simple tail model, puppeteered with wires. Regarding Watling’s Alien head, it was actually outclassed by Rambaldi’s — which was used throughout the film, in close-ups. “There was no call to use [Watling’s version]. Most of the Alien shooting was finally done pretty close up, and therefore the cable system of Rambaldi’s was much more practical. Remote control just isn’t as subtle as a hand-operated mechanism.” Scott was extremely impressed with the results: “normally you can’t stand to have the camera take a close look at things like this,” he said, “but it was so good I just did a huge close-up on it.” Rambaldi himself was satisfied of his work, but would have liked more focus on it in the film. “They use all the movements,” he said, “but the head cuts are so quick, and the action is framed so predominantly in extreme close-up, that frequently it’s impossible to tell what you are seeing! In my opinion, I gave the director 100 possibilities, and he used but 20.”

Rambaldi’s animatronic heads worked “wonderfully,” according to Giger, but needed to be combined with the proper amount of KY Jelly. “The cables coming out of the head were a bit of a problem,” Johnson said. “We had to dress those so you couldn’t see them and at the same time allow the maximum amount of flexibility. Also, we found that you could see the mechanism which operated the head. So that’s when the goo appeared — the goo covered up the mechanism. We rubbed the whole head with KY jelly and also had it oozing out of the mouth. We must have used gallons of that stuff, because it drips off slowly and you’re constantly replacing it.” As a result of the considerable use of KY Jelly, the paint scheme was constantly washed out of the creature; Giger had to repaint the Alien after each day of shooting.

The suits themselves presented some practical issues. The skin was mostly moulded in foam latex, and painted by Giger himself with an airbrush. The initial costume design was too rigid for a proper performance. “The first costume was so cumbersome that the actor couldn’t do a great deal of movement in it,” Johnson recalled, “and though Ridley never intended to be so explicit with the Alien that you could stare at it for minutes at a time and see everything, he did want it to be fairly flexible. He wanted the creature to be able to roll up in a ball and that sort of thing. Well, they couldn’t do any of that in the beginning — the costume was just too rigid — so there had to be considerable modifications.”

One of the Alien suits.

Butler ultimately devised three suits that would be assembled from a dozen separate components, and could be used each for different camera angles. Another suit was also built for Powell and Scammell. Though improved, the suits still did not allow the intended freedom of movement for the performer. O’Bannon told Fantastic Films: “unfortunately, the real grace was lost, because the suit proved to be very awkward to move in. The actor wasn’t able to make many moves in a graceful manner. Ridley was forced to stage around the physical awkwardness of it. But the visual appearance of power and grace was retained — quite striking.”

At one stage during filming, Scott wanted to add another layer of animation to the creature — by inserting a pocket filled with maggots inside the Alien’s head, simulating a writhing brain. “I wanted to have a kind of subtle movement in the creature’s brain,” he said, “so I thought maybe we could fill a pocket in the cranium with white maggots and let them crawl around in there. Even Giger went ‘eeyuk!’ at that one. But I decided to try it, so I had these huge tins of maggots brought in. We couldn’t make it work, though, because the heat from the lights would put the bloody things to sleep and they’d just lie there like spaghetti. We tried using Spanish fish, which look kind of like wireworms, but they went to sleep too.” Scott ultimately had to discard the idea.

Perhaps the most important among the discarded concepts was the so-called ‘Eggmorphing’ process, shown in a scene towards the end of the film — where Ripley finds Brett and Dallas, cocooned and slowly transforming into eggs. “I liked it because it was a brief way of explaining what had happened on the derelict, and what was now happening on the Nostromo,” Scott said. Dallas pleads Ripley to kill him, and she burns the nest down. Giger designed and built a wall set and cocoons (which he and Scott found in retrospective underwhelming) for the scene, which was filmed and initially part of the finished film. Tom Skerritt was (of course) replaced with a dummy in the sequence where Ripley burns the nest. Ultimately, Scott found that “it really killed the pacing,” and the scene was cut from the final film.

Filming the Alien proved to be complex. Hours of footage were shot, but were found to be underwhelming — and most of the times the actors could not perform the quick, agile and insect-like movements that Scott wanted. Production designer Michael Seymour said: “the Alien was an immensely elaborate and detailed piece of work, but we had to be very careful about how we shot it; and we had countless discussions about that, because in the end, if you held on it for more than a few seconds, it became just another man in a rubber Monster suit — and of course, that was unacceptable.” Allder further elaborated: “we were really quite limited with what we could do with the Alien. At one point, the script called for it to run up and down the corridors like a human being; but when we finally got the finished costume, we stayed late one night — at the end of a day’s shooting — just to see what it looked like in the sets and to shoot a few tests; and of course, we found it would look ridiculous to see this thing running around — it would give the whole thing away immediately.”

The suit was used in combination with a number of other stage effects; in the sequence of Brett’s death, the performer in the suit was suspended with a harness; most of the time, however, it was a restraint. Many sequences were heavily modified when compared to their original version; one example is Dallas’ abduction, as explained by Scott: “what I wanted was to have really huge air ducts — taller, in fact, than the corridors in the ship — so that when Dallas first sees it in there, it’s standing on the roof of this giant wind tunnel suspended upside down. Then I was going to have it roar down the tunnel toward him, running and jumping full-circle around the walls.” This concept was too impractical to achieve and was abandoned, in favor of the final version — where Dallas is abducted in a claustrophobic air duct.

In the film’s finale, Ripley escapes the destruction of the Nostromo aboard the Narcissus. What she does not know at first is that the Alien has actually hidden among the machinery. “Originally, we thought the Alien would be hiding in the closet in the lifeboat,” Shusett told Cinefantastique Online. “But then Ridley said, ‘can’t we beat that? Can’t it be somewhere [Ripley] and the audience can’t see it and it just emerges?’ So at the end of shooting every day, we changed the set around the Monster. He’d lay in there and we’d rebuild the set over and over. Every time, it looked like Mad magazine – you could see [the creature] was two feet away from her! The guy who played the Monster would lay there for hours and hours and we’d shoot it and look at it the next day and say, ‘this is stupid; we’ll never disguise it.’ The trick that really made it work was the [shape of the Alien’s] head. Finally, somebody got the idea: we’ll put an air vent that looks like its head above and below it, so when the hand comes out, it’s not coming from behind anywhere — he’s in the wall. We had just built that. We didn’t know if it worked. So Ridley said, ‘Let’s get the guy back in here.’ We yelled for him — and he was in the wall! We were shot with our own arrow — we jumped a mile! So we filmed it, and it worked perfectly.”

A dropped concept was a short life span of the Alien, in correlation with the excision of the eggmorphing scene. Scott elaborated in an interview with Fantastic Films: “I wanted a sense of a timeless, slightly decaying creature that, maybe, only has a limited life cycle of, maybe, four days like an insect.” In Alien: The Special Effects, he added: “I think it provided some explanation for the Alien’s killing spree — like a butterfly or an insect, it has a limited lifespan in which to reproduce itself.  It also helped explain why it didn’t attack Ripley in the Narcissus; its days were over.  Like a chameleon, it had found a protective corner in that ship and was working itself in there to die.” Scott also hinted at an alternative idea —  following which the Alien could metamorphose back to an egg, in a manner similar to how the Immortal Jellyfish is able to revert its growth pattern and return to its polyp stage. Scott told L’Ecran Fantastique: “I wanted the Alien to continually change shape. When it appears in the machinery at the end, it could very well be dying, finishing there its very limited life cycle — maybe even metamorphosing into a chrysalis, so that its physical volume decreases in order to return in the form of an egg and hibernate again.”

Originally, the storyboarded ending involved Ripley and the Alien getting ejected out of the Narcissus, with the former making her way back inside the ship and blasting the creature as it tries to enter one of the engines, disintegrating it once and for all. In the final version, Ripley shoots the creature with a harpoon gun. Scammell, in the Alien suit, was secured to a cord and dropped from the Narcissus set — which had been mounted upside-down — and then pulled up again, to simulate the Alien trying to find a way to enter from the engine (a full body shot the producers insisted upon). The performer was dropped again to portray the free-falling creature hit by the force of the Narcissus’ engines (lack of time and budget did not allow to convey the creature’s disintegration. The Alien is ultimately blasted away into space.

Giger ultimately commented on the experience and the creature: “I have worked on enough films now to realize that nothing may quite satisfy me the way the original Alien film collaboration did. There, I was given the freedom to do everything myself, from the design to the actual physical sculpting. I made myself a prisoner on that film and, in fact, that is what is necessary to allow for the fulfillment of the successful evolutionary process known as creature development and design.”

O’Bannon praised the Alien, saying that “I truly believe that that Monster in Alien is absolutely unique looking. I think that it is two strides beyond any Monster costume in any movie ever before; and some of them are goodies, like The Creature from the Black Lagoon, or This Island Earth – the bug with the exposed brain — some of those were terrific. I really think this is a step beyond. I don’t think that anybody’s seen anything like this.”

Special thanks to Valaquen and wmmvrrvrrmm, who have provided additional information for this article.

For more images of the Alien, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Part Ib: Alien, the Chestburster
Next: Part IIa: Aliens

Hans Ruedi Giger, the original Alien designer, did not return to work on Aliens. None of the filmmakers involved in the project contacted the artist, whom at the time was attached as a creature designer to Poltergeist II. “we didn’t know exactly how long that commitment was, but we heard that he was busy,” director James Cameron said. “But honestly, I think that if we had really wanted to fight for him, we could have worked around it.” Giger himself recalled in The Alien Saga documentary: “I was a little depressed because nobody asked me to work on this film. I was in Los Angeles at the time working on Poltergeist II, and I asked around about Aliens. For me, it would have been the most logical thing to work on that film. I was very anxious to collaborate, but nobody called me. I’d much rather have done a second Alien than a second Poltergeist — because, naturally, I felt more related to Alien. Perhaps the Poltergeist II people wanted to keep me away from Aliens for fear of losing me. I inquired everywhere, but no one could or would inform me about it.”

Cameron, having already successfully collaborated with Stan Winston on The Terminator, hired the artist and his crew of Stan Winston Studio to bring the horde of StarBeasts to the screen. The creative team wanted the new Alien designs to adhere to the aesthetic estabilished by the first film, whilst also trying not to copy it in an uncreative manner. “My attitude on the Alien was to render unto Giger what was Giger’s,” Cameron told Cinefex, “but hopefully not limit myself too much in the process.” Winston himself said: “we tried to be as true to the original film as we could, without disallowing ourselves a little bit of artistic freedom to do things that we considered — if not improvements — something to keep your head above water, so you’re not just doing what was done before.” The special effects crew had at disposal some of the original models portraying all the stages of the Alien’s lifecycle — save for the Chestburster; those served as a base to create the new models for the film.

The Alien menace is actually visually introduced in the film when the Marines enter the Hive — composed of secreted resinous material. Similarly to the deleted Eggmorphing scene in the first film (which, at the time of Aliens, was simply excised and did not appear in any cut of the film) the Aliens pinned hosts to walls. Cameron explained: “the Alien structure provided an interesting opportunity for us to do a Gigeresque-type structure created biologically by the Aliens — much the way ants do when they cement the walls of their tunnels using saliva mixed with granules of rock and sand.”

A structure of otherwordly geometry, with swirling biomechanical shapes, the Hive was built as a massive ‘make-up’ for the Power Station set. It was sculpted in its various components in clay and then moulded in latex and fiberglass, depending on the specific piece. Production designer Peter Lamont explained: “We got two castings a day from each mold. Some were cast off in fiberglass and others were vacuformed. In all there were hundreds of pieces, most of which were painted by one of our scenic artists. We spent about three weeks on that while the power station was being cleaned up. Then we moved into the plant and started fitting these things into place. A team of painters had already gone through with I don’t know how many gallons of silver spray paint, so already it was starting to look not much like a power station. By the time we finished, it was really transformed. We had just three weeks to complete the work once we got inside. It was quite a chore. We started on the lower floor and were still working on the upper floor when production began. As Jim came up shooting, we were gradually retreating behind.” Most of the cocooned colonists were sculpted dummies with faces cast from various actors.

Building the miniature Hive.

When the Hive is introduced, the camera pans down the ceiling of the colony structure, encrusted with the resinous material. The sequence actually employs a miniature devised by Robert and Dennis Skotak, combined with forced perspective. Robert Skotak explained: “It would have taken forever to do that for real, not to mention the expense. So after thinking about it for a while, we decided the best way to do it would be with a hanging miniature. The way the shot was set up was that the actors would be very close, literally right on their heads underneath it — and then they’d kind of look around and walk back into the depth of the set. So what we needed to do was to continue the encrustation up above the actors, and also continue the pipe work and the scaffolding and the catwalks and everything else. The art department had gone to Acton and gotten all the measurements — where the lift was, where the pipes were, basically the whole floor plan. Then, to save time while the plant was being cleaned up, they reconstructed that section in plywood on L stage and built the cocoon mass over it in carved styrofoam. While it was there on the stage. Dennis and I set up a camera in a position we’d selected while at Acton and determined all the measurements we’d need for the hanging miniature and its supports. Then we ran some film through the camera of the beginning, middle and end of a tilt-down, made prints and traced on top of them where we wanted all the lines and pipes and everything to go. We gave that sketch to Steve Begg and he want up to Acton with Chrissy Overs, and together they finished the miniature on site.”

The miniature was 10 feet high and 12 feet wide, and had to be blended with the full-size Hive set beyond it. Dennis Skotak recalled: “there was a lot of last-minute adjustments to be made, mainly because the live-action set was not quite ready until a day or so before we started to shoot. Since a lot of what we had to do depended on the final set dressing and paint job, it was pretty crazy those last couple of days trying to get our blend just right.” Cameron decided to shoot the sequence in the fog, and as such vapour had to be emitted in lesser amounts on the miniature — since it was closer to the camera (an uniform emission would have caused “an inconsistency in aerial density”). Dennis Skotak continues: “it was a very delicate balance. We found as we were there that by adding the slightest amount of fill light on the miniature and then wetting everything down and blowing in just the right amount of fog that it all worked together. It was transitory, though. Cast and crew would be standing around waiting, and when everything looked right, we’d say: ‘that’s it! Shoot!’ — and everybody would go for it. The blend was there literally just for moments and then it would be gone. We were very fortunate that after all the struggle it worked.”

The Alien Eggs underwent cosmetic changes in proportions and animation — with their petals splitting and moving downward for their entire length. Rick Lazzarini devised the hero animatronic used when an Egg opens. “I used a cable stand-off on polypropylene technique,” he said, “to allow the petals, [or] lips to curl back an seal back up organically. The Hero Egg I worked on was used in a number of shots in the film.” Winston Studio also built several background Eggs — either closed, for Eggs with Facehuggers still inside, or open, for already hatched Eggs.

The Facehugger’s role was expanded upon compared to the first film. “In the first film, the Facehugger — after its leap onto John Hurt’s face — appears simply as an inert form,” Cameron said. “In Aliens, we changed that. Now it has the physical capability, should it miss on that first leap, to run around on its eight legs and leap again — which made for a really interesting sequence.” The design of the Monster was partially changed, with its underside inspired by Giger’s paintings — a vaginal opening with an extruding proboscis. Cameron explained: “the bits of oysters and stuff inside [the first Facehugger looked great, but I did want to see the disgusting thing that had been down the inside of Kane’s throat. You never see it in the movie, so I figured we’d gross everybody out. All of Giger’s designs have a really sexual undercurrent to them, and that’s what horrified people about the Alien as much as anything. It worked on a kind of Freudian subconscious level, and Ridley and Giger knew that and went for that. This film was never intended to be as much of a horror film as the first one, it was working on a different thematic level, but I still wanted to be true to some of those ideas, some of those design concepts.”

Winston added: “we took a few artistic liberties, nothing anyone’s even likely to notice. It was just one of those things. If you work on something long enough, you’re bound to find things you feel can be a little bit improved. Sculpturally, I think ours was a little more organic than the first one, although the first one was brilliant. The finger appendages on ours are a little more like fingers than they were on the original. We made the knuckles a little more knuckle-like and on the tips of the fingers we actually put nails. Basically we took that which we saw as the intent of the original design and carried it a step further. Also, we lengthened the tail by about six inches so we could do more work with it — wrapping it around necks and getting a whip-like action out of it.”

Alec Gillis sculpted the Facehugger, with the original models as reference — whereas Lance Anderson devised the internal mechanisms of the main models. Several different Facehugger with specific ranges of motion were built, and used depending on the requirements of the sequences. As opposed to the original creature’s actually organic underside, the new Facehuggers had foam latex skin. Various dead and decomposed Facehuggers were built for the first Hive scene and the Med Lab scene, and a dead Facehugger with real organic innards — including chicken skins — was devised for the autopsy sequence.

In the Med Lab scene, two of the Facehuggers in the stasis tubes are still alive. To portray the creatures suspended in water, the models were controlled by cables. “For the [Facehugger] that slams up against the inside of the tube,” Winston said, “the difficulty was that it had to be operated underwater. The tube had to have a water-tight seal, but we had to be able to move in and out with our cables. Getting the tail to whip around in a confined space and underwater was a major challenge. We tried various things such as air pressure and water pressure, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, Ray Lowell came up with a spring-loaded tail that was cable-operated. Pulling on the cable would curl the tail up very tightly and then releasing it would allow it to whip open. At the same time, two other cables moved the base of the tail in a 360-degree axis so that it would pivot around while the tail itself was whipping. It worked beautifully.”

The two Facehuggers are released by Burke in the Med Lab. In this key sequence, several models were employed, including a fully articulated hero Facehugger. “Lance worked out most of the finger mechanisms before we left for England,” Winston said, “then, after we got over there, the tail whipping action and the extruding tongue elements were added, along with some fine-tuning of the controls. Everything worked on that one, requiring something like nine operators. For scenes where it’s crawling up the table, we built another one that was basically the same except that it didn’t have the tongue element within the body. Then Ian Rolph worked on a third one that had just the finger articulations. That was to help it scurry along and turn around on the wall before leaping off. We also made a series of floppy Facehuggers that had articulated fingers, but the fingers were left loose so the creatures could be thrown around like you’d throw a dummy off a cliff. Some of those were also used in the scenes where the Facehuggers are blown up. It’s amazing how some really good dynamics came out of stuff as simple as that. We’d be wondering what sort of fancy doodad to come up with for a particular shot and Jim would say, ‘let’s just make a bunch of dummies — we’ll throw them and blow them up.’ And for quick cuts that worked.”

Building the scuttling Facehugger.

One of the Facehugger animatronics was devised to scuttle around on the floor. Winston recalled: “I wanted to do a pull-toy type of thing, where we would literally pull it across the floor and a wheel would turn underneath or something and cause the legs to move. In a way, that’s pretty much what we ended up doing; but at the start we couldn’t quite figure out how to do it, so we got off on a few tangents.” Ultimately, Cameron was inspired by his earlier work on Piranha II. Winston continues: “Finally, Jim called me from England and said: ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of this, Stan, but I did this thing for Piranha II, where a fish was pulled through the water over a wire and we had a little mechanism inside to make the tail wiggle.’ So, working from that idea, he drew out a little design of what he thought the insides could be for the Facehugger, sent it over here, and Rick Lazzarini proceeded to make it work — which was quite a job since there were still an awful lot of problems to overcome. The Facehugger was on a wire that wrapped around a rubber-surfaced gear on the inside and was held taut by two operators on either end. Pulling the Facehugger along that wire would cause the gear to move which in turn would move other smaller gears connected to the legs. The gearing mechanism turned out to be very intricate, but the simple brilliance of the idea was that there was a correlation between how fast you pulled the Facehugger and how fast the legs would go. If you pulled it fast, the legs would move fast; if you pulled it slow, the legs would go slow.” Lazzarini himself added that “it could even ‘jump’ if the front operator moved his end of the cable up and down rapidly.”

