With the worldwide success of Alien Vs. Predator, a sequel was greenlit by Twentieth Century Fox. Due to their familiarity with both the Alien series and the first AvP film, the special effects artists of Amalgamated Dynamics were again hired to bring the creature effects of the new film to the screen. Accompanying them in the task was Hydraulx — directors Greg and Colin Strause’s own visual effects company, which provided digital counterparts for all the Alien creatures. Requiem would feature the least stages of the Alien life cycle — with a script devoid of both Eggs or a Queen; despite that, it would introduce to the screen the so-called ‘Predalien’, an Alien born from a Predator host, which only had been portrayed in the AvP comics up until the film’s release.

Reappearing in the film was the Alien hive, this time more overtly influenced by reference photographs of the sets built for Aliens. The hive was carved from styrofoam and coated with elastomeric sealant.

The Facehuggers were again built starting from moulds that had been created for Alien: Resurrection. The creatures were given a new paint scheme, based on brown and red hues. The Facehuggers were built as a series of models, including hand puppets, stunt dummies (maneuverable with wires), and an animatronic Facehugger able to run by itself with a rhythmical motion of its limbs. The battery-powered puppet, in order to actually move, had to be supported with a wire — being unable to sustain its own weight by itself — which was also used to determine the Facehugger’s path in the scene. Another Facehugger was radio-controlled and fully articulated. Reverse photography was used for certain sequences of the creatures leaping onto victims’ faces. Digital Facehuggers were implemented for more complex actions, such as those where the creatures escaped from the Predator ship.

The Chestburster, like the Facehugger, was again a recycled mould from Alien: Resurrection. To portray the film’s first chestbursting sequences, “a rubber skin casting of the creature was quickly inflated while high-pressure blood lines were fired, rupturing a tear-away shirt and providing a bloody reveal,” Gillis said in AvPR: Inside the Monster Shop. “Next, an articulated puppet was attached to the actor’s under-clothing harness to writhe and snap its jaws, while blood tubes again provided a wet and horrific environment.” Animatronic versions were also used in combination with fake pregnant bellies in the ‘belly-burster’ sequence.

Justin Murray’s concept of the new Alien head.

The Alien Warrior design began from the Alien moulds from Alien: Resurrection, including the renewed, ‘bulkier’ hands devised for AvP. The directors, however, wanted to make new changes to the creatures for their film. Based on the Aliens’ appearence in Aliens, the Strause Brothers wanted the heads of the creatures to be domeless and ridged. “Having been such fans of Aliens,” Gillis said, “the Strause brothers were very partial to that particular iteration of the Alien Warrior head and the absence of a translucent dome. The new head sculpture was assigned to Tully Summers, who began by inspecting a casting of the head from Aliens. The goal was to capture the essence of that sub-surface structure, but with greater detail than what Woodruff had created 20 years ago in sculpting the original head while working for Stan Winston.”

In addition, the directors felt that the ridged head, as opposed to the domed head, would aid the Aliens’ ability to camouflage within the environment. “Part of the idea behind [the design] is that the Aliens try to conceal themselves in the spaceship,” Colin Strause said. “Their long, smooth surfaces blend in, like in Aliens. The rigid head helps them camouflage into their environment.” The head was also otherwise redesigned, with a different teeth disposition and proportionally bigger upper canines, as well as newly sculpted lips and thinner jaw tendons.

Detail of the new Alien neck design.

The Alien’s neck was also resculpted and refined with more intricate biomechanical texture. “The neck must not only conceal the performer’s head and provide vision and breathing accommodations,” Gillis said, “it must more importantly compliment and complete the design of the Alien. Sculptor Mike O’Brien tackled the redesign, relying on castings of the neck of the Queen Alien from AvP as a source of reference. O’Brien was able to capture the strong design lines and preserve a balanced sense of the revered bio-mechanical hallmark of the Alien, while still making possible actors’ vision and breathing from within.”

The Aliens were built as a series of stunt and hero suits, with Woodruff returning as the main creature performer — supported by stunt performers in scenes that featured multiple Aliens. Both hero animatronic heads and stunt heads could be fitted onto the suits. The hero heads were self-contained, radio-controlled units; each head could be singlehandedly controlled by one puppeteer, who could maneuver all of its functions from a distance. Both floppy tails, maneuverable with wires, and stiff, self-supporting tails could be attached to the suits depending on the demands of the specific shots. Also built were dummies portraying the dead Aliens, dummies that were to be damaged by Predator or human weapons, and Alien skulls for the trophy room sequence.