An early dream sequence portrays Ripley’s nightmare, where she sees the Chestburster pushing itself through her chest. “It’s actually a wonderful effect,” Winston said. “She pulls her top up and you see her whole body stretch as the Chestburster pushes out from the inside. For that particular gimmick, Sigourney was on a slant board under the bed with a duplicate appliance body on top and an operator underneath pushing the Chestburster up. It was particularly effective because anyone who’s seen the first film knows exactly what it is, but it never actually bursts through. Tom Woodruff was largely responsible for that effect.”

When the Marines first enter the Alien Hive, Dietrich discovers one of the colonists still alive. The cocooned woman is however rapidly killed by the creature erupting violently from her body — the Chestburster. Winston commented in Superior Firepower: The Making of Aliens: “The Chestburster in the original Alien was one of the most shocking and wonderful effects in film history. We had to repeat it, but we had to do something a little different.” The design’s head and snout were partially altered, but the most prominent change was the addition of two developed arms — a trait originally considered by Roger Dicken for the original Chestburster. What remained in the final creature for the first film was a sculptural suggestion of arms at the sides of its small torso. Tom Woodruff, part of the crew, recalled: “the thing we were noticing  in the original sculpture was there was an indication [that] there were to be little arms on the thing, and I wasn’t really aware of them in the film.” Alec Gillis, part of the crew, added: “[Cameron felt that] it was a bit too larval, a little too disconnected from what it would later become.”

Adding the Chestburster’s teeth.

A Chestburster with arms would be able to help its eruption from the host’s chest — and would additionally be able to crawl on the Hive’s walls. Winston elaborated further: “the only thing we added to the Alien Chestburster was a pair of tiny little arms that folded up very tightly against the body. We thought the Chestburster ought to have them to help pull itself free — and, after all, the big one it grows into has arms. To mantain continuity, we made our Chestburster look exactly like the original when it first emerges. Then these little arms come out and work. Of course, the scene and the moment are so dramatic that only the most discerning eye will even notice, but we thought they ought to be there.”

“For the Chestburster scene,” Winston recalled, “we built the set so that the woman — Barbara Coles — was leaning slightly forward, cocooned between a couple of pillars. The lower part of her torso — from the waist down — was a fiberglass duplicate of her body surrounded by all this cocoon stuff. She could thus lay right up into that form and the upper part of her body would be real and the lower part would be fiberglass. That was the configuration at first, when she speaks. Then, for the scene where the Chestburster comes out, she was on a slant board with a foam rubber appliance from the neck down.”

Out of the mould.

The actual Chestburster was sculpted by Tony Gardner, and portrayed by two distinct puppets. The first model was used to actually burst through the colonist’s chest; Bill Sturgeon elaborated and built the mechanisms of the ramming Chestburster. “It had a very strong metal structure and cables that were used to provide its various movements,” Winston said. Three joints in its waist allowed it to move, achieving a crawling motion. “We were literally able to punch it through like a punching rod,” Richard Landon, creature effects coordinator, said. “[It came] through the foam latex skin and the t-shirt that [the colonist] was wearing, with a lot more energy than the John Hurt Chestburster from the first film.” Meeting an issue similar to the set-up for the first film, the crew had to film multiple takes of the bursting sequence, as the pre-distressed t-shirts did not tear appropriately until the last take.

The second animatronic, a fully articulated hero model, was developed by Steve Norrington. “That one had even more life than the first,” Winston said, “mainly because it didn’t have to push through anything, so it didn’t have to be as strong.” The puppet featured multiple layers of vertebrae-like discs, through which cables ran — allowing a total of four directions of motion for each segment. Cable actuated rods for the arms and a full jaw opening mechanism were also included. “For the last scene,” Winston said, “we built a complete duplicate of the actress in her death position — head, body, everything — which we then put into the set. At the same time, we replaced the original Chestburster with the one Steve Norrington had made and had it writhing around and really going crazy. The movement was stupendous — the little sucker was really alive!” To the dismay of Winston’s crew, however, the entire set — including the Chestburster — had to be torched.

ANGLE ON WALL as something begins to emerge. Dimly glimpsed, a glistening biomechanoid creature larger than a man. Lying formant, it had blended perfectly with the convoluted surface of fused bone. The troopers don’t see it.

-James Cameron, Aliens script draft, 1985

With the death of the Chestburster, the Hive awakens. “I think if you can do one, you can do any number,” Cameron explained. “Anyone who’s been through the process of creating a creature effect, or a character that’s sculpted in clay and molded and blown and painted or whatever, knows that to make one takes six months and to make two takes six months and a couple of extra days. I’m exaggerating slightly, but there’s an economy of scale there. It does create additional problems when you’re shooting, though. All the things that can go wrong with one creature go wrong five times as often with five creatures. On the other hand, you have times as much to look at so your attention is a bit divided.”

In the original story treatment for Aliens, Cameron included both the Alien Warriors (“my term for the single adult seen in Alien,” according to Cameron) and a new Alien caste among the horde — the ‘Drones’ — whose role was to excrete resinous material to build the Hive. “The Drone is a small albino version of the Alien creature,” the original treatment reads. “Where the Warrior has a set of striking teeth within its head, the drone has an excreting probe, like an organic stucco-gun [sic].” The concept was mantained in early drafts, but dropped in further drafts, and was not even explored in any conceptual designs.

In the final film, the Alien horde is represented by the Warriors — which adhered to the originally estabilished anatomy for the creature; the filmmakers were creatively constrained by the fact it had been shown in its entirety in the climax of the first film. Winston elaborated: “I loved Alien, it was probably my favourite horror movie of the decade. But if there was anything that I was disappointed in, it was at the very end when the Alien gets blown out of the ship and you realize at last that what you’ve been waiting to see all this time is simply a man in a suit — a great suit, but a suit nonetheless. I found that very disheartening in the movie, and even more disheartening going into Aliens knowing that millions of people had seen this thing and therefore knew exactly what the Alien looked like. Our hands were tied — we had to be true to the original.”

Regardless, the filmmakers allowed themselves cosmetic changes to the Alien anatomy. The most prominent example was the removal of the Alien’s signature translucent dome on its head, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Cameron recalled: “on the original Alien, there was a translucent cowl covering the whole top of the head that looked kind of like a porpoise back. We planned to do the same thing with ours, and to that end Stan had Tom Woodruff sculpt up a ribbed, bone-like understructure that would fit underneath and be slightly visible through the cowl. When it was finished, they gave it a real nice paint job and I took a look at and said, ‘hey, this looks much more interesting the way it is.’ So we ditched the cowl and decided that this was just another of Aliens — slightly mutated.” A later explanation — initially suggested by David R. Larson on an issue of Starlog, and approved by Cameron — portrays the differences as results of an aging process. From a practical standpoint, the frenetic actions that were to be performed by the Alien suits represented a constant danger for the domes to receive consistent damage. “Jim just wanted to remove [the dome],” Gillis said, “thought it would be a hassle. He was afraid of it cracking or it having to be replaced — we’d have to cut and switch the dome.” The design of the ridges was actually based on the patterns that Giger had painted on the sides of the original Alien’s underdome structure.

Winston’s sketch of the Alien hand.

The removal of the dome implied that the Alien’s skull would be exposed; to mantain what Winston called “the Alien’s eyeless menace,” the human-like skull portion was smoothed over and painted with darker tones. Traces of it are still present, in the form of small indentations in the front of the Alien’s head — detectable upon close inspection. Other changes were strictly made to distance the appearence of the Aliens from “the man in a costume look of the original.” Those include the Aliens’ hands, whose fingers were greatly elongated. “We’ve redesigned the hands so that they are longer than original,” Winston said, “the fingers are a little bit longer — again, we took certain licenses to get away from the human look of a hand in a glove; and then we’ve developed articulated mechanical hands for close-ups, which do things that a person’s hand in a glove couldn’t do!” Interestingly enough, the sixth digit (corresponding to the double opposable thumb) was removed. The first digit of the Aliens’ feet was also modified and designed to grow at an angle, a trait included for them to convincingly climb walls. The rest of the changes amounted to simple cosmetic modifications. Winston explained: “It was all quite subtle. Details that were obviously tacked onto the first one — little hoses and things — we worked at in a sculptural way so that the organic and inorganic elements blended together better. It’s nothing you could ever detect on film — just the kind of thing you do to keep from getting bored duplicating exactly what someone else has already done.”

The original Alien suits were rather detailed, but were impractical: they could not perform the fast and agile movements that Ridley Scott wanted to portray. In order to avoid the same issues met by the filmmakers of Alien, Cameron and Winston decided to modify the structure of the suits — with an emphasis on movement rather than detail. “I thought that quick, blurring, lizard-like, or insect-like leap was more important than the physical, sculptural design of the suit,” Cameron said, “and I think that that’s a mistake that a lot of make-up and prosthetics people make when they’re dealing with this sort of thing is that they lavish all their attention on the sculptural detail –the surface texture, etc. — and they fail to realize that people need very few pixels of information to identify a human figure, and most of that identification is through motion. The way we walk is so ingrained in us mentally that you can see it just like that; so what we did was we actually redesigned the suit and made it simpler and less sophisticated and basically freed it so that it was much more flexible.”

Winston explained further: “what Jim wanted were movements that were sporadic and odd and strange, so that even though they were men in suits, they didn’t move like men in suits. So the big thing for us was to figure out a way to make these guys move and act in ways that were unlike a human — hanging from ceilings, hanging from wall to wall, doing insect-like moves and so on. The Alien in the first film could never have done these things because it was a full tubber suit and was very difficult to move around in. To avoid that problem, we had to come up with an alternative design that allowed for great freedom of movement. We did that by eliminating the rubber suit aspect altogether and using instead black leotards with lightweight foam pieces attached to them. If you were to look at them hanging on a rack, you’d think, ‘my God, those are just black leotards with pieces of stuff on them.’ But when you see them in the film and they’re wet and they’re slimy, you can’t tell the difference at all between ours and the original — and ours had complete freedom of movement.” The lighting and angles of the film also aided in the objective.

The Aliens were sculpted and constructed by Tom Woodruff, John Rosengrant, Julian Caldow, Nigel Booth, Lindsay McGowan and David Keen. Various stuntmen and dancers portrayed the Aliens in the various scenes featuring the creatures; none of them reached Bolaji Badejo’s towering height, and as such the filmmakers had to resort to camera trickery. Cameron recalled: “for Alien, they went out of their way to find a very tall person to be inside the suit — Bolaji Badejo was something like seven feet tall. We knew right off that we weren’t going to be able to find ten people who were seven feet tall. On the other hand, in studying Alien we found that there was really only one shot in the entire film that shows a direct scale relationship between the creature and a human being. In all the other shots, it exists separately in the frame.” In actuality, both the Alien and an actor are seen in the same shot in a number of sequences, but only one — the Alien raising in front of Lambert — offers a real sense of scale. Cameron continues: “we decided that rather than go for height, we’d go for people who had the right physique to be in the suits — the thinnest people we could find that had the strength to do the kinds of movements we wanted, such as hanging on wires and crawling upside-down and that sort of thing. In the end, they averaged under six feet tall, but by putting them on footstools or doing low angles on the creatures and high angles on the people looking at them we were able to create the impression that the Warriors were much taller than they actually were.” The Aliens’ tails were at times puppeteered with wires. For specific sequences, upside down sets were built and filmed with the performers in the Alien suits; the footage was then mirrored vertically, creating the illusion of the creatures scuttling on the ceiling.

The hero puppet.

One of the full stunt puppets.

The suits were actually combined with a large number of stunt and hero puppets with various purposes. The Winston Studio crew built several eight feet tall stunt puppets — whose purpose was to be damaged, shot at, or crushed. “Whenever we could,” Winston said, “we used one of the puppets because they were about eight feet tall and very thin — there was no way they could have been humans in suits. A couple of them were rod and cable actuated and we could put their arms into positions that a human just couldn’t get into. Others were floppy puppets that were just jointed so they could be thrown or crushed or blown up — whatever was needed.” Insert animatronic arms were also built. For the most detailed actions, a single, fully articulated hero puppet was constructed from the torso up. It featured articulated lips, head, neck and hands, whereas its arms were puppeteered with rods. To further differentiate the Aliens, the suits included hollow blade-like extensions on their arms, something absent in the stunt and hero puppets.

Giger commented on the Alien designs, saying that “I didn’t like the ribbed cranium of the Alien Warrior, although you couldn’t see the Aliens very much.” Otherwise the artist stated in a Cinefantastique interview that “It’s all beautifully done, everything, the designs and the way they’re executed.”

For more images of the Aliens, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Part Ic: Alien
Next: Part IIb: Aliens, the Alien Queen

Main Articles:

• StarBeast — Part IIa: Aliens
• StarBeast — Part IIb: Aliens, the Alien Queen

A PIERCING SHRIEK fills the chamber.

She turns. And there it is.

A massive silhouette in the mist, the ALIEN QUEEN glowers over her eggs like a great, glistening black Insect-Buddha. What’s bigger and meaner than the Alien? His Momma. Her fanged head is an unimaginable horror. Her six limbs, the four arms and two powerful legs, are folded grotesquely over her distended abdomen. The egg-filled abdomen swells and swells into a great pulsing tubular sac, suspended from a lattice of pipes and conduits by a web-like membrane, as if some vast coil of intestines was draped carelessly among the machinery.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

Before being attached to Aliens, and even before the production of The Terminator, director James Cameron wrote a treatment for a story called Mother, which featured “its own type of Alien Queen.” Although it would never eventually be greenlit, Mother was heavily influential on Cameron’s conception for Aliens. First written towards the end of 1980, the treatment fundamentally concerned “a female, genetically engineered creature attempting to ensure the survival of its young,” hence the title itself. The concept of the Alien Queen and the climax of Aliens itself was, in fact, an idea first conceived for Mother. Cameron continues: “in the final confrontation in Mother, a human in a ‘power suit’ — a utility exoskeleton that is a sort of cross between a fork-lift and a robot — fights the alien creature that I called the ‘Skraath’ or ‘Skraith’, a black six-limbed panther that I had previously created for another project called Labyrinth.”

Cameron’s concept of the Skraith. Whilst the idea had to be visually adapted for Aliens, this sketch would later serve as the starting point for the Thanator in Avatar (many other elements from that film were also extrapolated from the ideas for Mother).

In a deleted scene from the first film, the Alien’s life cycle had already been revealed — with the so-called Egg-morphing. Cameron, however, exploited on its excision to introduce his new idea. He explained: “If you follow Dan [O’Bannon]’s original concept, the closure of the original cycle was the human host turning back into a cocoon. I never found that to be very satisfying as it showed — when one had the facehugger attached, the embryo implanted, and when it burst out it killed that person. There was nothing going on with John Hurt in that respect. So there was a different version of it when the Alien grabbed Harry Dean Stanton and presumably put him into a cocoon. It’s certainly no great logical detour to assume that it might have used him as another host but I think it would be a bit odd that he turned into an egg. That’s something that would have been hard for the audience to swallow because it involved the transformation of the human host and although one can assume the Alien can metamorphose,  to have its biological properties take up residence in a human being and change it was going beyond the ground rules they set themselves. One of Alien‘s great attributes was that it set up a very weird biological process, but it has a basis in science fact all the way through, like the cycle of a digger wasp which paralyses its prey and injects an egg into the living body to mature. There’s a validity in all of that, but I dispensed with it because we never saw that in the film anyway. Had it appeared in the film I wouldn’t have violated any logic turbulence.”

Without the Egg-morphing sequence (which would be reintegrated in the Director’s cut of Alien decades after the production of Aliens), the original film did not explain how the Eggs in the Derelict spacecraft came to be. Cameron thus elaborated the Queen’s role in The Winston Effect: “that adult [Alien] form — one of them, anyway — couldn’t possibly have laid the thousand or so eggs that filled the inside of that Derelict ship. So, working from that image — acres and acres of these quite large eggs, two and a half to three feet tall — I began focusing on the idea of a hierarchical structure where the central figure is a giant Queen, whose role is to further the species.” The director explained further in a letter to Starlog: “Extrapolating from entomology (ants, termites, etc.), an immature female, one of the first to emerge from hosts, grows to become a new Queen, while males become Drones or Warriors. Subsequent female larvae remain dormant or are killed by males… or biochemically sense that a Queen exists and change into males to limit waste. The Queen locates a nesting spot (the warmth of the atmosphere station heat exchanger level being perfect for egg incubation) and becomes sedentary. She is then tended by the males as her abdomen swells into a distended egg sac.”

James Cameron’s first Alien Queen concept.

Since the integration of the Queen concept in Aliens‘ script, Cameron had a precise idea of what the Mother creature’s appearence should eventually be. Winston told Cinefex: “Right from the start, Jim had a concept of the Alien Queen in the back of his head. In fact, when we first began talking about the project he showed me the beautiful rendering he had done of it which I liked immediately.” Heavily influenced by Giger’s biomechanical aesthetic, Cameron envisioned a tall, proportionally thin and feminine Monster, with an elongated head ending in a crown, and six limbs; although the general anatomy would inevitably be parallel to a dinosaur (essentially, a biped creature with a tail) — Cameron wanted the design to distance itself from those, instead taking inspiration from arthropods: “I feel a sense of authorship when it comes to the Queen. Somebody once described it as an anorexic dinosaur, which I suppose is inevitable even though that’s not what I had in mind. In fact, I wanted specifically not to suggest a dinosaur concept — at least overtly — because that would have been a little too commonplace and boring. For me, the Queen is really a blend of what Giger does with what I wanted to do, which was to create something that was big and powerful and terrifying and fast and very female — hideous and beautiful at the same time, like a black widow spider.”

One of the maquettes. Two wooden figures represent the placement of the two stuntmen inside the animatronic.

Cameron also conceived the basic structure of a full size animatronic Alien Queen, a marvel of unprecedented complexity. Suspended from a cable rig, the creature would contain two puppeteers that would control one large and one small arm each — in order to achieve organic fluidity to their movements. The rest of the Monster — which included the head, legs and tail — would instead be puppeteered with a combination of hydraulic mechanisms, wires and rods. Although Winston was intrigued by Cameron’s concept of the Queen, he was initially skeptical about the intended structure of the puppet, for primarily practical reasons. “Jim had seen what we could do with puppets on The Terminator,” he said, “and so it made perfect sense that he thought of puppeteering techniques when he needed a way to realize the Alien Queen. But, even so, it was a huge leap of faith to believe we could build a 14-foot tall, acting puppet.”

One of Winston’s concepts.

Winston tried to elaborate his own renderings of the Alien Queen. He explained: “there were a few little things about the design that I thought could be improved, so I worked up a few sketches of my own and showed them to Jim. Actually they were pretty much like his, although on one of them I had deleted the extra set of arms and reconfigured it so that only a single stuntman would be needed inside.” Cameron however rejected the ideas, adamant to adhere to his vision.

Giger’s Alien Monster IV. Notice the hands and the neck of the creature, which were translated onto Cameron’s Queen design.

Though the director did not intend to use Winston’s designs, some of their traits were implemented in the final design — which, otherwise, essentially adhered to Cameron’s concept. “One thing Jim did like,” Winston continues, “was an idea from my redesign of the leg that gave it a double joint and made it look less human. In the end, Jim took into consideration some of what I’d said and the things I’d drawn and he went off and drew another Queen which was similar to his first but much more refined. In fact, when he came back, it was obvious that that was the Alien Queen. There was no doubt about it. We then sat down together and worked out a scale drawing — literally blueprinting her out in profile and front view, with her exact shape and exactly how she would have to be done to get two people inside.” The final Queen design also included more overt influence from Giger’s paintings — such as Alien Monster IV, which provided inspiration for both the Queen’s neck and hands. The Queen’s head also included a front portion able to move independently from the crown and ‘retract’ inside it when at rest. When the Queen is revealed, she is still attached to her Egg-laying sac, inspired by queen termites.

Cameron’s final Queen design.

The garbage bag test.

Once Cameron defined the final appearence of the Queen,  the director worked with Winston to further elaborate the structure of the full-size animatronic, and whether or not it could be actually brought to the screen. A test was made, with a ‘garbage bag’ mock-up Alien Queen. Winston recalled: “once we came up with a design and an idea of how we were going to get it to work, we rented a crane and built a quick little body plate setup out of wood that would hold two stuntmen. Then we made a rough mock-up of the Queen using black foam-core and plastic trash bags and suspended our stuntmen inside it. For the big arms, we used ski pole extensions — which were lightweight, but very strong — and attached them to some creature hands I had developed for another project. Each stuntman would hold one with his arm stretched out straight so that from his shoulder to his fist would be the Queen’s upper arm and from his fist to the end of the pole would be her forearm. For the smaller arms in front, the guys were able to use their own arms without any extensions. We set this thing up out in our parking lot to see if it was going to work — and it did. There was still a lot of fine-tuning to be done, but the basic concept was good.”

The Alien Queen was first built as a 1:4th scale maquette, which served as a base for the construction of the full-scale puppet, as well as a moulding base for the quarter-scale rod puppet used in the miniature sequences. The maquette was sculpted and painted by a team of sculptors: Shane Mahan for the head; John Rosengrant for the body; Greg Figiel for the arms; Alec Gillis and Willie Whitten for the legs; and Brian Penikas and Shawn McEnroe for the tail. “We all had such a wonderful time sculpting that thing,” Rosengrant said in The Winston Effect. “At the end of each day of sculpting, we’d all look at it, and say, ‘this is going to be great.'”

The creation of the full-size animatronic Queen began with the construction of a solid understructure able to support the various components and mechanisms, as well as the two internal stuntmen. The two puppeteers inside the Queen were Nick Gillard and Malcolm Weaver. Winston recalled: “the first thing we had to do was build the inner body of the Queen. The strong fiberglass shells that would hold the stuntmen and the strong aluminium plate inside that would carry the hydraulics. That inner section would in large part dictate the size of the Queen’s body, so it was necessary to work that out in advance.” Assigned to the fabrication of the supporting structure were Rick Lazzarini and Wayne Sturm. Once completed, it was shipped to London, where the rest of the construction would be held. “We set up shop on a large effects stage at Pinewood,” Winston said, “and began building the different components of the Queen — which basically we designed and built and sculpted exactly as we had done the miniature. Armatures were built for the legs and arms and body and head and tail — all separately.”

The first section to be constructed was the Queen’s tail. “The simplest armature to build was for the tail, so I decided we should do that first,” Winston said. “Not that it was simple by any stretch of the imagination, but the tail was probably the easiest to build quickly and I figured it would be a good break-in project for my English crew to help me assess individual strengths and weaknesses. Once the tail armature was done, we could then go to clay on it while the rest of the armatures were being built.” The tail was sculpted by Steve Norrington, John Robertson, Christine Overs and Philomena Davis, whereas its internal mechanisms were devised by Ray Lovell and Richard Landon. The torso had to accommodate two stuntmen inside of it to operate the arms. Winston said: “foam human figures representing the two men were placed inside our already-completed body plate, and a wire mesh sculpting armature was constructed around it. That way we could be sure of having enough room.” John Rosengrant, who had sculpted the maquette’s torso, also sculpted the full-size torso. Welded steel armatures were built for the head, arms and legs. Shane Mahan, who had sculpted the maquette’s head, also worked on the full-size head; Chris Overs, Steve Norrington and Philomena Davis sculpted the outer arms; John Rosengrant, Tom Woodruff and John Robertson sculpted the inner arms (which matched those of the Alien Warriors); and Graham High and John Robertson sculpted the legs. The same people collaborated in painting the Queen. A team of moldmakers from Pinewood, headed by Keith Shannon, worked on the casts and molds of the Queen’s components. To minimize the weight of such a massive puppet, the Queen’s skin or surface was cast in a very light polyfoam — placed directly over the armature sections — and fiberglass for the more rigid parts, such as the crown extension.

For most of the sequences involving the full-scale puppet, it was supported by a crane arm; depending on the shot, it would be above, with wires, or from below, with a rigid bracked mount. Winston said: “the wires and the bracked both attached to a point midway down the Queen’s back. The wires were used primarily for the shots where you see her full body. Usually, though, you never see below her knees, and that’s where the bracked came in. The bracked came out of the Queen’s back, down one side of her spine and then under her body where it connected to the crane arm, at her pivot axis. The configuration of this bracket — which was built for us by John Richardson and his effects crew —  enabled us to shoot the Queen without showing the crane arm, because the arm connected to the bracked well below the frame line. The bracked itself was also virtually invisible, mainly because we could run it down either side of her back and it would be concealed by her spiny vertebrae. The pivot action that allowed her body to turn was hydraulically controlled by a power steering unit off the crane arm. So an operator, if we wanted the Queen to turn from right to left, would simply turn a steering wheel from right to left and the body would do the same.” Two pivot devices allowed the Queen to respectively tilt forward and back, and move her neck up and down. Trevor Butterfield devised the hydraulic mechanisms of the body. The controls for all body portions were connected to separate power steering units, each maneuvered by a single operator.

The Queen’s head had a wide range of motion. Both a stunt and a hero version of it were built. “We had two slightly different versions,” Winston said. “One was our major fighting head — which was built to take abuse — and the other was our ‘hero’ head which was finer tuned and lighter weight. Functionally, it was about the same as the fighting head, except that it had an extruding tongue mechanism inside and also had tilt capability. In addition to hydraulic controls, the head had cable-actuated functions as well. The face, for example, had its own movement that was independent of the head. The first time the Queen is shown, in fact — when Ripley discovers her in the Egg chamber — her face extrudes from the head almost like a turtle coming out of its shell. Along with the 360-degree facial movement, there were also cable-operated jaws and snarling lips.”

Since the elbow movement was to be controlled by a wrist, the Queen’s arms had to be very light weight and maneuverable. Winston said: “it was especially important that the large arms be as lightweight as possible. As with our foam-core and trashbag mock-up, the stuntmen’s arms reached only as far as the Queen’s elbows, so the whole movement of each forearm and hand had to be controlled by the wrist of a person whose own arm was stretched out straight. For the forearms, we again used a ski pole set-up — this time with hands that could be either positionable or floppy. Depending on the shot, we could position them in dynamic poses or loosen them up so that they would move around freely when the arms moved. In either case, there was no real articulation as such — but amazingly, the approach worked very well. With all the thrashing around the Queen did, it was impossible to tell if the hand movements were free or directed. For our fighting arms, the ski poles were foamed right into the forearm section, which could thus take quite a beating. We also had a set of lighter-weight arms that were polyfoam down to the Queen’s elbows, but then the forearm was a thin vacuformed shell that weighed practically nothing. Those allowed the stuntmen to have much freer movement — but they were very fragile, so we couldn’t use them to bash up against things or else they’d crush.”

Insert arms were also built for scenes requiring great dexterity, such as when the Queen tries to catch Newt under the Sulaco floor grates. Winston explained: “the insert arms — which were done by Ray Lovell — had completely articulated fingers, cable-controlled by external operators. These we could use in one of two ways. Either we could position the Queen with her elbows out of frame — then come in from the outside with these articulated hands — or we could connect the whole articulated arm right to the Queen’s body. If we did that, though, we couldn’t have our stuntmen inside.”

For the legs, Steve Norrington and Richard Landon devised inner articulated armatures, in two versions. “One was for the full legs that were puppeteered externally by wires,” Winston said. “The other was for a separate set of legs that had no foam below the calf. These were used for closer shots where the feet were not in frame and could therefore be moved about simply by having operators grab onto the base of the armature and manually step the Queen through her paces.”

The internal stuntmen also contributed to puppeteering the Alien Queen’s lower body section and tail. Winston explained: “there was hydraulic movement of the tail at the base for ups and downs, but the side-to-side moves depended upon the amount of pressure the stuntmen put on their footplate — which also happened to be the Queen’s hips. Putting pressure alternately on one side or the other would cause the hips to move from side to side. That, combined with the hydraulic action, created a great deal of base tail movement. At the same time, the outer extremity of the tail was actuated by external wires — usually a combination of two or three wires, each controlled by a different operator.”

Although Cameron intended to use the full-scale Queen for most of the sequences, he acknowledged that it could not perform specific movements required by a number of scenes in the script. It was decided to combine the Winston animatronic with a quarter scale puppet, maneuvered with rods and wires. Stop-motion was initially considered, but ultimately discarded for budget and practical reasons. “As a director, I find it tough to deal with stop-motion,” Cameron recalled. “I was very happy with what was done on The Terminator, but by that point in the story we were dealing with a mechanical device and I didn’t feel the look of stop-motion violated anything we’d already done. I was a little more worried about it with Aliens; the scenes involving the Alien Queen were very important, and what we were trying to do was create a real and believable character. Plus, when we started to analyze the types of shots we’d be doing we realized that most of them would require fairly quick action — turns and spins and rapid strides — the sorts of moves that in stop-motion would cause so much displacement per frame that the arms and legs would end up strobing. There are things you just can’t do in any other way, though, so originally the plan was to have a rod puppet version and a stop-motion version. But eventually it got down to budget and it became a choice of either one or the other. Given that, the rod and cable-actuated puppet seemed more appealing for a number of reasons. One was that I had never worked with that kind of thing before and I wanted to fool around with it and see what could be done. Also I just had a feeling that with a lot of the floor effects we’d be usig — smoke and steam and that sort of thing — we’d have more flexibility with puppets we could shoot ‘live’ on a miniature set.”

To build the  fully articulated small-scale puppet, Cameron hired Doug Beswick — who, like Winston, had already collaborated with the director on The Terminator, being responsible for the stop-motion effects of the Robot. Among his effects crew for Aliens were mechanical designer Phil Notaro, cosmetics supervisor Tony Gardner, and construction supervisor Jim Belohovek. “Our puppet was going to be the same size as Stan’s miniature model — about three feet tall — so while they were still in the process of sculpting, Phil would go over there and take measurements and photographs of it so that he could begin working on some early mechanical designs.” As devised by Beswick and Notaro, the Queen would be supported by a pole that extended from the base of her spine and was attached to a maneuverable overhead crossbar. Her basic motion was controlled by rods attached to her feet and inserted through slots in the miniature set floor. The Queen’s proportionally thin design made it complex to devise a mechanical system that could be fitted inside her anatomy. Beswick continues: “from a mechanical perspective, the design was very difficult — mainly because the Queen was extremely complex and extremely skinny. During that first month when the model was still being sculpted, Phil was able to do some of the mechanics we’d be needing, but not a whole lot because the dimensions weren’t totally locked in yet. In fact, we ended up having to do a couple of things over — like the back joint. Phil underestimated how deep they were going to sculpt the undercuts all around the thorax and, as a result, when it was finished the mechanism he’d worked out for it didn’t fit. So he had to cut it way down, and even then it just barely made it.”

The internal mechanisms fit tightly inside the miniature Queen. “The thorax narrowed down to a tiny triangle-shaped area that was maybe three inches from corner to corner,” he said. “That in itself wasn’t bad, but because the Queen had so many mechanical functions we ended up having to run 49 cables through that area — through a hole that was only about an inch and a half around. Complicating things further was the fact that the Queen was going to have to bend at the waist. As a result, we had to put in a massive joint that would enable her to bend with all those cables in there, plus an inch of foam all the way around. It was important that we have a lot of control over the body. Most especially, it had to be solid enough to hold its position so that when the head was slashing back and forth, the body wouldn’t follow it. The arms were also a problem. They were only three-quarters of an inch in diameter on the outside, yet they had nine functions each. The arms and shoulders moved up and down, forward and back, and rotated. The elbows and wrists bent, the forearms rotated, and even though they were smaller than a soda straw — about three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter — all of the fingers had to be functional. We kept trying to talk Jim into either simplifying the Queen or fattening her up a bit but he was very adamant that we stick to the design. It got to be kind of funny because we’d go to him and say, ‘couldn’t the fingers be a little bit bigger?’ And he’d say, ‘that’s not the design.’ Or we’d say, ‘there’s not enough room for a mechanism in here.’ And he’d say, ‘but that’s the design.’ Everything we asked for, we didn’t get.” Ultimately, the small scale puppet replicated the final Queen design perfectly, as Cameron had intended it to do.

A basic aluminium armature was built and mechanized. Available space was always a concern. “As each new mechanism went in,” Notaro said, “space became very tough to come by. I’d lay out a game plan for where I could put something — usually in some tiny little space somewhere — and then I’d have to go in and shift everything all around to actually make it work. It was a long, continuous process. By the time I finished, there was virtually no room left inside at all.” The Queen puppet was fully articulated; the head could be moved widely, complete with the signature independent facial motion, as well as opening jaws and an extending tongue. Her lower neck section could also perform a wide range of movements. The outer arms could move fluidly, and were fitted with functional fingers — whereas the inner arms had more limited motion. The wrists of both versions were floppy, allowing the hands to move about as the arms were puppeteered. The Queen’s back spines could also move up and down, whereas her tail was both mechanized and puppeteered with external wires.

In order to minimize the number of required puppeteers for the 1:4th scale puppet, Notaro devised coordinated cable functions that could be controlled with a single joystick — an idea that also allowed more organic movement. Notaro explained: “oftentimes the difference between jerky, unnatural-looking movement and fluid, natural-looking movement is the way the functions have been organized for operation. When I hook up these kinds of things, I try to group the cables together in such a way that one puppeteer can handle several functions. But they have to be interrelated functions. On the Queen, for example, the head, neck and face functions were all fed into one set of joysticks so that just one operator could control everything needed to give the character expression. That’s the only way to get a real flow in the character. You don’t want to have one operator controlling two different functions; nor do you want to have one function operated by a whole bunch of people. It just makes sense. If the functions are interrelated, you can get a better feeling for the character and make it look more realistic. It also means less breakdown in communication. If you want something to happen, you tell one person as opposed to telling three or four and then trying to choreograph their movements.” The Queen’s 49 cables were controlled by ten joystick systems, operated by a total of five puppeteers on the set — although four assistants were also needed: from above the set, two supported and directed the Queen, and two others puppeteered the legs from below the set.

Placing the Queen’s skin also proved to be difficult — since the special effects artists had to determine the thickness of the layer of foam latex. “Usually, we have a fiberglass substructure in our figures,” Notaro said, “but in this case there was no room for one. So the foam had to be thick enough that we wouldn’t have metal things poking through it, yet thin enough to still bend and fit the character. We had a core that was put inside to hollow out the foam body, but by the time I was done putting in all the mechanics, Tony had to literally cut the foam down to paper thinness in some spots.” The Queen’s large crown also posed a practical challenge due to its sheer size and ratio between it and the Monster’s neck. The structure had to be light and resilient. “It was about 18 inches long,” Beswick said, “which was huge in relation to the tiny neck joint it had to rest on. So it had to be very light, yet strong enough to make it through shooting. We made it out of the thinnest fiberglass we’ve ever used — about 30 thousandths of an inch thick. We used a little bit of gel coat, then one layer of angel hair, one layer of half-ounce cloth and a very little bit of resin. We did it in two sections — the top and bottom separately — and then seamed them together. Amazingly, it was very strong and it held up through the filming like a trooper.”

A stunt, featureless dummy was also built by Graham High and Verner Gresty for scenes where articulation was not required. Both miniature puppets displayed an additional finger in the inner arms — but they were filmed so that it would be never shown onscreen, keeping consistency with the footage of the full-size creature.

Following Cameron’s instructions, the Queen was animated with quick and agile movements. Beswick said: “one of Jim Cameron’s comments when he saw our dinosaur from My Science Project was that the Alien Queen would have to move very fast — almost like a blur. The dinosaur had to move very slowly, which was actually more difficult. It’s really much easier to get smooth movement from something that’s moving quickly than it is from something that’s moving slowly. I think Jim got the effect he wanted from the Alien Queen — quick, yet fluid action.”

Expectedly, both the miniature and full-scale Queen proved to be very complex to film, although the anatomy of the Mother creature allowed more screen exposure than the Warriors. Some of the Queen sequences were shot at quicker speed, at times with 12 to 16 frames per second. “In photographing the Warriors,” Cameron explained, “we tried to be circumspect so as not to make them look like men in suits. That was always a concern. With the Queen, however, we felt sure that it would hold up because it clearly isn’t a person. It has extra limbs and spines and other features that defy normal human geometry, and we therefore knew we could show it longer without blowing the game. All we had to do was make it look nonmechanical — which proved not to be a major problem, given Stan Winston’s handiwork and my own tendency to shoot action scenes in very quick cuts.”

The Queen is introduced in the Egg chamber, which was built both as a miniature set and as a full-scale portion of the environment. The scene, in fact, employed a combination of the full-scale Queen and the 1:4th scale puppet. In this ambience, the creature is secured in position by extensions of hive material, and is still attached to her Egg sac– which was built both as a partial, featureless extension of the full-size puppet, as well as an animatronic extension of the 1:4th scale puppet. The miniature Egg sac was also filled with miniature Eggs, KY Jelly and egg yolk. A miniature puppet of the Queen’s ovipositor was also built. All of the components of both versions of the Egg sac were cast in translucent foam latex. Dennis Skotak recalled: “it was a very difficult environment to work in, and as usual, Jim was very specific about how everything had to be. The egg sac had to operate in a certain manner, the eggs had to move in just such a way and the ovipositor had to deposit an egg precisely and with just the right amount of goo. To create a breathing effect, we had wood poles on the sac leading away from the camera and wires to move the Eggs inside. Then, to get the ovipositor to work, someone had to reach way over through an opening in the side of the set, slide his hand into the Egg sac from the rear and guide the Egg out. One of the biggest problems was that there was so much slime in there that we’d get an Egg all positioned and ready to go and it would keep popping out before we got to shoot it. So someone would have to climb back in and reposition it — and it got messier and more disgusting every time. In fact, everything about that set was unpleasant. There was KY jelly and ‘superslime’ dribbling all over the place and it was extrmely hot. We had steam rising from below and smoke and all kinds of smelly things in there — even cans of freon spurting from both sides. It was like shooting in hell.”

Ripley sets the Egg chamber ablaze, and shoots the Queen — also discharging her grenade launcher at the creature in the process. Skotak continues: “that was another messy one — especially since we found that the most dynamic way of shooting it was up close, with a fairly wide lens, so the sac exploded right into the camera. We0d get everything all set up and then blow the sac apart with charges and all of this goo would come splurting out and collect in a bucked down below so we could recycle it. For some reason, shooting that scene always drew an audience. We’d warn people to keep their distance, but invariably someone would wind up with a face full of slime.”

Lashing in a frenzy, the QUEEN DETACHES FROM THE EGG SAC, ripping away and dragging torn cartilage and tissue behind it. SEEN DIMLY THROUGH swirling smoke, it rises on its powerful legs and steps forward.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

When the Queen detaches from her Egg sac, “it wasn’t possible to do that in full-size, so we were faced with the difficulty of dealing with flame in scale. Bob came up with the idea of using mirrors. One of them was placed behind the Queen and positioned in such a way to reflect a flame bar we had set up about 15 feet away. At that distance, the flames — which were six or seven feet high — looked quite small in the mirror. It was a good scale. In the same shot, another flame bar was positioned similarly, but in such a way that when photographed through a beam-splitter, flames would also appear to be in front of the Queen. Obviously, we could have done the same effect optically, but this method allowed us to move the camera during the shot and also introudce mechanical effects and falling debris in front of the background flames — and do it all quite simply.”

Ripley sees a silhouette moving in the smoke… a glistening black shape which FILLS THE CORRIDOR TO THE CEILING… the QUEEN.