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

Previous: Part V: Alien Vs. Predator
Next: Part VIb: Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem, the Predalien

Whilst Alien Vs. Predator marked the first film appearence of an Alien birthed from a Predator host — abbreviated in ‘Predalien’ — the concept had already been explored in the eponymous comics and video games, starting from the 1995 run Aliens Vs. Predator: Duel. Shortly after the publication of that series, freelancer concept artist and illustrator David Dorman, was approached for the very first attempt at making a film version Alien Vs. Predator. Dorman was assigned the design of the Predalien — which he produced over the course of a few months.

Dorman’s Predalien concepts.

That version of the film, still embryonic at that stage, would actually never be greenlit — although Fox archived Dorman’s concepts and illustrations for possible future use. A decade later, Dorman would notice similarities between his design and ADI’s. “I had produced those designs for Fox and then they scrapped the production,” the artist said on his blog. “The art went into the vaults. And I thought they would never see the light of day… well, it appears someone might have done some digging, because the similarity is striking. It would have been nice to be acknowledged for the work. I doubt I will get any credit.”

The Predalien Chestburster that makes its appearence at the end of Alien Vs. Predator, when it erupts from the corpse of the Scar Predator, was designed by Patrick Tatopoulos. Since the beginning, Shane Salerno’s drafts for the sequel — which would eventually get the title of Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem — involved the very same Predalien in the premise of the film: the creature, wrecking chaos in a scout ship, caused it to crash on Earth and unleash a new Alien batch — in the form of several Facehuggers that had been contained inside it — upon the planet. In the first script drafts, the Predalien actually left the scene early in the film, dying in the crash; the producers, directors and special effects artists, however, felt that the creature should have a more prominent role in the film. The script was thus rewritten, and featured the Predalien as the main opponent of Wolf, the Predator in the film. “When Fox first sent us the script, there it was in the first couple of pages, wreaking havoc in the Predator ship, but then it died in the crash,” Gillis said. “The next one that we got, the Predalien was essentially the new nemesis, which was a great move.”

Whereas the Chestburster from the previous production could be reused, the adult Predalien had to be designed in its entirety. ADI’s involvement in the design process of the creature began even before the actual pre-production. Early designs were produced, and included both a Queen-like version — conceived by Gillis — with dreadlocks taken from moulds of the tails of the miniature Alien from Alien³, and a more Predator-like version — conceived by Woodruff and Jordu Schell.

Woodruff and Schell’s early Predalien.

Maquette by Akihito Ikeda.

The real design process only began when directors Colin Strause and Greg Strause were actually hired. It was decided that the Predalien would take considerable traits from its host, due to the different structure of Predator DNA. “Fox executives Alex Young, producer John Davis, and the Strauses were all in agreement that since this new creature was an Alien that had gestated inside a Predator,” Gillis said, “it may have picked up traits from its host but was fundamentally still an Alien. Our logic on Alien³ was similar for the ‘dog’ Alien, but this time we all felt that the potent DNA [sic] of the host Predator might cause more intermixing of traits. This allowed us to play more with the superficial features like dreadlocks, mandibles, and colouration.” Both ADI founders further elaborated: “in designing this hybrid of the two creatures, we had to keep in mind that the infant Chestburster had gestated inside a Predator, but it was not actually an offspring of a Predator.  It was still basically an Alien, but it had taken on some of the characteristics of its host. It also had to look more like an Alien so that the audience would believe its loyalties were with the Alien species and not the Predators. To estimate the proportion of the combo, we went with 80% Alien and 20% Predator.”

Predalien concept by Farzad Varahramyan. This iteration introduced the ‘half-dome’ that would be mantained in the final creature.

Concept by Michael Broom.

In particular, mandibles and dreadlocks were always a key element to distinguish Chet — as it had been nicknamed by the directors, after the eponymous character from Weird Science, to avoid leaks — from the other Aliens. Colin Strause told AvPGalaxy: “we understood that the reason to have the dreadlocks was to make the audience able to understand who was who. If we removed them them, [I feared] that no one would know who Chet was.” In general, the directors were concerned that the general audience would not be able to distinguish the Predalien from the other Aliens, also considering the dark setting of the film. “The biggest issue we had with the design was that because we were going so dark with the movie, and there’s a lot of rain and atmosphere and everything,” Colin Strause said, “would a normal fan, a normal person be able to watch the movie and tell the difference? […] We knew the hardcore fans would get it instantly, but a good design also has to appeal to people who really don’t [care] about the franchise — they just go to see a movie and they actually like it. We had to make sure we included all those people in it as well. That’s why we cheated the pigmentation, [with] a little bit more yellow on her. And just things so that even if you just see flashes of her, at least a general audience member will be able to track it. But at the same time, [we did not want to] water it down with design or anything and make it kind of generic.”

One of Steve Wang’s maquettes proposed Predator-like teeth, as well as multiple mandibles based on Facehugger fingers.