-James Cameron, Aliens draft, 1985

The Alien Mother chases Ripley and Newt as they reach the lift at the end of a corridor — one of the last scenes to be filmed with the 1:4th scale Queen. “The idea was that the Queen was really too big to fit in the corridor very well,” Notaro said, “and that’s how Ripley gets ahead. For us, it was a difficult shot in that she had to be crushed down to much shorter than her usual height and then sequeezed through a quarter-scale set representing the hallway. To make it work, I readjusted the support post so that rather than coming out of her back and up, it came out from the rear, away from camera. Then I disconnected the joysticks and ran all the cables through slots I had cut in the post. She had to travel about six feet down the corridor, so I put the post with the cables on it on a camera dolly that I’d rented and then reconnected the joysticks. It was still a very tight squeeze. Even shortened to her minimum height, she just barely fit in the hallway.” As Notaro had to fly back home, the Queen was eventually maneuvered by other puppeteers at Pinewood — but according to him, “it came out real nice.”

During the film’s climax, the Queen’s acidic blood announces her presence in the Sulaco. Several different chemical combinations were tested, but ultimately the crew had to resort to the polystyrene approach. Richardson recalled: “we went back to the polystyrene approach, but tried to give it a different look. Instead of acetone, we used carbon tetrachloride — which produces basically the same effect — and we mixed it with all sorts of dyes and soaps and other chemicals so that when it hit not only would it dissolve the polystyrene, but it would smoke and bubble while doing so — which was much better than just seeing something melt through. Also, I found that by adding metallic powder onto the surface of the polystyrene, as it dissolved the powder floated on top of the solution — and looked very much like molten metal.”

The Queen violently impales Bishop with the dagger-like tip of her tail — then lifts him up and rips him apart. Winston explained the complex effect: “the Bishop rip-apart was a multistep effect. At first he’s just standing there and he gives a little jolt and for an instant you think maybe he’s got a Chestburster inside him. Then the tail comes right through him from behind. The normal way to do that effect would be to put him on a slant board with a fake body, but we didn’t want to do that. We wanted him to be standing in plain view and then suddenly have this thing shoot out of his chest. To do it, we made a slightly built-up chest plate for Lance Henriksen that allowed a flexible rubberized tail to be inserted and take a bend. So in the start position, the tail piece was lying flat inside the chest plate. It was then pulled up and out through his shirt by a wire that you couldn’t see because of the way it was shot — wires can be hidden. Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis developed that part of the effect. Then we did a switch. The next shot was a variation of the old arrow-through-the-head trick. John Richardson’s crew built a harness that went through Lance’s back. On the front side there was a rigid tail piece that was the length we had pulled out in the previous shot. The back side connected to the Queen’s actual tail. Lance’s feet weren’t in the frame, so we were able to put him on a teeterboard to lift him up. Jim set up the shot in such a way that it starts out tight on Lance with the tail sticking through his chest, then widens out to reveal that it is in fact an Alien tail that has come through from behind and finally follows that tail all the way up and into the drop-ship where the Queen is looming overhead. With her tail, the Queen lifts Bishop right up to where she is in the drop-ship. Her arms come out. One hand grabs the upper part of his body and the other hand grabs the lower half of his body and she literally rips him in two. Lance said they weren’t paying him enough to do that shot, so we had to come up with a dummy rig.” The two-part dummy that had to be ripped apart featured a spring-loaded armature that would “pop apart” and push the Queen’s hands (which were put into slots) along with it, creating the illusion that they were actually tearing the android apart.

After ripping Bishop apart, the Queen lowers herself down from the dropship; the full-scale Queen was used. Winston recalled: “for the scene where she lowers herself down from the dropship, we ran wires from the pivot point on her back up through the ship to the top of the stage. Our stuntmen were inside operating the arms and we had wire riggers off to the side lowering the Queen down onto the ramp. Other wires — connected to the knees  and to the ankles — allowed the legs to be controlled from above too. It was like a giant marionette. And so the moves wouldn’t look floppy, we ran additional wires from her ankles to specific landing points so she could step down firmly in a dynamic position. Her tail also had to uncurl, which meant other wires and other puppeteers. It was pretty rugged. Jim had multiple cameras going and we did it a multitude of times, but the shot was worth it.”

The Alien Mother chases Ripley when she runs towards the cargo hold door. This was actually the first scene to be filmed with the 1:4th scale Queen puppet. “We had everything working on that shot,” Notaro explained, “two guys supporting the Queen from above, two others walking her from below and five cable operators for the other functions. In all, the Queen was capable of about thirty movements, but Jim wanted one more when we got to shooting — a rotating move right at the top of the tail so that she’d be able to turn more quickly. So we added a tiny mechanism in her butt that allowed her whole body to turn around farther and faster. That was also helped along by turning the post she was mounted on. By turning the post, everything turned.” After several sessions of rehearsal, smoke and alarm lights were introduced into the set as the scene required. The sequence was shot at 36 frames per second, meaning that the puppeteers had to maneuver the creature faster than usual.

Cameron allegedly “showed no mercy” to the small-scale Queen puppet during filming, according to Notaro: “during our next shot, we had two puppeteers literally ramming the puppet into the sliding doors as hard as they could — over and over again. Then, after about ten takes, Jim would say, ‘here’s how I want you to do it.’ And he‘d it three times harder than anybody else had. Luckily, the Queen turned out to be very durable. We did have some slippages in the mechanisms, but that was to be expected since they had been built to fit into a very thin, small area and they were being abused very badly. I was constantly adjusting things to keep it operating correctly. We also had to keep it looking good because we might do a scene one day where she was completely battered and the next day do a scene where she had to look brand new. There was constant maintenance going on.”

The climactic fight with the power loader ensues. Special effects supervisor John Richardson explained: “during the fight, there were a lot of different things happening all at once. In fact, for the scenes where we had the Alien Queen and the power loader working together, the whole stage was full of special effects people pulling wires and pushing levers. It was quite a sight.” The sequence employed an orchestrated combination of footage with the full-size Queen and the 1:4th scale puppet. When the Power Loader violently smashes the Queen with its lifting arms, the dummy version was used. “We used the floppy Queen for a lot of the tumbling and alling sequences,” Notaro said. “It was just hard and soft foam pieces glued together. We’d throw the floppy Queen over a bunch of boxes, for example, then cut back to the articulated Queen for when she stood back up.”

Ripley realizes that the only way to defeat the creature is to eject it out of the Sulaco’s main airlock — a method familiar to her. “Where Ripley wallops the Queen with the Power Loader arms, then grabs her by the neck and lifts her into the air — that was all done live action,” Notaro explained. “We picked it up with the puppets at that point, just as Ripley is about to toss the Queen into the airlock. We had a couple shots of them fighting, then the Queen breaks one of the hydraulics on the right knee of the Power Loader and it buckles up, sending both of them crashing to the bottom of the airlock.” When the Queen falls into the airlock, the dummy Queen was used. To portray the Queen being ejected into outer space, the airlock portion of the set was bolted to the ceiling, with a starfield blanket below. Both the miniature and full-size Queen (which was adequately supported by wires) were used when the creature attempts to hold onto Ripley’s leg, before finally falling to her demise.

The final shot of the Queen writhing aimlessly as she falls towards the camera was again achieved with the 1:4th scale puppet — which was attached to a motion control system, and filmed against bluescreen. Visual effects supervisor, Brian Johnson (who had already worked on Alien) commented: “in addition to the rotation, the Queen had cable-operated head movements, cable-operated arms and legs, plus a few exterior wires to jiggle the tail a bit — all of which were nonrepeatable. So that was another instance where we had to use bluescreen.”

Giger himself commented on the Mother Monster, asserting that “the Alien Queen is very complicated, like the way I would have done. I like how she moves.” He also said in an interview with Cinefantastique that “She’s a bit smaller in the face than my Alien, but my basic design was very well studied. She was frighteningly well animated.”

For more images of the Alien Queen, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Part IIa: Aliens
Next: Part IIIa: Alien³, Giger’s Beast

Alien³ underwent a long, articulated creation process — which saw several scriptwriters elaborating their own screenplays, only to be replaced — one after the other. Going from William Gibson to David Twohy, the film only began to develop to the next step with Vincent Ward and John Fasano’s script. It was based on that story that concept artists Stephen Ellis and Mike Worrall elaborated their own designs for the creatures, which included a woolly Chestburster born from a sheep, and an adult Alien whose origin was left unexplained. Those very initial concepts were conceived more as placeholders to illustrate certain sequences in the script, rather than actual designs.

Concept art by Mike Worrall.

Given Aliens was the winner for Best Special Effects at the 59th Academy Awards, Stan Winston Studio was the obvious choice for the third film’s creature effects. The artist was initially contacted for the project, but was unable to accept the offer — as he was already attached to his own feature film, A Gnome named Gnorm, and James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Despite that, Winston recommended two of his previous crewmembers — Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis — who had recently detached from his Studio to found their own special effects company, Amalgamated Dynamics. Hans Ruedi Giger — who had not been contacted for the previous installment in the series — was concurrently contacted by both Gordon Carroll and David Fincher, director of the film, to reimagine the StarBeast. “While I was working on my idea for The Mystery of San Gottardo, Gordon Carroll contacted me about doing Alien³. I told him that I was working on a new creature and I could probably combine it. I had imagined that because I had done the first Alien, this time I would have a little more freedom to be able to bring in some new ideas.” Although he was given no script to work from (as the story was being constantly rewritten) the artist was happy to accept the offer. From the information he was given, three new creatures had to be designed: an aquatic Facehugger, a new quadrupedal Chestburster, and a new version of the adult Alien.

The Facehugger design was slightly modified, with prominent webbing between its limbs and thorns adorning its tail. “One of the first scripts had it swimming, so I visualised how it would move,” Giger said. “The fingers would retract, so that it would crawl just under the water’s surface.”

The new Chestburster, labeled as the ‘Bambi-Burster’, was conceived by Fincher as a gangly, fawn-like newborn Monster. “That was the idea of Mr Fincher,” Giger said, “to have a Bambi-like [creature]… it shouldn’t be like the Chestburster, [an] ugly thing; it should be [like] Bambi — so, a creature you like right away, but [that’s] not too nice. My first design was too nice, it has been like a little bear, so I [gave] it long, long legs, like bambi is a little helpless.” The design in fact featured long and thin limbs, based on newborn ungulates such as fawns.

Regarding the adult stage of the Alien, Giger had not been wholly satisfied with the results seen in the first film. “This time around it had to be more animal-like,” he said, “more elegant. You shouldn’t get the feeling that it was a man wearing a suit.” The first foundation of the design was in fact that “the head had to remain unaltered, but the body had to change.” Though he remained in Zurich, Giger sent several sketches to the director. The designer followed Fincher’s initial instructions, which conceived the new Alien as a feline, lethal creature. “In his mind was a kind of puma,” Giger said, “or a  beast like that.” The original creature, as it appeared in the first film, had initially been intended to be transparent, but technical limitations did not allow it to display such trait. In addition, it had a tail that “resembled too much a crocodile’s,” and “useless pipes” on its back. “These tubes on the back,” Giger said, “I did them [to balance] the long skull, if [the Alien has to stand]. But if he’s like a beast, then the long head is just over the shoulder — he doesn’t need any supporting.” The pipes protruding from the creature’s back were completely removed, and the tail was made thinner, with a long blade-like barb on its tip. Its chest and limbs were lengthened — “like a spider.” 

The hands now featured long blades that could be everted from sockets between its fingers. “The hands now had very sharp blades between the fingers, which could shoot out, allowing the Alien to cut its victim. This is in keeping with the new dog-like look of the beast, which is very fast and devious.” The shoulder guards were given a ridged structure, which could “open up and be pointed like a saw” when the creature attacked. The new Alien would also have a ‘second skin’ that “was designed to produce tones,” Giger said. “It had valves on it, like a saxophone.” The artist also said that its purpose was to produce sounds that would reproduce the Alien’s mood. “You should hear how he feels,” he said.

Fincher specifically wanted the Alien to have lips based on Michelle Pfeiffer’s — more voluptuous and feminine. The director recalled: “we did give it Michelle Pfeiffer’s lips. That’s what they’re based on. It always had these little thin lips, and I said to Giger, ‘let’s make it a woman when it comes right up to Ripley.’ So it has these big, luscious collagen lips.” Giger wanted the new creature to be “more sensuous” as opposed to repulsive. “The lips and chin on my new model are better proportioned, and give the creature a more erotic appearance,” he said. “When the mouth is closed it looks very voluptuous, beautiful.” In addition, inside the creature’s dome, Giger introduced a series of elongated, vertical structures. According to him, it was a “finger-brain, which should move like when wind is blowing over the grain.”

As Giger had not been wholly satisfied with the Alien’s tongue in the first film, he redesigned it. “The tongue of the first Alien was, in a way, not organic,” the artist said. “It was a tube with these teeth in front. It was really not [the best].” The new tongue was conceived with the appearence of a sword, or a spear. “When it opens its jaws the tongue inside the mouth is more like a spear — also very suggestive — which penetrates the head with greater velocity, snagging bits of brain. From Beauty to the Beast.” The creature’s jaw structure would literally transform for a ‘kiss’ — with its tongue penetrating the skull of the victim and, upon returning, dragging shreds of its innards.

What Giger initially did not know was that ADI was concurrently hired to design the creature, not only to construct it. “David Fincher neglected to inform me that Woodruff and Gillis were also contracted to take care of the redesign of the Alien,” he said. “I found out much later. I thought I had the job and that Woodruff and Gillis would work from my plans. On their side, they were convinced that it was their job and accepted my ‘suggestions’ with pleasure. They believed that all my effort was based on a huge love for the matter, because I worked hard even after my contract was over. Today, I am convinced that it was a game by Fincher to keep both sides happy and obtain the maximum for his movie.”

Giger, Woodruff and Gillis also spoke through phone calls. “The Alien is Giger’s baby,” Gillis said, “and he was calling to find out what we planned. After we stayed in contact and he faxed through drawings and ideas that proved very helpful when we were deciding how the Alien was going to develop.” The artist also invited both Woodruff and Gillis at his home in Zurich, where the sculpture of the new design was being made. Due to the hectic production schedule, they unfortunately had to turn down the offer. “We had a couple of phone calls where we actually spoke with Giger,” Woodruff said, “and at the time he told us he was working on a sculpture, he was working on a full size maquette of the Alien in his studio, so he invited Alec and I to come to Switzerland, and at the time we were so under the gun schedule wise that we — you know — respectfully said ‘you know, we can’t do that right now,’ and that is the one thing I always regret to have done, to have had the invitation, you know and just kind of put it off for now and say, ‘maybe when the film is done, maybe afterwards’ — and then of course by the time the film is done, he wasn’t involved at all and the offer was no longer there.”

In a combination of miscommunication and rapidly quickening production schedule, Giger’s involvement in the project faded. The artist offered the Alien sculpture — sculpted along Cornelius de Fries —  and reference footage of it to Twentieth Century Fox; the company declined and severed contact with him. In an interview with Outpost31, Woodruff said: “people often look for the drama in this event, but the simple facts are that we designed the Alien effects (the method and mode of how each effect was achieved) while at the same time inventing a couple of new evolutions of Alien creatures. We returned the approach to the Alien after what had worked for Aliens in providing dozens of warriors in very simple ways. Our approach was to recreate the art of the Alien as we saw it in Giger’s own work in a form that worked for a man inside the suit. Someone along the line quoted us as saying we were improving Giger’s work rather than properly conveying that we were improving what had been done before to look more like Giger’s work in his own original art. His publicist ran with this ‘affront’ and it took a number of letters from us to Giger before we finally heard that he understood the miscommunication.”

Giger was, regardless, disheartened for the situation. “In the contract it stated exactly how I should be credited. They [are breaking] the contract because they’re saying in the movie that it’s only ‘original design by Giger’ and not Alien 3, so it looks like I didn’t work on it. Mr. Fincher never gave me any credit. That did not just happen; it was made to happen. I never heard from the man responsible, and I don’t know why he did it.” He also attributed some of the shortcomings to the budget. “I read in the papers [that Sigourney Weaver] got something like $5.5 million for playing Ripley again. Imagine what could have been possible if all that money had been spent on the creature design! It could have been ganz toll! After all, the star of an Alien film should be the Alien itself, right?”

For more images of the unused Alien³ designs, visit the Monster Gallery [COMING SOON]. Previous: Part IIb: Aliens, the Alien Queen Next: Part IIIb: Alien³, the Dragon

Like many other aspects of Alien³, the creature effects department was plagued by constant changes in direction and contradicting studio decisions. Gillis recalled in an interview with Fangoria: “Fox never had a problem with coming back and saying ‘sorry guys. We know you built these things, but there’s a new direction, and we’re not going to use them’. We had to keep ourselves and the crew orally afloat, because people put their blood, sweat and tears into the stuff, and have a tendency to get upset when an effect’s cancelled. There were six stages of Aliens, count them! But we’re not griping about the script changes, because any story should constantly be honed. That only shows us the film’s getting better, and if the effect doesn’t serve the plot, then there’s no reason for it.” Even though Giger’s Alien designs for the third film were not used as he conceived them, some of their characteristics made their way into the final creatures devised by Amalgamated Dynamics. First to appear in the film is an Egg, placed ambiguously in the Sulaco — built as a static model, as the only sequence showing it was a very late addition to the film.

The Queen Facehugger.

Initially, the shooting script for the film introduced a particular Facehugger which would carry an embryo of an Alien Queen inside — the aptly named Super Facehugger. Its special purpose was visually reflected by its design. Gillis explained in a featurette: “we designed it so that it would reflect the armour-plated, exoskeletal quality of the Queen, but transferring that onto the Facehugger body design.” The armoured creature was also given webbing between its limbs, probably inspired by Giger’s aquatic Facehugger designs. The Monster, sculpted by Gary Pollard, was cast in urethane — with an understructure that simulated bones and was positionable. The Super Facehugger was cut from the theatrical version of Alien³, and was only reintegrated in the 2003 Assembly cut.

The Facehugger sculpture.

ADI also constructed a more traditional Facehugger as an animatronic. “We used the same design as the original Facehugger,” Woodruff told Cinefex, “but we had to splay it open a little bit because this one had much more movement in the front fingers and we needed extra room for the various mechanisms. We also sculpted new finger skins because the fingers were a little bit longer.” In the original version, the Facehugger impregnates one of the oxen used to drag the crashed EEV ashore. The animal dies, but the Alien inside it does not — and bursts through its corpse. The design of the infant Alien implemented anatomical structures of a quadruped, and was strongly influenced by Giger’s earlier attempt at designing this stage of the creature. The ‘Bambi-Burster’, as it was affectionately called by the crew, was gangly and foal-like in proportions. For the bursting sequence, a dummy of the ox was built by Alex Harwood and Monique Brown, and filled with false guts and blood. A simple foam form of the Chestburster was mounted on the end of a ram rod, and was pushed through the carcass model (which had been fitted with a hole on its back). Several takes were filmed, but Fincher found none satisfying.

For within each seed, there is the promise of a flower. And within each death, no matter how big or small, there’s always a new life. A new beginning. Amen.

The director decided to change the scene completely and selected a new host inside which the Alien would gestate: a Rottweiler (named Spike in the film). “I wanted something faster and more predatory than an ox,” Fincher said. “As a result, the final Alien is not as elegant a creature as it was before, but it is more vicious. The change to a dog broke everybody’s heart — because it had been done before in The Thing — but it helped when we got into the big chase sequence at the end, because it gave us exciting POVs and explained the ravenous attack mode that the thing was in.” The choice was controversial, and Fox officials refused to allow the scene to be shot. Early test screenings of the film did not portray the Chestburster scene at all. Fincher recalled: “we previewed it to audiences, and people would ask, ‘where did the Alien come from?’ So I said to Fox, ‘can I shoot the fucking dog now?'” The scene was ultimately shot in the span of two days, with an animatronic Chestburster bursting through the dog puppet.

The failed whippet test.

Fincher initially wanted a dog to perform as the Chestburster scuttling away from its birth side. Alec Gillis recalled: “we looked at a bunch of lanky dogs and chose a whippet. I made a little suit for the dog to wear, just using foam skins for the Bambi-Burster that I snipped and tucked and placed over a spandex leotard. She was really a great little dog, but Fincher decided that it wasn’t working because she ran in a very straight-legged fashion whereas we wanted more spiderlike movement. I think it could have worked in a quicker cut, but what he needed was a shot of it running all the way down a hallway and around a corner. We just pushed the idea a little further than it could be pushed.” The idea imposed several practical limitations: the dog “wasn’t too thrilled about wearing the head,” according to Gillis, and thus had to be dressed with a helmet that could not cover the front of its head — something that limited the possible camera angles. Richard Hedlund, visual effects producer, asserted that the final shot “was so silly looking [that] in the dailies you were on the floor, laughing.” The idea was obviously discarded, and the final scene employed a fully articulated rod puppet and point of view shots.

Painting the adolescent Alien stage.

The Alien is next seen when it is discovered by one of the prison mates — Murphy — whom first finds the Alien’s molted skin. Murphy inspects a hole, only for the Alien to attack him with an acid spit. The sequence employed an ‘adolescent’ Alien hand and rod puppet, sculpted by Jose Fernandez. “The head was 16 to 18 inches long,” Woodruff said, “I puppeteered it for the shot, pointing it at the camera and using a video monitor to aim it right at the lens. As it comes into the light, it spits the acid out of its mouth. We had a hose inside, attached to a lever, so that we could shoot a spurt of this greenish-yellow spit.” In other scenes, effects of the Alien’s blood were achieved with caustic soda poured over sheet aluminium. The adult Alien was, quite obviously, the main concern for the special effects crew. In contrast with the precedent chapters of the series, Fincher intended the Alien to be seen more clearly. He explained: “philosophically, we went into the Alien effects in a different way. I didn’t want them to be ‘framed’ effects shots, with everything else just clearing out of the way. To me, the Alien wasn’t just a Monster, it was a character. So we decided that we were going to see the whole thing this time, as much as possible. We wanted the creature to walk on the ceilings and really sell the idea that this thing is a bug from outer space.” “A freight train crossed with a jaguar” — this is how David Fincher famously summarized the creature in Alien³. In the film, Golic calls it “a Dragon,” and in the extended assembly cut it is implied he worships the Monster. Early on, the director discarded the possibility of a fully animatronic character, instead choosing a creature suit to portray the Alien. In addition, to properly depict both the Monster’s inhuman geometry and its agile, predatory movements, the suit was to be combined with a small scale puppet — the construction and animation of which was assigned to Boss Film Studios. Expectedly, considerable time was spent in designing the adult Alien. “We felt that we should take the Alien in a different direction,” said Gillis. “The idea was that the creature would be constantly mutating to adapt to whatever the environment was, which gave us reason to have an Alien that was considerably different from the Alien Warrior in any of the other films. But, ultimately, Fincher decided that he wanted to remain basically with what we’d seen in the first film.” Bringing forth a concept that dates back to the pre-production of the original film, the Alien would take genetic traits from the host it gestated in. “We wound up with an Alien that was more of a quadruped,” Gillis said, “and could run very fast on all fours, while still being able to stand up on two legs.” One of the innovations was, in fact, the digitigrade structure of the Alien’s legs, a trait taken from its host. Though Giger’s designs for Alien³ were not actually used, they were used as references for many aspects of the final creature: most importantly, the new Alien sports fuller lips, inspired by Michelle Pfeiffer’s — although less prominent than Giger’s version. “Fincher wanted more of a lip structure than had been seen before,” Gillis said, “so this Alien had more human-looking lips over the top of its teeth.” The signature pipes on the back of the Alien were also removed, always in line with Giger’s innovations: this was a reason of concern, and the director went back and forth between actually incorporating them into the creature and omitting them; ultimately, he settled on an Alien without the pipes on its back. Also influenced by Giger’s designs was the return of the signature translucent dome of the first Alien, even considering its impracticality on set. “We always felt it would be worth the extra trouble,” Gillis said. The structure inside the dome was redesigned, with partially overlapping ridges. Also returning from the original design was the additional opposable thumb on each hand. In addition, partially in line with Giger’s designs, the new Alien was given a more prominent barb on the tip of its tail, although not as large as in Giger’s version. The final design portrayed by the rod puppet was also altered before filming. ADI based the textures of the Alien on Giger’s own Necronom paintings, and possibly his designs for Poltergeist 2 [for an in-depth visual comparison, visit Alien Explorations’ article]. Woodruff told Strange Shapes and Monster Legacy: “During the build on Aliens, Fox provided us with many pieces of the original Alien creature suit and head. Within those pieces, you could actually see castings of mechanical bits; valves and plumbing pieces, some with catalogue numbers visible that had been etched into the pieces that were molded. On Aliens, those pieces of the new suits evolved to be more organic and not just castings of off-the-shelf hardware. But the suits were still very broad in that they were sections glued to a spandex leotard with nothing more than slime-covered spandex to span the space between built-up sections. On Alien 3, we took that to the next step and sculpted an entire body suit – not in an effort to make it look different – but to make it look more complete since the shooting style was going to be completely different and lighting would be revealing more of our single Alien than the hordes of the Cameron film. We relied heavily on images of Giger’s work from his own Necronomicon as the guide, seeking to replicate the organic life of that creature in more specific ‘Giger’ detail than what was represented in the work of both Alien and Aliens.” Woodruff also said: “it was a whole sculpted suit made out of spandex and foam rubber, and we were really pushing it to the limit. We did a bodycast of me, shaved it down and sculpted over it so that the suit would have to stretch for me even to get into it. It was absolutely skintight to keep from wrinkling and buckling in strange ways. We had an amazingly fast and effective English sculptor named Chris Halls who did a large percentage of our sculpting, including the Alien head and some of the suit.” A total of six suits was built, with one of them adapted to a stuntman — ultimately used in only one scene. The inhuman hands were engineered with mechanisms that allowed the additional thumbs to move when the performer moved his own. The suits could also be fitted with leg extensions, which would never eventually be shown in the film. “They were fiberglass shells with struts and springs for the toes,” Gillis said. “We ended up not using them because they bulked up the legs a bit, and also because Tom would have needed a smooth runway to maneuver on and most of the sets were pretty cluttered.” Generally speaking, the suit was intended to be shot “no wider than the waist up,” according to Gillis. “Otherwise you would start seeing more of the waist and the legs, which were not quite as thin or dog-legged as the puppet. But we got all the detail a costume can provide.” The suits could be equipped with an animatronic head. Its full facial articulation allowed both sides of the lips to move independently. It also featured tubes pumping methyl-cellulose to simulate emission of saliva. An insert animatronic head, dubbed the ‘attack head’, was also built. It was engineered with a projecting tongue driven by a pneumatic piston, devised by Paul Dunn. By pressing a trigger, the air piston would be released and the tongue would be would be violently ejected outwards. This head was used, for example, in the sequence of Clemens’ death — where the character was portrayed by a fake head built in fiberglass, filled with animal blood and entrails, and covered in wax. The head contained an air hose. “When the Alien’s tongue punched it, we fired the switch on the air hose,” Gillis explained, “and blew the brains out. It was pretty effective, as well as gruesome.” A total of three versions of the Alien’s tail was built. The first tail was a cable-controlled tail that was not attached to the suit, but rather lined up to it — always filmed with the lower body area of the Alien cut out of the frame. Another tail was a self-supporting tail, attached to a rig that adhered to the performer’s waist and a series of supports on his back and chest. “That was supported with a sheet of plastic inside so that it could stand up,” Gillis said, “and Tom would be able to thrash it around from side to side.” The third tail was a stunt tail, attached to the suit through a similar, but simpler belt-type rig, and maneuverable with wires.

Ciak!

Filming the scenes scheduled with the Monster suit proved to be difficult for Fincher. “It was beautifully sculpted,” the director said, “and really well put together, but it was still very difficult to hide the human form inside. The suit gave itself away with certain movements. One of the brilliant things that Giger put in the design was the hammerhead– which helps to draw you to the face and not concentrate on much else. Still, there was only so much of just head and shoulders we could show before people would start to say, ‘you’re putting me on.'” Woodruff performed as the Alien creature all the required scenes of the live-action schedule, save for one. Those included both sequences for the film itself and reference footage for the rod puppet animators. The suit did not house eyeholes, and the actor was completely blind; he was directed by other crewmembers through a walkie-talkie headset.

Suiting up.

Woodruff’s endurance proved to be useful not only for the length of the shoots, but also for the suits themselves. Gillis said: “Tom is the best performer in suits that I know. Not only does he have amazing stamina for enduring the things; but by building them he knows what their limitations are. He knows how to move to get the best look out of them. When you have an actor in the suit, you have to have zippers and things in the appropriate areas for them to relieve themselves. Tom simply doesn’t eat or drink when he’s in the suit. He’ll wear it for 13 hours at a time without having to go to the bathroom. As a result, we can make the suits more form-fitting and seamless. Tom also had a vested interest in making the suit work; so if he has a complaint about something, he’ll quietly come to me rather than shout it out to the production manager. Generally, I work with the director and then coordinate with Tom. Sometimes Fincher would say things like, ‘tell Tom not to make it look so much like a Barbie doll,’ or, ‘tell him to up the scare factor 20 percent,’ and I’d tell Tom what I thought he meant. Fincher was great. He had done stop-motion, so he’d been around Monsters and knew aesthetics and dynamics.” Instructions and directions given by Fincher were quite extensive as well, as recalled by Sigourney Weaver herself. “One time I went around the corner [of the set] and I heard Fincher talking to Tommy,” the actress said. “He would talk directly into [Tom’s] earpiece. He was saying, ‘you hate that bald bitch, you hate that bald bitch! Get her, get her! There’s that torch again! You hate that torch even more than her! Get her!’ It was like he was whipping Tom into this lather of hatred. It was wonderful.”

The rod puppet.

Fincher wanted the Alien in his film to have an inhuman geometry and to perform complex, agile movements, obviously impossible to achieve with a creature suit alone. To properly portray the Monster he wanted, it was decided to combine the suit with a miniature rod puppet. Gillis and Woodruff designed the rod puppet, which was sculpted by Chris Cunningham and built at Boss Film Studios. “We’ve done miniature puppets before,” Gillis recalled, “And we felt that it was important for continuity that we make the puppet — but that was impractical since we were stuck in England, so we did the next best thing. Since we had access to the director for approval, we finalized the design, Chris Halls [Cunningham] sculpted it, we ran a mold and then we sent it to Boss with a painted model as reference. From that point on, it became their deal.”

Chris Cunningham sculpts the Alien rod puppet.

Although Fincher had approved ADI’s design, the creature needed structural alterations to erase foreshortening issues in miniature photography and for other practical reasons. Lead puppeteer Laine Liska explained: “we made a lot of changes after Fincher saw it on film and saw it moving; the original design had a tendency to look a little stubby when seen from the front scuttling on all fours.” Five additional vertebrae were implemented into the thorax of the Alien, thus erasing the foreshortening issue. The digitigrade legs were also shortened to enable them to move more naturally than before. Final tweaks included shortening both the arms and the tail. The final Alien rod puppets were 40 inches long and 18 inches tall, and were fitted with an extendible tongue that, however, was never actually used during filming. Their skin was cast in foam latex, with the dome portrayed by translucent vacuformed plastic.

Making of the Alien rod puppet. On the top left, a picture of one of the painted maquettes. The creature design was slightly modified afterwards.

The internal armature of the puppet was conceived to be simple and easily maneuverable. Liska explained: “for a lot of the joints, like the elbows and wrists, we used bicycle chain because it is a good, strong joint with a fixed direction. Places like shoulders and hips were left loose so they could move in all directions. Electing not to do too much internal cabling gave us much more freedom, because we didn’t have to fight cables which might not hold the weight or might sometimes fight the rubber skins.” The armature and its mechanisms were devised by Craig Talmy.

The rod puppet. Notice the new leg configuration, as well as the longer back.

Animating the puppet and compositing it convincingly within the film posed several different issues. Fincher wanted the movements of the Alien to be distinctly and unmistakably inhuman; the Horror had to move quickly, darting through corridors. A lethal predator. In addition, Fincher’s filming style included frequent camera motion, further complicating the process. Boss Film Studio first developed a motion control field recorder able to record fast tracking camera motion (such as panning, tilting, or booming). Richard Edlund explained: “we would have to scale the motion control camera system’s dynamic directional moves and scale its nodal point position to match the miniature. The moves could be preprogrammed or altered if we chose. It had to be a quiet system and it had to be repeatable within a few thousandths of an inch over a long dolly track. We had a lot of requirements which aren’t normally met by this kind of equipment. We stuck our necks out and invested our own money to build it.” Boss Film’s motion control system was designed and supervised by Phil Crescenzo, and engineered by Steve Kosakura. The software that controlled it was instead devised by Kuper Controls. It used a Fisher 9 dolly retrofitted with servomotors and electronic components, and had to be as silent as possible. It was used to shoot clean plates and the Alien puppet, with the right adjustments and modifications applied. The original plate sequences shot in Pinewood were in either 24fps or 30 fps format; the field recorder had to be designed to compensate for the different film rates. Once the background plates were recorded, the actual filming of the puppet began. Fincher wanted the puppet to be shot on an even higher frame rate than the background plates; for this reason, Bill Thomas applied further modifications to the software that ultimately allowed the puppet to be shot at any frame rate up to 60fps. “All we had to do was punch in a number,” Crescenzo said, “and the motion control system would play back the recorded move at whatever scale speed we needed to match the frame rate.” Though the go-motion technique was successfully used by Industrial Light & Magic on other films — such as Dragonslayer and Willow — the special effects crew quickly discarded the idea, and thus began elaborating a different approach. “Go-motion has hideous complications,” Edlund explained. “With 50 channels of motion control, slow and lugubrious work and extensive programming time, everything is very difficult and lacks flourish. Rather than go that royte, Fincher wanted something more flexible — which, in the course of its development, became a high-tech rod puppet technique. Using that, our takes could range from one to 48 frames a second and encompass prerecorded camera moves. We could also motion control just a few puppet channels if we needed speed or the moving of large mass. With all these possible variables, it became a limitless type of system.” Liska doubted that the new approach could be used entirely successfully. “I was probably the hardest one to convince,” he said, “because of my stop-motion background. Richard was pretty insistent on the Alien being a rod puppet; and the director seemed adamant that it not be stop-motion. But he also wanted to make sure that it didn’t look like a man in a suit. if it had been up to him, it would have been a fully articulated robot — and we’d still be making it.”  The new combination of techniques was labeled by the crew as mo-motion. The Alien was puppeteered by a multitude of crewmen moving its various parts with rods or wires, which were painted to match the colour of the Monster in order not to be detected after compositing. Each rod was equipped with a block with handles on the receiving end. Up to six puppeteers maneuvered the puppet. Most of the times, Liska puppeteered the head of the Alien, with other puppeteers moving the components of the body. Craig Talmy, Douglas Miller, William Hedge, John Warren and Brett White all contributed to the animation of the Monster. “There was something really interesting,” Fincher commented, “a more animal feeling, about bringing five intelligences to bear on a single puppet. It gave it a sort of an insect quality, like the way a tarantula [sic] walks around without any sort of order to its feet.” Various parts of the creature could be connected with the puppeteering rods: the sides of the head, the ribcage (in three different places), the hip (near the base of the tail), the hands, and the feet. Wands or wires were alternately attached to the tail to move it. The number and attachment of the rods was obviously dictated by the specific sequence and frame that had to be shot, as well as the relative position of the Alien in regards to the camera. The trunk of the puppet was connected to a motion control mover to enable the gross motion and to mantain the creature in the proper place of the frame. During filming of certain scenes, however, the mover proved to be an obstacle to the actual animation. Liska recalled: “the Alien tended to move like a bunny rabbit, and we couldn’t seem to get past that because the computer kept smoothing things out. David was going for movements that might resemble something familiar, but not anything in particular. We were first told to make it run like a cougar. We looked at cougar footage: and when we did our original tests, we pretty much got that. But that ended up not beingh what he wanted. Other characters were suggested, like a spider or something else that was gangly. David was going for the oddest configuration that we could get. We found that rods and manpower helped it to look as erratic as possible.” The Alien puppet was shot against a bluescreen, and was put elevated from a reference flat surface, in order to minimize the rotoscoping work. For each single shot of the Alien, the average number of takes floated from 20 up to 100. Scenes including the Alien darting on the ceiling had to be actually shot with the puppet upside down, because the motion control system could not flip the motion files. One of the main concerns, obviously, was actual environment interaction. The crewmembers first experimented with various kinds of plexiglass — from clear plexiglass, to blue plexiglass — to provide reaction of the Alien to surfaces. Although some of the experimentation was successful, the small nuances were hardly noticeable on film. Another major issue was represented by lighting. The puppet had to be intensely lit in order to portray proper depth of field; the consequent heat on the stage was uncomfortable to the crewmembers — and even to the puppet itself: the thin, vacuformed plastic used for the dome was frequently subject to cracks due to the heat, and thus had to be constantly replaced. In addition, the puppet frequently moved beyond the edges of the blue screen by accident — a problem solved with a new, smaller screen that was rigged to move along with the puppet. Though extremely complex to achieve, the miniature photography process was successful — also thanks to an innovative system that allowed the Boss film crew to preview composites on stage: it allowed a certain shot against the bluescreen to be recorded and electronically composited with the plate, already converted to video format, on laserdisc. The system was designed by Phil Crescenzo. “The laserdisc video comp gave us the ability to tell whether the creature was interacting with the actors or bumping into things,” said Edlund. “We had to know right away, because we didn’t have the luxury of shooting the scene and leaving the set-up until after dailies. There were a lot of shots to do and we had to be able to move on with impunity, knowing we had the take.” In order to reproduce on the Alien sudden lighting effects such as those caused by torches, a specific code, called ‘flicker processing’, was written. “[It] allowed us to follow a particular area in the plate,” Crescenzo said, “and create a table of its relative intensity per frame. Steve Kosakura then put that data into the motion control system to run light gags and replicate the flicker and whatever else directly on the puppet. Doug Calli operated the laserdisc system and contributed a lot of input to make things happen more quickly.” Rick Fichter added: “without the laserdisc system, you would have to make your best guess at a take and then weed through them later. The tendency might be for a director to overshoot in order to make sure that he got it right. The laserdisc allowed us to zero in on a specific action and a specific take without having to go through the usual black-and-white tests, wait for the dailies and then go to optical before we could see the results. We could tell quickly whether or not everything was locked into the plate. We also used the system for elemental shooting wherever we needed a quick turnaround — for steam and smoke and fire elements, mostly. It really sped up the whole editorial process.” The laserdisc compositing gave the crew data in a far shorter time than it usually would have taken. “There were certain things I wanted in the movement that we never nailed perfectly,” Fincher commented, “and in some ways, mo-motion hindered what I wanted. But in other ways, we got fluky things that looked cooler than anything we could have imagined. We found that if we got the head and tail right, then it didn’t really matter what the legs were doing. The tail was what made it look organic and the head was what made it look like the Alien. When those two things were in synch, that was usually when we had a take that we liked.” Once a certain shot was deemed satisfying, the components had to be actually composited together and finalized for the film. Fincher wanted a darting creature that would thus produce a blurring motion; he suggested using an additional optical shake to the scenes involving the running Alien to highlight the sense of frenzy in those sequences. In post-production, the director also asked for other modifications. Optical chief Michael Sweeney recalled: “[Fincher] wanted to change the size on some [sequences], add elements to certain shots, drop other shots, put shots on hold that they had brought back and reinsert sequences that had been deleted. You always want to look at a scene if it’s simply the Alien over a background, for example, but that’s just where it starts. Just shooting the Alien against a bluscreen involves a number of colour separations and cover mattes. We also added in shadows, debris, smoke, fire and animation lights. I would guess the most we had to deal with in any one shot was 22 to 25 elements.”

The rod puppet in a scene (from the Assembly cut).

Boss film Studio’s computer graphics department also largely collaborated on finalizing the sequences. Most importantly, the Alien’s shadows were mostly digital additions to the shots, which would have otherwise needed extensive rotoscoping work. Digital effects supervisor Jim Rygiel explained:  “the bluescreen puppet element and the background plate and scanned them into the system; then, by making a matte of the bluescreen element, we were able to create the shadow simply by bending the matte over as the light source would suggest for a shadow. By using the background, we were able to distort the shadow, bending it to actually fit over pipes and along walls, whatever. So the shadow would sinc up one-to-one with whatever the Alien was doing.” Due to the extensive motion blur, the mattes were also digitally enhanced.

The lead-covered version of the rod puppet.

The Alien is ultimately trapped inside the refinery and seemingly killed when Morse pours the molten lead on it. The Horror however arises again, only to be quickly dispatched with water — which cools the lead. The sudden temperature differential causes the final explosion of the Monster, dispatched once and for all. For this particular sequence, lead-covered versions of both the suit and rod puppet were constructed. The Alien jumping from the molten lead was actually filmed on stage. Crewmember Al di Sarro said: “ADI made us a fiberglass mould of the body and we skinned it with the Alien suit. We made a special air mortar to accommodate the body and incorporated that mechanism into the mould. On cue, we blew that Alien through about five feet of the lead mixture at 260 pounds of pressure. It flew 15 feet in the air and threw lead everywhere. To make the Alien look like it was smoking from the molten metal, we used a cigarette smoker, purging a lot of tobacco under pressure to create a cool smoke coming out of the suit.” Once out of the lead, the Alien moves about frantically. For Woodruff, it was one of the most difficult stunts. He recalled: “climbing up pipes while covered with that slimy stuff was almost impossible. We had one set with pipes running horizontally on the stage floor, and at the back end of those was a pit for the top of the lead mold with the lead fluid in it. Fincher mounted a mirror at 45 degrees, so as we shot into it we were shooting past the Alien on the pipes into the mirror reflecting the lead. So it looked as if we were shooting right down the pipes into the mold.”

Covering the suit in the lead mixture.

When water is poured on it, the quick cooling of the lead creates tremendous pressure on the Alien’s surface, before it explodes. The cracks that appear on its dome were created digitally by Boss film on a lead-covered puppet of the Alien. The head was digitized and the wire frame animatic of it was rotoscoped in order to track with the live-action head. The cracks were then drawn frame by frame, in black, on a flat sheet. The cracks were then scanned and digitally applied around the modeled head, so that they could progress in perspective with the footage. The final shot was then digitally composited. The actual effect of the Alien exploding was achieved with a hollow creature model, moulded in flexible polyurethane. “It had a skin that was about three quarters of an inch thick,” said George Gibbs, head of the pyrotechnic effects team. “We packed it with green blood and bits and pieces, and laced up the body with light grain primer cord and then set it off.”

The CAT-scan reveal.

In Alien³, Ellen Ripley ultimately sacrifices herself as the newborn Alien Queen inside her bursts from her chest. She holds the creature tightly as both descend into the furnace to their demise. Ripley first discovered the presence of the creature when she decided to perform a CAT-scan on her body; and previously, the Alien had refused to even harm her. In the first versions of the film, the reveal was to take place at the beginning of the film. For this purpose, ADI had built a puppet of the Facehugger proboscis and Alien embryo, and a model of Ripley’s neck. The sequence was eventually cut. Additionally, the embryo was just another Alien embryo without defining characteristics, only to be later changed into a Queen. “It started off as just a creature embryo,” said Gillis, “and then it was later decided to make it a Queen embryo. So we had to go back and take a copy of our sculpture and make an appliance to give it the Queen carapace, the hood. It didn’t have the tiny arms like the adult Queen; but we thought, what the hell, maybe she grows those later.” Fincher had initially intended to reintroduce egg-morphing with his film, but the change from Warrior embryo to Queen embryo made the idea obsolete. ADI had started construction of the cocoons when the concept was ditched. “They were begun and then killed halfway through,” said Woodruff. “We were going to end up making about 20 of those cocoons, all vacuformed and stapled up. We started on two, and then the plug was pulled because Fincher’s idea was that the creature simply kills to eat. Actually we did finish one off for Fincher because he liked it so much. He had it on the set with him and would occasionally climb into it for inspiration. He called it his ‘thinking shell’.”

The Queenburster sculpture.

The Queen embryo is first seen in the CAT-scan sequence, for which a detailed, layered model portraying Ripley’s body and organs was sculpted and built. A larger than life scale model of the chest cavity hosting the Alien was also constructed. The latter featured a pulsating human heart and a rod puppet of the Alien embryo, complete with its own beating heart. “The embryo was made out of translucent urethane,” Woodruff told Fangoria, “and lit from behind gave it a glow that revealed the creature’s nervous [and circulatory] system, including its beating heart. We took the chestburster’s design and worked backwards, accentuating the head while making the arms and legs smaller.” Both elements were puppeteered by ADI crewmembers. An opening in the rear of the chest model was used to backlight the innards and the Alien, which were cast in translucent materials. Video Image Associates was hired for photography and image processing of the CAT-scan models, which were shot on a motion control system. The models were moved to suggest a rotation around the spinal axis — with “a sort of 3D, X-ray look,” according to crewmember Richard Hollander.

The Queenburster embryo model in construction. Notice the translucency, as well as the layered structure — with a complete nervous system and a beating heart.

In Fincher’s original concept, Ripley would have sacrificed herself without the Queen actually bursting from her during the fall. Producer David Giler however opposed the idea, and was adamant about having a pay-off sequence at the end of the film. Edlund recalled: “the original background had Ripley falling into what was solely white, and had her just dissolving into it. It was very stylistic and a much more cinematic ending. It was really quite beautiful, but David Giler came in and told us what he thought of it and that he felt the movie should be bookended by Ripley having a chestburster.” Edlund was otherwise satisfied by the change, saying that “to be honest, I liked the change. The audience kind of expects something like this and it was a payoff that wasn’t made with the original ending. The problem was that by the time the decision came down, we had only a little more than two weeks to shoot and composite three or four very complex bluescreen shots — important ones that affected the outcome of the movie and the way people would leave the theater thinking about it.” Fincher opposed the idea, but was forced to run with it. He said: “I never thought it was necessary to show the creature. We showed it to preview audiences and it was voted that we would do this. I was very much against this and dragged my feet and said, ‘I don’t believe in it, I don’t think it is important to see the Monster.’ No matter what cathartic experience we could expect from finally seeing the two strongest images from the first movie, the Chestburster and the character of Ripley, if we left the movie with her choking on her tongue then the audience would feel worse going out of the film than they do now. I said ‘whatever happens, she has to be a peace at the end. It has to be a sigh rather than gritting teeth and sweat.'” He also added that “it was vulgar. If she gets ripped apart before she falls into the fire, that’s not sacrifice, that’s janitorial service. To knowingly step into the void carrying this thing within her seemed to me to be more regal.” The original version of Ripley’s sacrifice was restored in the 2003 Assembly cut of the film.

The Queen bursts.

For the final Queen chestbursting sequence, ADI devised an animatronic extension that attached directly to Sigourney Weaver’s chest. “We had a whole effect built where Ripley’s rib cage was spreading and then the Queen bursts out,” Woodruff said. “The articulated rod puppet [of the Queen] had moving arms and snapping jaws.” The new mechanism eliminated the necessity for a false torso, which, combined with the set up for the sequence, would have hindered shooting. The sequence was actually a very late addition to the film, and was shot nearly a year after principal photography. “The first thing we had to do,” Edlund said, “was build a motion control seat for Sigourney that was split on the side so the camera could get in really close. We started on a tight close-up with her in an upright position. Then the seat tilted her back toward the bluescreen. When she was about perpendicular to the camera, the Chestburster was fired. Alec and Tom were on hand with nine of their Chestburster units. We went through seven of them — and after each take there was a major cleanup effort. It took a long time to get everything just right. Sigourney grabs the Chesbutrster and we go to a close-up and then back to a 14 inch rod puppet Ripley that Laine Liska made in one weekend and which we follow way, way down into the molten lead.” To enhance the dramatic weight of the scene, it was converted to a slow motion format in post-production.

The end of all things (until the sequel).

Woodruff commented on the making of the effects: “a lot of our work, especially the new stuff that we were really enthusiastic about, got cut out. Being creature guys, we almost always would like to see more. But we realize there is a point where you can show too much and it gives away the illusion. I think we achieved a good balance.” For more images of the Alien, visit the Monster Gallery. Previous: Part IIIa: Alien³, the Beginning Next: Part IV: Alien: Resurrection

Main articles:

• StarBeast — Part IIIa: Alien³, the Beginning
• StarBeast — Part IIIb: Alien³, the Dragon

Amalgamated Dynamics returned to provide the creature effects for the fourth chapter in the Alien series. The special effects artists were only allowed a tight production schedule. Tom Woodruff Jr. explained to Cinefex: “production told us that, due to Sigourney’s schedule, we would have to be ready to start shooting with a very short prep. We did a breakdown of the script and realized that the job was enormous — just way too big. And then that original shooting date came and went. Unfortunately, when they came back later, it was the same story. We were very worried about having enough time to do the job right. We knew that if we rushed it, the work would look bad, and we’d be the ones who ended up hurt. So we outlined some cuts, identified what was needed up front when Sigourney had to start, and pushed all the other stuff to later in the schedule. It was understood that we’d be showing up literally two days before shoots with very little time for tests or changes.” Gillis remarked on the changes in mentality of film productions: “preproduction schedules are getting shorter, and we’re expected to produce these creatures faster and faster. But artists can’t perform at top speed all the time. The constant demand to do everything quicker tends to burn people out. And in this digital age, with so much wonderful stuff possible on the computer, we can’t afford sloppy work. If we drop the ball, it looks bad for our art.” Alien: Resurrection was, at the time, the largest special effects project for which ADI was ever hired, and to accommodate the gargantuan body of work, the company had to move to a larger workspace and hire new crewmembers (arriving to a total of 70).

In Alien: Resurrection, the imperfect cloning process causes the Aliens to be “tainted with human DNA,” according to Woodruff, and to be fundamentally mutated when compared to precedent incarnations. For this reason, each iteration of the Alien life cycle was allowed to be redesigned within the estabilished aesthetic confines of the stages. “To me,” director Jean-Pierre Jeunet said, “it was very important to keep Giger’s style.”

Hive concept art by Sylvain Despretz.

The mutation influenced the secreted Alien hive material, which looked different when compared to the precedent iteration, seen in Aliens. Foam latex and silicone were used to create the new hive and cocoons. During the underwater chase, the survivors stumble upon a placenta-esque membrane, brought to the screen as a thin silicone layer.

The Viper Pit.

Both director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and special effects team wanted to offer the audience something that had never been seen before in an Alien film — something that eventually took the shape of the Viper Pit. Labeled by the director as such, the Viper Pit is a living, pulsating landscape of Gigerian textures whose actual nature was never detailed by the filmmakers.According to Sigourney Weaver, it was the single most memorable image in all four Alien films. In Alien: The Archive, the actress described it as “a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare of tentacles and protuberances.” The actress also said that it was a “sort of sensuous, sinuous world of parts and God help you if you’re there; and yet, at the same time [Ripley] wants to sort of surrender to it. To me it was, you know, all about life. It’s horrifying and [yet] you know you’re attracted to it. It’s fabulous stuff. But we had to fight of course for that scene, because it was not an action scene, it was all sort of this subliminal erotic stuff.”

The Viper Pit being built.

The Viper Pit scene, intended as an homage to Giger, replaced an otherwise undescribed action scene in the original script. The director, however, wanted the scene to have a different vibe than originally intended, and end in the “poetic” image of Ripley 8 being carried by an Alien. Jeunet recalled: “it was an opportunity to make a homage to Giger. I imagine the beautiful painting of Giger’s. I imagine this kind of nest.  it’s slimy, insane disgusting and more interesting than an action scene.” Woodruff otherwise told SFX Magazine: “it’s like an H.R. Giger painting come to life, and it’s enveloping her. It’s going to be a startling moment when you realize how all encompassing the aliens are to Ripley. It’s such a literal expression of the Alien all completely engulfing her.” A good portion of the Viper Pit’s structure and textures were based on Giger’s own painting Passagen-Tempel/Eingangspartie, a fact Giger himself pointed out in his second, outraged letter to Twentieth Century Fox — about his exclusion from the film’s credits. The same painting curiously enough had served as the inspiration for the original design of the Facehugger’s underside for the first film.

H.R. Giger’s Passagen-Tempel/Eingangspartie, which served as the base for the Viper Pit.

“The Viper Pit was important in terms of the story,” Woodruff said, “because it was something that we had never seen before, but it was always in your mind: ‘where would the Aliens take Ripley if they ever got hold of her?’ We knew we had to come across with something that was terrifying. What we ended up with was this large living landscape, a 20 by 20 feet set piece that basically came to life. It contained tentacles and tails of Aliens and a couple of Aliens in suits dragging Ripley through it.” The Viper Pit was built as an enormous, 20 by 20 foot set, with four soft polyfoam mats covered in an outer layer of foam latex. The Viper Pit required 25 to 30 puppeteers to maneuver (with levers) its thick outer layer of foam latex, and various components. A hole in its center (unceremoniously nicknamed “the sphincter”) allowed Weaver to sink beneath. Two performers in suits (Woodruff and Viniello) were also in the scene, among the twisting mass of organs, tendrils and other components.

Eggs!

Jeunet had felt that the Eggs in the precedent films had not been lively enough, and so instructed the ADI team to infuse more life into their form. “Early on, Jean Pierre commented to us that he felt that in the past films the Eggs looked a little mechanical,” Gillis said. “He felt that they just opened and that was it. So we took that as a challenge to improve upon the mechanisms of the Eggs. What [gave] the Egg about probably 25 points of movement, as opposed to the four the Eggs had had in the past. That included undulating movement on the edges of the petals so that even if the Egg was sitting still before it came to life you would start to see a little bit of movement, very subtle movement happening. The ‘body’ would squirm and twist.” The opening of the petals was actually devised in three different segments of the petals themselves. The Eggs were also fitted with air bladders, concentrated in an ‘organ’ that could be inflated and twisted. A silicone membrane through which the Facehugger could be glimpsed would split and peel away as the creature emerged. Three versions of the Eggs were built: hero Eggs, stunt Eggs, and partially mechanized Eggs that could house the puppeteers’ arms as they maneuvered the Facehugger hand puppets. The Eggs featured multiple layers of semitransparent silicone to simulate their organic quality. Jeunet was reportedly “absolutely ecstatic” about the final result, as said by Gillis.

The Facehugger design was cosmetically altered, but remained essentially anchored to the estabilished appearence of the creature. Several versions of this stage were built. Cable-maneuvered models were employed when fine finger articulation was needed. For the first time in the series, the Facehuggers were also built as hand puppets — allowing more movement in the body and in the ‘knuckles’ — with mechanical finger extensions. Stunt models were used for scenes where the Facehuggers had to be damaged or explode. In one sequence, a Facehugger attaches itself to Ripley 8; it was filmed in reverse, with the puppet initially positioned on Sigourney Weaver’s face, and then yanked off with a wire. The shot was also digitally enhanced to make the tail wrap around Weaver’s throat realistically.

The first Chestburster seen in the film is the immature Queen Chestburster surgically removed from Ripley 8 at the beginning of the film. For Alien: Resurrection, the Chestburster design was once again modified; other than cosmetic changes to the head silhouette, the tendons on the sides of the mouth were removed, and the disposition and size of the teeth was changed. For the extraction sequence, a false chest was created in a manner similar to the fake chests built for the previous films. In the set-up, Weaver positioned her body below the table surface with only her head, arms, shoulders and legs visible. Attached to her was a silicone fake chest, which extended from her collarbone to the knees. This prosthetic appliance featured a 5-inch thick layer of simulated bone and tissue, that covered the immature Queen Chestburster. The false chest was rigged to open when the surgical laser passed over it. Silicone tendons and veins are then cut, and the Alien creature (a life-size dummy) is finally extracted — still with a placenta-like sac attached to it. This specific effect was achieved with a thin silicone membrane.

The oversized Queen Chestburster animatronic on set.

Following the cut of a cord (or tendon) that connected the creature to Ripley, the Monster awakens and screeches in pain. In this scene, the Chestburster was portrayed by a larger-than-life scaled animatronic, set in oversized surgical tools matched with its proportions. It was built by Luke Khanlian, and it was cable-maneuvered. Subsequently, the Queen is placed in an incubator. Its feeble movements were achieved with a simple wire attached to the life-size dummy portraying the creature. Another scene involving a Chestburster was when Purvis forces Wren’s head against his chest, making the Chestburster inside him erupt through both his chest and the villain’s head. The Chestburster is first seen in Purvis’ throat — a sequence that used the oversized Chestburster inside a silicone throat, composited with another sequence of the camera entering Purvis’ mouth (which was filmed in reverse). When the Chestburster violently erupts from Wren’s head, the effect was achieved with an animatronic head, filled with a spring-loaded Chestburster, then replaced with a partially mechanized version.

The adult Alien was considerably redesigned, both in silhouette and textures — even though the ADI artists wanted to remain within the estabilished qualities of the character. Woodruff said: “in general, there’s only so much you can do within the general context of the Alien creature. There’s a lot that audiences expect of the Alien, and you want to deliver that; but you also want to give them something new.” As a result of the imperfect cloning process, the Aliens appear less biomechanical than before, and therefore fleshier — due to the human DNA. As shown in the film, several attempts were made to separate Alien and human DNA — with Ripley 8 and the Queen extracted from her being the first viable, though not flawless, result. “The cloning process would naturally be contaminated,” Gillis explained to Fangoria, “so the Aliens would have slightly messed-up DNA and be somewhat different. We thought this was the perfect opportunity for us to do something like give them longer arms and other subtle things. Our belief was that the design from the first movie was very successful, and you don’t want to fix something that ain’t broke. So all our effort went into improving it and making it look more organic, having more of a bio-mechanical exoskeleton feel, instead of going for the easier route of combining car parts into the clay before we cast it.”

Despretz’s illustration based on Cunningham’s concepts.

The Aliens also went through a number of other aesthetic changes. Woodruff said in the Unnatural Mutation featurette: “the biggest change that we did to the Alien was to make him seem more cunning or more vicious. In terms of the way to do that, designwise, was to look for more directional lines, sharper angles, and a lot of art elements that went into it. We had the dome, for example, [which] is more pointed this time around; the chin is more pointed and brought forward; we’ve exaggerated the shoulders; elements of the ribcage appear to stand out more and help reduce the forms around it. It’s like a process of [total] honing, refining something each time you go through it.”

These changes were also influenced by Jeunet and director of photography Darius Khondji’s own visual style. Returning from the previous incarnation was the dome, but the shape of the head was significantly elongated (by about 10 inches) and modified — making the front more streamlined, with a pointed chin, and the phallic silhouette of the back of the head more subtle, by elongating and flattening it on the underside. Also returning were the four back appendages, this time able to move independently. The Resurrection Aliens also have digitigrade legs, a trait which may or may not indicate that their phenotype displays latent Queen-like characteristics usually absent in Warriors. The leg structure was proposed because the digital effects could actually allow to properly portray it. Jeunet recalled: “I remember they proposed to put the legs in three parts, a little bit like a frog, because this time we could see the legs. It was the first time because [the CGI could allow it].”

Maquette by Jordu Schell, showing the new tail design.

In order to portray the Aliens’ miraculous — or ominous — adaptive abilities, the filmmakers decided to show them for the first time swimming underwater. Visual effects supervisor Erik Henry explained: “one of the early things we talked about was — what happens when the Alien [is born] and, you know, they grow up so fast, and they’ve never been in water before? And we wanted to make sure that people realized that these guys were so bad that when they encountered something like a new environment — water being one — they immediately knew what to do. They could breathe underwater; and they [could swim] like experts immediately. There wasn’t any trepidation, ‘is the water cold?’ or anything like that. They had to be real badasses. It’s what the whole series is about.” To portray the new swimming ability, ADI added a laterally-flattened, fin-like extension at the end of the tail. Gillis elaborated: “we let the fact that they swam influence the design of the new Warrior creatures to a degree — so we put a paddle-like blade at the end of the tail.” The new trait was based on a crocodile’s tail. The spines along the vertebrae, down to the tail, were also increased, because first versions of the story featured the Aliens swimming and emerging from the surface — thus exposing said details. Those scenes were, however, removed. Completing the Aliens was a new colour scheme based on sepia tones, with textures and subtle details based on Giger’s paintings. Chris Cunningham’s final creature design was sculpted by Jordu Schell in maquette form.

The final maquette.

The Aliens were built as a series of practical models, ranging from suits to dummies. The full-size sculptures for the suits were based on the main performer — Woodruff. Accompanying him in scenes where more than one Alien was needed onscreen at once were Mark Viniello and David Prior. ADI was able to give the new creature suits several structural improvements: other than new kinds of foam latex and silicone used for the skins, the head’s weight was reduced and more evenly distributed to reduce performer fatigue and allow more fluid movements. Sculptural detail in the Alien’s neck concealed two eyeholes covered in black screen cloth, allowing the performer to see the surroundings. Both stunt versions and articulated versions of the heads and suits were built; the hero heads were either cable-actuated or radio-controlled — the latter were also implemented with pneumatically-controlled ejectable inner jaws (built by John Lundberg). The tongues, at times (such as for Perez’s death sequence), were used in combination with fake skulls and other body portions. Tubes that ran down the back of the suit and out of the tail mount provided both methocel (for the saliva) and dry ice vapour for a visible breath function.  The vapour breath “gave it an extra foetid quality,” Gillis said.

The hero suits featured cable-operated finger extensions. Separate, insert mechanical hands were also built. The appendages sprouting from the Alien’s back were animatronic units, able to move independently from each other. This last feature, mechanized by James Hirahara, was only displayed when one of the Aliens emerges from the water during the chase in the second act. All suits featured harnesses to attach the tails, allowing the weight of the extensions to be carried more comfortably than before. These harnesses were designed for specific types of tails, three of which were made: a tail that emerged straight out of the back (for walking scenes); one that aligned with the spine (for swimming or climbing scenes); a floppy tail maneuverable with wires; and a self-supporting tail devised with laminated polypropylene sheets inside it to support its structure. The last type could also offer a realistic whipping motion with just a swinging motion of the hips — something never seen onscreen. The same tail was also used as an insert model for scenes where it is seen whipping across frame.

Whereas the suits featured no leg extensions — which could not convey the organic movement of the Aliens’ legs given the technological constraints of the time — ADI built several full models of the creatures. Several of them portrayed dead Aliens; one such model portrayed the Alien torn apart by its cage mates — who exploited its acid blood to escape. An elevator device directly under the simulated guts was lowered in order to create the illusion that the acid blood was actually corroding the floor of the cage. In collaboration with All Effects, ADI also constructed wax versions of the Aliens for the underwater sequence, and wax heads and bodies rigged with explosives to portray Aliens hit by bullets or explosives. An additional full-size Alien featured a mechanized tail and could be pulled underwater — with a wire — to simulate the swimming Alien.

A last touch to the Aliens was a thick coat of slime; compared to the precedent creatures, the Resurrection Aliens were covered in larger quantities of KY Jelly, this time mixed with other materials. “Rather than just putting a glazing coat of slime on the Alien, we mixed up a viscous slime that made the creature look like it was under half an inch of mucus — much wetter and sleeker than in the past.” This decision was primarily dictated by Khondji, who wanted the Aliens to capture and reflect light in determinate manners. “I love what Darius did with the slime,” Gillis explained in a commentary to the film. “He really put a lot of care into shooting, and designing the lighting [of the film]. He at times built almost a ‘cage of fluorescence’ around the Alien, so that you get a million of little [reflections on] the slime. He kept going back to us, asking for thicker slime, because the stuff we had used in the other movies was too runny for him — he wanted a quarter of an inch build up, so we started going for a slime that was almost like gel; and it really had a different look.” Gillis also explained to Fangoria: “the shapes [of the Aliens] are bolder and a bit more aggressive, because those shapes read in a different way on screen due to the thicker version of methylcellulose we used. The way Darius filmed the Aliens was like product photographt. He used a lot of fluorescents with filters over them that are just out of frame: they made an incredible reticulated pattern all over the creatures, and the thick slime made them that much more reflective. It gave the Aliens a lot more kick; it looks like they’re covered in a half-inch of mucus. It’s really gorgeous, and a lot of that is Darius Khondji and his craftmanship.”

The first suit test.

The Alien design was overseen by Jeunet– from Chris Cunningham’s concept designs to Jordu Schell’s maquettes. However, the ADI team wanted to keep the full-size Alien suit a surprise until it was finished — and the director did not see it until the day of the first test footage, when the suit was finalized. Jeunet recalled: “I remember the first day when we saw the Alien on the stage during the test. It was Tom inside the suit, and he appeared on the stage. There was complete silence. We had goosebumps — it was amazing!” VFX supervisor Pitof added that “it looked like a real Alien.”

On set.

Filming the Alien suits posed concerns on how to precisely frame them. Visual effects supervisor Pitof recalled: “to disguise the fact that it was a man in a suit, the trick was to shoot the Alien just right and keep it moving. We framed the shots so that we were always cutting at about mid-torso, and we kept the Alien in darkness. Because the arms looked so much like human arms — with their motion determined by the actor inside the suit — they were shown only in quick cuts or held back and at his side.” Despite that, Jeunet knew that he wanted to show the Aliens more clearly than in the first two films. “In the first Alien,” he said, “the most interesting thing is that you can’t see the Alien itself. But after three movies, I thought, ‘now we know the Alien. We can show more because the surprise is finished now.'”

The most complex scene to film was the underwater chase, for which Woodruff actually had to move underwater whilst wearing the suit. The hero head of the suit was first fitted with a radio control mechanism, whose range was however too short — for this reason, it was replaced with a cable-controlled head. Woodruff elaborated: “my face was inside the neck of the Alien, so there was no place to put any kind of eye wear that would allow me to see underwater. And there was no room for any kind of breathing apparatus because the neck was just an eighth of an inch thick across my face. All I had was a slit in the throat where I could put an external regulator in my mouth. I would go underwater and be led into place. There was an underwater speaker to direct me. Then, as the cameras rolled, I would take the regulator out of my mouth and hand it to Rod Francis, the divemaster, who was positioned just out of frame. The moment they yelled ‘cut!’ I would put out my hand, Rod would place the regulator in it, and I would put it back in my mouth. We just got into a rhythm. I had to get to a point where I trusted the people who were to support me. If I’d thought about it more, my concern could have gotten in the way of my job. It was difficult enough for me just to perform underwater  — to move that big head or hold it steady — without also worrying about safety issues.”

On set between takes for the underwater sequence.

To portray the Alien grabbing Hillard by the ankle and dragging her away, Woodruff was secured to a ratchet mechanism — built by All Effects — and to Kim Flowers’ ankle, allowing the two to be dragged backwards by the mechanism. Woodruff explained: “I was locked off in the cable rig and I couldn’t get out of it quickly, so we put a small bottle of air inside the suit, which would have given me about five minutes, if I needed it — but I never felt in danger. Had things gotten bad, there were enough divers that somebody would have been there to help.” Most of the footage shot with the suit did not live up to expectations in the end, and was replaced with digital shots. Visual effects supervisor Erik Henry said: “the Alien had many spectacular highlights when shot on stage, and those lent to its eerie and beautiful look; but when we got to it underwater, all of those highlights disappeared, and it tended to look dull. The details suddenly seemed very sculptural and the colours washed out. Water just wasn’t very flattering to the character.” Only a limited number of shots with the suit survived the final cut of the film.

Digital Aliens.

For the first time in the Alien series, in fact, digital models were used to portray the Aliens in certain sequences. Blue Sky Studio was chosen for the digital creature effects, based on their work on Joe’s Apartment — for which they had provided the film’s dancing cockroaches. Kerry Shea, visual effects coordinator, explained to VFX HQ: “we were looking for Alien effects that were sort of insect-like, and [Blue Sky] had done such a terrific job on the cockroaches in that film.” Reference material from ADI was used to build the digital Alien model. Full-size castings of the head and tail were provided and scanned. Technological constraints of the time only allowed them to be 3D templates for the digital model, due to their sheer level of detail. For the rest of the body, a half-scale painted casting of the left side of it — sculpted by Steve Wang –was provided by ADI, and simply used as reference. The digital model was, in fact, built from scratch by modelers Mike DeFeo, Shaun Cusick, and Alexander Levenson. Once the model was constructed, painters texture-mapped the colours in the ADI reference sheet onto the model, degrading them to match the worn appearence of the suit in the live-action footage.

Sculpting the reference maquette for the CGI team.

Reference footage of various kinds of animals, including felines and insects, was used as reference for the animation of the Aliens. Footage of Woodruff in the Alien suit performing on set was also used. Blue Sky animation Jan Carlée elaborated: “I put together a reference tape of different animals walking or swimming, and presented that to Jean Pierre, Pitof and Erik, and we discussed the pros and cons of each. For example, in underwater scenes, the Aliens’ movements are kind of a composite between a sea iguana and a shark, with the shark element adding menace and a predator-like behaviour. In addition, Pitof put together an animatic that combined the storyboards and the live-action plates so that everyone knew how large the creature should be in the scenes.” The main swimming animation was based on that of a marine iguana, as well as alligators. “Jan [Carlée] at Blue Sky had a lot of great ideas as to how the Aliens should move underwater,” Henry said, “and gave the production a lot of options. He showed up one day with a videotape of a sea iguana swimming, from a National Geographic video. The way that it moved through the water was oddly elegant, which is precisely what the director was looking for.” Henry elaborated: “we had something that we knew could swim elegantly and we also knew that when the time came it would be very violent and attack.” The artist mainly referred to the rapid motion crocodilians perform with their tails when ambushing prey. “We came up with the idea that when the alien committed to attacking someone that its tail would violently thrash, just like an alligator would when it’s attacking its prey,” he added. Animating underwater creatures was an exciting prospect for the artists at Blue Sky. “We had an opportunity to pull off some effects that have never really been done before,” Kopelman said. “I can’t remember seeing any other underwater CG creatures in a film before.”

Animators Steve Talkowski, James Bresnahan, Doug Dooley, Nina Bafaro and Jesse Sugarman developed walk and swim cycles, also determining the movements of the skeleton and the muscular contractions under different conditions and in different movements. Renderings of the digital Aliens were achieved with suitable resolutions for each shot — with the most ‘data-intensive’ being the scenes set underwater and in close-up. Visual effects supervisor Mitch Kopelman said to Cinefex: “the high-res model that we had was about 85 megabytes of data, which was the most complex and detailed model that we’ve ever made. On top of that, the close-up model required something on the order of 300 megabytes of texture maps. Fortunately, the majority of the shots were a little more reasonable, so we could do them fairly economically, without sacrificing image quality.” According to Kopelman, the Aliens were the most complex digital creatures Blue Sky had to create up until that time. Rhett Benatt, David Esneault and Thane Hawkins were among the compositing and lighting technicians.

Digital Aliens were used both on land and underwater — but, as already mentioned, the latter proved to be the most complex shots to achieve. Kopelman explained: “the underwater stuff presented a unique challenge to us. There were a lot of issues we had to deal with, such as the interaction of the Alien with various set pieces. We used volumetric lighting techniques for shadow effects. There was also the effect of caustic reflections from the rippling water surface creating little strands of light cascading across objects below.” In order for the Aliens to be inserted convincingly into the environment, air bubbles had to be inserted into the shot and interact realistically with the swimming Aliens. Different layers of digital bubbles were created to interact with the Warriors coming towards the camera, in order to mantain a correct depth relation. For the scene where one of the Aliens is actually hit by Johner’s weapon, “we set up a black, wax Alien that was blown up underwater by the special effects team led by Eric Allard — it was rigged to blow up just as the little grenade that was wired and aimed directly at the wax Alien hit the creature,” Henry explained. “We also shot a clean background plate of the underwater set and of course, the animation elements provided by Blue Sky.” The number of underwater shots was also increased when footage of the practical suit was mostly deemed unsatisfying. Techniques to help conceal the digital nature of the Aliens included adding multiple atmosphere layers, as well as increasing the number of bubbles to certain shots. When the Alien chasing the survivors violently bursts from the water and grasps the ladder, the original plate was shot with a full-size black Alien dummy with cables, launched with a pneumatic ratchet and pulleys. The dummy was then replaced with its digital counterpart, animated by John Siczewicz. Digital Alien acid spit was also employed after practical tests at ADI were deemed unsatisfying.

Ripley 8 is carried to the heart of the Aliens’ hive after her fall into the Viper Pit. It is there that she finds the Alien Queen, in the throes of giving birth to a blasphemous hybrid of human and Alien — the Newborn. The same creature is seen early in the film, when Perez, Gediman and Wren go to inspect it in its initial confinement. With time and budget constraints, ADI had to find a way to bring the Queen to the screen respecting those two demands. Woodruff explained: “the Queen is featured prominently in the script, but we didn’t have enough time to make a new one. They had a certain window to shoot in order to work with Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder’s schedules and to make the release date, so we had to investigate getting whatever pieces we could of the Queen to save time.”

The team had found some of the original moulds of the Aliens Queen, which had actually been thrown away in a storage bin, whilst making the effects for Alien³. By the time of Resurrection, however, they were in almost unusable conditions. “The moulds had literally been thrown into a huge steel bin,” Woodruff said. “They were silicone rubber with a fiberglass jacket, and the silicone and fiberglass were shredded to pieces. I believe what happened was that somebody wanted an Alien Queen for themselves and had pulled a fiberglass copy, and the remaining pieces were shipped to Distortions, a company in Colorado that was manifacturing big polyfoam versions for people to buy. That’s where we tracked the moulds down, and we paid to have them shipped to us here in Los Angeles, but they were useless. There was little of them left that could even be pieced together.” Most of the Queen’s body had to be resculpted starting from what could be casted from them; as such, it appears cosmetically altered. For example, the hands of the inner arms have two opposable thumbs each — a trait which was present in the miniature models built for Aliens, but carefully hidden in order not to conflict with the full-size Queen, which only had one opposable thumb on each hand of the inner arms.

Fortunately enough for ADI, whereas the original body could not be retrieved, the head of the Aliens Queen had actually been salvaged in Bob Burns’ collection of film memorabilia — along with a number of other moulds. Woodruff recalled: “we got the head from Bob and gave it a new, detailed paint job, refabricated a body and did new sculptures for the body and neck. We also used some moulds that we found which were still intact. Had it not been for Bob Burns, though, there would not have been a Queen in the movie, because there wouldn’t have been enough time to get it done.” The new colour scheme, which included sepia tones and a light fogging of pearlescent blue, was devised and applied by Dan Brodzik and Mike Larrabee.

Unlike the Aliens Queen, however, the Resurrection Queen would be a fully animatronic character, positioned on an elevated set. Mechanized by Luke Khanlian, the creature was powered by extensive hydraulic mechanisms. Aquadraulics — which employ water instead of hydraulic oil — were used for certain parts of the body, such as the neck and head. Limbs and other components were cable-maneuvered. Tubes running to the head were used to pump slime and dry ice vapour in the same manner as the other Aliens.

H.R. Giger, the original Alien designer, was not originally credited for the film (allegedly due to “an oversight”). In a letter to Fox, he said: “the creatures in Alien: Resurrection are even closer to my original Alien designs than the ones which appear in Aliens and Alien³. The film also resurrects my original designs for the other stages of the creature’s life-cycle, the Eggs, the Facehugger and the Chestburster. Alien: Resurrection is an excellent film. What would it look like without my Alien life-forms?” The artist would later claim that the new Aliens “looked like turds.”

The filmmaking team was satisfied with the results on Resurrection‘s effects work. Henry said: “there was a desire on the part of Jean-Pierre, Pitof, and myself to lay money issues aside and just make the [effects] look as real as possible. And we definitely made the right decision on who to go to for these effects. Their hearts were in the right place — and, fortunately, so were their talents.”

Special thanks to Andrea Pusceddu, who has provided additional images for this article.

For more images of the Aliens, visit the Monster Gallery.

For a look at the failed Ripley clones and the Newborn, visit the article: Aberrations of the Auriga [COMING SOON].

Main Articles:

• StarBeast — Part IV: Alien: Resurrection
• Aberrations of the Auriga [COMING SOON]

Necronom IV.

When Alien: Resurrection was theatrically released, there was no actual credit given to H.R. Giger — neither in the opening credits nor in the end credits. The omission, allegedly “a genuine oversight,” was corrected in home video releases — especially after the following letters, sent by Giger to Twentieth Century Fox.

To: Twentieth Century Fox
From: H.R. Giger

November 13, 1997

The Alien Quartet has, from the very beginning, contained my unique and personal style. For the first film ALIEN, I was awarded an Oscar for “Best Achievement for Visual Effects”. In ALIENS, a film I was not asked to work on, I still received a screen credit for “Original Alien Design”. On ALIEN 3, I was cheated out of the Oscar nomination received by that film because 20th Century Fox gave me the credit, “Original Alien Design” again, instead of “Alien 3 Creature Design”, as it was my rightful title in accordance to my contract and the work I had performed on the film. In 1976 I had completed two paintings, “Necronom IV” and “Necronom V”, in which two long-headed creatures appeared. In 1977 these paintings, were published in my book, NECRONOMICON, by Sphinx Verlag, Basel, in German. It was in this version of the book that Ridley Scott, in his search for a credible Alien creature, came across these two paintings and decided, on them for the full-grown Alien, using the words “That’s it!” The statement has been graciously repeated by Ridley Scott in almost every interview about his work on ALIEN. The creatures in ALIEN:RESURRECTION are even closer to my original Alien designs than the ones which appear in ALIENS and ALIEN 3. The film also resurrects my original designs for the other stages of the creature’s life-cycle, the Eggs, the Facehugger and the Chestburster. ALIEN:RESURRECTION is an excellent film. What would it look like without my Alien life-forms? In all likelihood, all the sequels to ALIEN would not even exist! The designs and my credit have been stolen from me, since I alone have designed the Alien. So why does not Fox give me the credit I rightfully earned? As for those responsible for this conspiracy: All I can wish them is an Alien breeding inside their chests, which might just remind them that the “Alien Father” is H.R.Giger.

To: Twentieth Century Fox
From: H.R. Giger

December 19, 1997

However Twentieth Century Fox is maneuvering its way through the legal issues in order to keep HR Giger far away from proper credit and profit, one thing is certain: the Biomechanical style of HR Giger in any Alien sequel is obvious to everyone. No future Alien copyist or imitator will be able to hide that fact. The Alien Lifeforms, environments, the whole Alien world is created and copyrighted under the law by HR Giger. This is confirmed in the Academy Award of 1980 for “Best Achievement for Visual Effects.” I reserve all rights to my own intellectual property. The copyrights granted to Fox are only for the uses which have been contracted and paid for. In regards to the new Alien development called the Newborn, it is just another Giger design, which you will realize when you look beneath the shell of the adult Alien head, as seen in the photos on page 60 of my book. The human skull under the face has been exposed and the creature’s sinewy body has been contaminated by deformed features. Fox, however, tries to deny HR Giger’s influence. No objection was ever voiced to the title of the book named after its mentor “HR Giger’s Alien”, published by Sphinx in Basel and Big O in London. It would have been wise for Fox to add my name into the main and final credits, immediately, five weeks ago. For every day that passes without this embarassing wrong-doing being fixed the damage grows. Since Fox refused my request for a screen credit, I have received hundreds of e-mail messages from Alien fans, all of them stating what an outrage it is that hundreds of million dollars are made on Giger’s Alien but that his name could not be mentioned among the several hundred other names, even in the credits. Tom Woodruff’s Alien design style is simply “HR Giger’s Biomechanical”. Woodruff, an excellent effect specialist, said about his “Alien Viper’s Nest”: “It is like an HR Giger’s painting come to life.” Yes it is. It has been newly stolen from my book “Necronomicon”. As photographed from above, you will see that it is a section of my painting “Passagen-Tempel / Eingangspartie” (Passage Temple / entrance section) Work # 262. This painting existed three years before the first Alien movie had even started to be filmed. During my participation on the first Alien, Fox was permitted to use my books as a guide and my book “Necronomicon” was Ridley Scott’s bible. There can be no Alien sequel, not even in the future, that is not influenced by H R Giger’s Biomechanical style.

Alien Vs. Predator was born as a successful comic book series by Dark Horse, which pitted the two iconic film Monsters against each other within an organic backstory. When the film version was being written, Dan O’Bannon, the original writer of Alien, suggested to the filmmakers a new twist on the relationship between the two titular creatures. The idea was — for perhaps obvious reasons — discarded. O’Bannon told Fangoria: “the most obvious creative thing you have to solve on a movie like this is: what’s the connection between the species? What they came up with was that Predators bred Aliens as part of a complicated ritual. But my idea was, what if the Predators are the Aliens? In the first Alien movie, there’s a part in the end when they blow up the ship. And it still has one stage left, and my idea was that if it metamorphosed one more time it would have become the Predator, but they didn’t use it. It was good, though! My one great idea for them and they didn’t use it.” Despite that, O’Bannon still ultimately enjoyed the final product.

An Alien discusses his paycheck with director Paul W.S. Anderson on the set of the film.

When Alien Vs. Predator finally began its creation process, the task of bringing the Aliens to the screen fell on Amalgamated Dynamics, the company that had created the effects for the two preceding Alien films. ADI was restrained by an incredibly tight schedule and only five months to complete the creature effects for filming, which by itself would only last three months. “We went to ADI ’cause Tom was the guy in the suit,” director Paul W.S. Anderson said. “It’s amazing when you see a great performer, and the suit comes to life. He’s part of the Alien family; he had to be the guy in the suit. I was insistent on getting ADI to do the Aliens, because that kind of experience you can’t buy, no matter how much money you throw at it — the experience of having done three Alien movies — they’re the guys. Especially given that I wanted to do probably the most complicated and expensive man-in-a-suit movie ever made, it had to be all about performance.”  Supporting the practical creatures with digital versions of the characters were multiple visual effects companies, including MPC and Cinesite. Those companies were also given a short time to complete post-production — under four months.

The requirements for the film were numerous: ADI had to bring to the screen both titular creatures — and creating the Aliens meant building each stage of their life cycle. The special effects company worked in strict collaboration with visual effects supervisor John Bruno; they all agreed that the film should use as many practical effects as possible. “One of our goals in this,” Tom Woodruff Jr. said, “secondary to just coming up with cool-looking creatures and satisfying the needs of the show and the director, was to make a real fanfare on behalf of animatronics, rubber work, men in suits — creature stuff that has sort of been pushed aside in favour of the digital aspect, which has really happened in the last few years.” Bruno himself added: “the first thing I did [on Alien Vs. Predator] was come up with this rule: ‘do everything for real, and what we can’t will become an effect. But that effect could be a puppet, a model, a miniature or CGI. Using a puppet or a model means it’s a practical element within the shot, and that all you’re doing is compositing other things into a real lighting situation, which is quicker to complete.” Anderson concurred: “John hates visual effects. His first rule is, ‘well, do we have to do it as an effect?’ You know, if he could go out, capture a Predator, and breed a couple of Aliens, that would be the movie we would make. We would all be wearing armoured suits and we would be shooting a documentary.”

For Alien Vs. Predator, a new hive set was built based on the original Aliens design; materials for its construction included foam latex, silicone, and fiberglass. With only five months to complete their effects work, ADI had to save bduget and time however possible. For that very purpose, the company recycled a number of moulds used in the production of Alien: Resurrection. As in the preceding films, every stage was carefully completed with KY Jelly on set before filming.

The Eggs were among the reused moulds, and as such remained substantially unaltered in their structure. They were repainted with greenish highlights by Justin Raleigh and David Selvadurai. A total of twenty Eggs was built, between seven hero cable-operated Eggs and several stunt Eggs. Hollow versions of the Eggs allowed puppeteers, as in the last film, to animate the Facehugger hand puppets from below the Eggs themselves.

The Facehugger was also among the reused moulds. A single tail sculpture was used for both the Facehuggers and Chestbursters. Several versions of this stage were built and painted by David Selvadurai and other painters. A hero Facehugger, with both servomotor and cable-maneuvered functions, was fully articulated and also featured an ejecting proboscis. Several stunt versions were also built. In scenes where the Facehuggers had to perform actions impossible to achieve with practical models, they were actually portrayed by digital models. Cinesite was chosen for this task, as crewmembers Ivor Middleton and David Rey had successfully animated the spiders for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; due to the similarity in the characters’ bodily language, the choice seemed ideal. The CGI model was obtained by scanning a wax version of the Facehugger, specifically provided by ADI for the purpose. The same wax model was used to shoot reference lighting footage in order to properly render and light the digital Facehuggers.

The Chestburster was another reused design. The creature was built as a number of puppets, including a ram-rod puppet used for Rousseau’s chestbursting sequence, stunt versions, and a hero cable-operated puppet seen in the scene where the Scar Predator snaps a Chestburster’s neck. All the different versions’ skin was cast in silicone, as opposed to the foam latex used for all the other stages of the creatures in the film.

Stephane Paris’ digital Alien.

As with the Egg and Facehugger, the adult Alien design was fundamentally recycled from Alien: Resurrection; ADI reused pre-existing moulds that had been built for the suits of the previous film. Woodruff explained in AvP: The Creature Effects of ADI: “there simply wasn’t time to build unnecessary pieces, and [the director] knew exactly what he needed and what he didn’t. Fortunately, Paul loved the Alien as we had realized it for Alien Resurrection, but asked for a few changes.” Cosmetic design alterations were in fact applied to the character.

Original Resurrection hand design on the left; revised AvP version on the right.

On a structural level, the Aliens’ hands were bulked up, in order to appear more weapon-like. “Per [Anderson’s] request,” Woodruff continues, “we made the spindly hands of the Alien into meatier, longer-taloned weapons that looked more formidable next to the Predator.” Peter Farrell resculpted the Alien hands into the new configuration. This change mirrored the upgrades in the Predators’ armour designs, which were changed for the same reason — the Hunters had to fight Aliens. The Aliens’ legs as portrayed by the suits were also never completely seen in the previous film, making them a new design as far as the films went. Another initial design addition was a flat back appendage, reminiscent of the ‘head-rest’ appendage found in the original Alien design. None of the screen-used Aliens, however, do display this trait.

Whereas the Aliens in the previous two films had been painted with sepia tones-based schemes, Anderson wanted his Aliens — which he defined as “biomechanical, insectoid creatures” — to blend with the environment of the Pyramid. Jet black tones were as such used as the primary foundation of the new colour scheme. “Paul Anderson wanted to return to the deeper blacks of the original film,” Woodruff said. “Production designer Richard Bridgland’s pyramid interiors were black, obsidian-like blocks, and the Aliens needed matching tones in order to integrate into their surroundings.” In order to enhance the creatures in the shadows, “a reflective silver highlight scheme was devised to help define the shapes of the Alien. Some gold and subtle blue tones were also introduced to avoid a totally monochromatic look. By the time slime was applied to the suit on set, the distinctive Alien imagery was complete.”

The adult Aliens were built as a series of hero suits and stunt suits. The hero suits featured radio-controlled animatronic heads. An innovation that helped the suit performance was the implementation of an advanced wire rig system that enabled the performer — Woodruff, usually — to control his own enhanced movements. “we had done early tests with a wire rig, a temporary harness that we built at the shop, and came up with a bungee supporting system, which is something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. I’ve done wirework in the past, and what I always thought was missing was the ability to let me, as a performer, dictate my own movement, rather than have a second set of hands pulling on a cable to give the creature lift. It’s very hard to balance those two things — my movement with what somebody else is interpreting as the right time to give me some lift. This really took the edge off of that, and basically amplified the momentum of what I was doing. There were plenty of times when it didn’t work, but there were really sweet moments where it all fell into place.”

Concept art of Grid.

In Alien Vs. Predator, as a result of being trapped in a Predator net, one of the Aliens is scarred with a grid pattern on its head and shoulders. Quite in fact, the character was aptly named ‘Grid’ by the filmmakers. The pattern was thoroughly explored in concept art. “The size and pattern of the Predator’s metallic net which cuts into Grid’s carapace,” Woodruff said, “as well as what would be an appropriate amount of oozing acid blood, all had to be determined in the design phase.” Grid was portrayed by one of the Alien suits, appropriately cut and completed with oozing blood. To portray the effect of the Predator net cutting through the creature’s head, a number of insert heads was built, rigged with additional tubes that would pump fake blood and smoke out of the head’s surface. The ‘Grid’ insert heads were mechanized by Nevada Smith.

The hydraulic Alien on set.

Unlike in previous films, however, ADI also built a fully mechanized creature — a hydraulic animatronic. This version of the Alien had a range of movement impossible to obtain with the suit version of the creature “A long-term dream of ours,” Woodruff said, “has been to create an Alien Warrior that was completely mechanical. On AVP, we finally had that opportunity. The goal for this particular character was to build in movements impossible to achieve with a performer in a suit. The torso had increased ranges of movement, as did the neck, which was capable of turning the head 180 degrees around to look directly behind it. The neck also had a cobra-like striking ability, and the head carried a pneumatic tongue. This sophisticated puppet was performed with the help of a computer motion control system, which not only aided in performance, but was a safety must for operating in close quarter combat with a performer in a Predator suit.”

Woodruff added: “it is basically a duplicate of the man-in-a-suit creature, but it gave us the ability to narrow the waist, to lengthen some of the other proportions, to make it a little spindly and more insect-like than you can get with a guy in a costume.” The Alien required a total of five to six puppeteers to operate: one for the head, two for the body, two for the arms, and a sixth crewmember that checked constantly the transmission of data from the controllers to the animatronic itself. A motion control computer system also allowed the crewmembers to record specific movements, refine them, or increase or decrease the speed of certain functions. The crew was in complete control of the puppet. In addition to the hydraulic Alien, insert heads were built, as well as models portraying dead Aliens — including one that is dissected by a Predator, revealing the Alien’s brain. Another recycled effect from Alien: Resurrection was an exploding Alien head — portraying the effects of a nail gun fired by the main character.

The ‘brain’ Alien dummy on set.

In filming the Alien suits, “you have to be careful that you don’t reveal it as just being a guy in a suit,” Gillis said. “I don’t know if you had this reaction, but in the first film, which was brilliant and had me completely riveted, when I saw it head to toe hanging outside the spaceship, I realized, ‘oh, it’s an actor.’ So we tried to be very careful not to reveal men in suits from any wider than waist-up, just to avoid the guy with floppy feet. That’s where the CGI comes in, to give us the dynamics over long leaps or runs that maybe a performer in a suit can’t quite do.”

The digital counterparts for the Aliens, used for complex scenes such as big leaps or long shots of the Aliens scuttling on the floor, were provided by Moving Pictures Company (MPC). Based on scans of the suits, the digital Alien Warrior model was built by Stephane Paris, the lead CGI modeler for the film. Various versions of the model were devised, from a ‘hero’ detailed version to increasingly less-defined versions — for scenes such as the flashback, where a swarm of thousands of Aliens is seen. “My approach was very simple,” Paris told 3DVF.com. “I wanted to be as faithful as possible to the creature sculptures [I had received from] Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis, both in details and the general shape of the characters. We made ​​some changes to the Aliens, to make them a little more ‘beast-like’ because the costumes gave them proportions that were too human-like.” In-keeping with the intention to use as many practical effects as possible, most of the times MPC only employed digital tails as extensions of the suits shot on set. The Alien feet, never filmed in close-up, were also modified and made more articulate. To portray the Gridalien, the Alien model was appropriately resculpted by Max Wood.

The Alien Queen also returned in Alien Vs. Predator, and was virtually the only complete design overhaul introduced in the film. “Early in the design process, it was decided that some artistic license could be taken with the Queen,” Woodruff said. “Experimenting with loose maquettes, Akihito Ikeda added various spikes and other forms to her carapace. The final design featured subtle yet distinctive changes from the Queens in previous films.” The final Queen design was allegedly also inspired by a “spiral-like” Queen head design found in an issue of Dark Horse’s comic book run. Regarding the final design, which added thorn-like structures on the crown of the Queen, Woodruff asserted that “the added spiny structures match her prickly personality.”

Ikeda’s proposed Queen crown designs. Final film design is on the bottom.

The textures throughout the body were also heavily redesigned, but always based on Giger’s work. “In keeping with the idea that the Aliens do change from film to film,” Woodruff said, “and that there is a kind of morphing quality to these creatures depending on their surroundings or their strain, we did make the Queen’s head a bit more ornate and decorative, just to sort of say this is Paul’s Queen. It was a nice, elegant approach, especially considering that the body had been substantially resculpted and is a more intricate and cleaner design.” Changing the practical approach also meant that some of the proportions of the Queen’s body could also be altered. “We really took advantage on the fact that we were pulling those two stuntmen out of the body,” Woodruff said, “so the waist was very narrow and wasplike, with a nice big ribcage; she has a great profile. There was so much movement packed into this tiny little waist.” The thin waist was inspired by James Cameron’s early Alien Queen concepts for Aliens. The Egg sac was instead designed and sculpted by Steve Koch.

Woodruff poses with the unfinished Queen.

Regarding the Queen’s colour scheme, “we chose to go back toward her original color,” Woodruff said, “and once again created a color scheme of rich blacks in the deeps and blues and silvers for highlights.” In post-production, some of Anderson’s sensibilities regarding the Queen’s design changed. Her feet, which had been designed by ADI to mimic the original’s, were changed into a four-fingered configuration reminiscent of the foot design in the Alien Warriors. In addition, per Anderson’s request, the digital version of the Queen was enlarged — from 16 feet of height to about 20. The change in height was mostly achieved with bigger legs, as the size of the Queen’s head, arms, and upper body appears to match the practical version. All of the aforementioned changes were just applied to the digital Queen model.

“The most formidable creature in the film was also the most formidable one to design and build,” said Woodruff of the Alien Queen. Once approved, Ikeda’s 1:4 scale sculpture of the Queen’s torso and lower body was digitally scanned; from the resulting model, a computerized milling machine produced a full-size foam sculpture, which was then refined by Andy Schoneberg, David Selvadurai and Mike O’Brien. The same sculptors worked on the other portions of the body — the tail, the legs, and the arms — which were sculpted by hand. The sculpture of the Queen’s head started from a cast of the original Aliens creature, which was sculpted over with the new design by David Selvadurai, who based the sculpture on Ikeda’s original maquette. Tim Martin sculpted the Queen’s tongue. The full-size Queen was cast in foam latex and fiberglass, and was painted by Ginger Anglin, Mike Larrabee, and David Selvadurai.

Queen and crew!

To be built as a full-size animatronic, the creature demanded unprecedented mechanical complexity. The Alien Queen was built as a 16-foot tall hydraulically powered animatronic, whose construction lasted five months. David Penikas and a group of mechanical effects artists devised and built the mechanisms that animated the Queen. The puppet, which contained a total of 47 points of articulation, featured a motion control system that was actually articulated into two main computers. This innovative motion control system was called Overdrive. Woodruff explained: “one computer is external to the puppet, and it interfaces the signals sent from the puppeteering controls to the other onboard computer. The onboard computer interprets the data sent from the puppeteering controls and relays that information to the servo valves, which regulate the flow of oil to the cylinders.” He further elaborated in an interview: “All of [the movements] could be recorded, and then we could go in and look at each individual move — every one of the 47 — and we could smooth things out or extend a range here and there. It’s amazing [how many] editing possibilities [we have]. We could also drop or crouch her down and bring her snout down to within 2 or 3 feet of the floor, so it was quite a range to play in.” The animatronic was also mounted on a dolly grip that allowed it to be raised, lowered or otherwise physically moved.

A total of 12 to 15 puppeteers were required to control the Queen on set. Woodruff explained: “the hydraulic Alien Queen’s movement controls were divided as follows: one puppeteer handled the movements of the face and jaw (and striking tongue if necessary); another worked the gross movements of the neck and head; one controlled the torso; the lips were radio-controlled by another puppeteer; each of her large arms required a separate operator; one person controlled the broad movements of her pair of smaller arms while others controlled the fingers on those arms; the back spines were operated by yet another puppeteer; finally, one person manned the control computer monitoring the electrical and hydraulic systems, activating any pre-recorded movements, and was in charge of the failsafe safety system. If required by the scene, additional crew members handled drool, blood, and steam functions as well as moving her along on a dolly track.”

The full-size Queen could not perform all of the demands of the shooting schedule; as such, a third-scale puppet was also built. Based on the same scanned body, a third-scale wax version was produced by the computerized milling machine. It was then refined by Steve Koch (who sculpted the rest of the third-scale components — including head, arms, legs, and tail), and would serve as the moulding base for the Queen rod puppet, which was mechanized by David Penikas’ team and painted by Mike Manzel. The rod puppet could be puppeteered with rods and wires, and certain areas of its body (such as the head and neck) also featured radio-controlled mechanisms. Both the full-size Queen and the 1:3 scale version could also be fitted with different versions of the crowns showing the damage resulting from the Predator bomb device. Filming both versions of the Queen was intense; Anderson described the process as “quite laborious,” but ultimately worth the time, because “you get some fantastic looking footage.”

Stephane Paris’ digital Queen.

As with the Warriors, the Queen was also brought to the screen as a digital effect, created by the artists at MPC. Once again, the digital model was created by Stephane Paris. “For the Queen,” the artist said, “we have also played on the proportions and changed the design in certain details — e.g. the feet, [to make the creature] look believable in the sequences where you can see it running.” Animation supervisor Adam Valdez found animating the Queen rather complex due to the structure of her design. “We really had to be careful about her arms. Every time we animated her big arms it looked like a person running or walking. We had to be careful with making poses that put emphasis on her tail, the big spikes on her back, and the crown of the head, to give her a sort of special look. Also, she is a hard-driving, predatorial, killer sort of animal, but then she is alien, you know, she’s not a T.rex. She’s an Alien character, and this means that her motivations are in a way unknowable. Is she just out to kill? Is she out for revenge? Is she hungry, or hunting? What would be her mood in those moments? How would she move, you know, in a way that is Alien-like, part insect, part machine, part animal, all at the same time?” A damaged Queen model was also created — to portray the effects of the Predator bomb — by Max Wood, by modifying the pre-existing version.

 Alien Vs. Predator marks the first film appearence of a Predalien — although only in the stage of Chestburster. Designed by Patrick Tatopoulos, and sculpted by Akihito Ikeda and Andy Schoneberg, the Predalien was brough to the screen as two puppets: a stunt version was used for the scene where the Predalien erupts from the corpse of the Predator. The set up included a hollow altar and a full Predator dummy that could twitch as the Predalien tried to burst from it. Once the creature is seen in close-up, it is the hero puppet, which was cable-operated and radio-controlled. It was a completely mechanized version with a wide range of bodily motion, as well as moveable mandibles, jaws and tongue, and pulsating bladders in the sides of its neck.

ADI was ultimately enthusiastic about the project and the collaboration with Paul W.S. Anderson. “We thank him for having us on his picture and for his enthusiastic gasps from behind the monitors as our creatures performed for the cameras,” Woodruff said. “His love and excitement for the Alien and Predator genres was infectious and reminded us that, for all the long hours and hard work, we really are lucky to be a part of all this. We were glad to deliver the ‘general unpleasantness’ he requested.”

For more images of the Aliens, visit the Monster Gallery.

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