Other Alien traits were kept, such as the metallic teeth; also returning from the original film was the translucent dome, revealing skull features inside it — although the Predalien’s dome only extended to the front portion of the head. Colin Strause told ShockTillYouDrop.com: “we went back with putting the skull underneath the glass dome, so it has a real Predator skull under there. In the original Alien you could never really see it because the photography was lit so dark. We have a couple shots in the movie where you actually can see the whole skull through feature and everything underneath.”

Final concept of the Predalien’s head.

The Predalien went through several conceptual iterations, with artists Steve Wang, Michael Broom, Farzad Varahramyan, Chris Ayers, and Justin Murray, as well as others, collaborating in the process. After receiving feedback from the directors and the studio executives, ADI proceeded to create a maquette that would synthesize the most favoured elements in the precedent incarnations. The result was a single small scale sculpture of the full body of the Predalien, created by Steve Wang. Upon approval, the same artist, with a team of other sculptors, began to sculpt the full-size Predalien that would serve as the moulding base for the creature suit.

Steve Wang’s full body maquette essentially estabilished most of the Predalien’s appearence. Certain modifications were applied following studio concerns based on the opinion of a 14 year old child.

During this sculpting stage, however, particularly unusual feedback was received. “That 80/20 proportion changed a bit when a 14-year old happened to be walking through the halls of Fox, saw the maquette and said ‘wow! Cool Alien!’ This observation led to much discussion about how to make it look more like a Predator, and some last minute adding of dreadlocks to increase the Predator feel.” Following instruction from the studio executives, the Predalien’s appearence was altered further — increasing the number of dreadlocks and adding more muscular components to its exoskeleton, such as the chest area. The Predalien was ultimately sculpted by Steve Wang, Hiroshi Katagiri, Casey Love, and Corey Schubert, and painted by Mike Larrabee.

The Predalien sculpture underway, with one side still devoid of the newly added muscular components.

The Predalien was built as a series of complete creature suits; Tom Woodruff wore the suit for every scene that featured the creature. A total of six suits was made: four stunt suits and two hero suits; the latter featured mechanized finger extensions. The suits could be fitted with self-contained, radio-controlled creature heads (puppeteered by three crewmembers), or stunt heads. The animatronic heads were mechanized by David Penikas and Hiroshi Ikeuchi. Sculptural detail in the neck concealed two holes that allowed Woodruff to see the surrounding environment. Depending on the scene, two different types of tail could be attached to the suit through a harness: a floppy tail, maneuvered with wires, and a self-supporting tail with an internal nylon sheet armature.

A lot of footage also had to be cut because the Predalien kept breaking into its own Macarena impression.

In filming the suits, the filmmakers had to be careful about how to properly portray the Predalien’s size in the film. “He’s supposed to be about the same or slightly larger than a Predator,” Gillis said in a featurette, “so we lengthened the head more, gave him bigger hands, we kind of cheated the upper body proportions. So when you see Tom in the suit as the Predalien, it’s kinda goofy from head to toe, because his legs look very squat. We were always concerned that the still photographer’s gonna take a picture, somebody who doesn’t really know that this thing is mostly meant to be shot from the waist up, releases a shot to the magazine where it looks like it’s a weird dwarf Alien.” For the more complex actions, a digital Predalien was provided by the visual effects artists of Hydraulx.

Testing the Predalien’s extendable mandibles.

One of the hero heads of the Predalien suits featured mechanisms that allowed the mandibles to extend and latch onto victims’ faces, emulating a Facehugger. “With the mandibles,” Colin Strause said, “basically with the egg laying scenes, we wanted to match the mandibles on [the faces] so she could actually wrap around almost like a Facehugger in a way, and grab people’s faces as she’s doing the impregnation. That was kind of an important design thing.” As a new component of the Alien lifecycle, in fact, the Predalien would be able to literally replace the Facehugger and inject multiple embryos in a single host. Other iterations of the new lifecycle were considered, but ultimately discarded. Multiple — often contradicting — explanations were given by the filmmakers regarding the exact origin of this new trait. “There is a complexity to Alien reproduction that isn’t limited to such a simple and rigid structure,” Colin Strause claimed.”Nature finds a way, and we’ve never seen the phase of an Alien pre-queen before. We’ve seen what born queens do in Alien: Resurrection, but what does a lone alpha Alien do to reproduce? What’s that next phase look like? These were the questions that got us excited when we did our pitch.”

Other times, the filmmakers instead claimed that the new lifecycle component was “perhaps a random side effect of the Predator’s DNA.” Originally, the Predalien was to select only pregnant hosts, identifying them through ultrasounds. Point-of-view shots were filmed and digitally enhanced, but cut from the final film. Ultimately, Colin Strause said that “we never explain what happens so it’s all really up to what the audience wants to take away from the movie. Just like with the Egg-morphing in Alien, we kind of know what is happening, but it could be interpreted a dozen different ways. And at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because keeping the mystery is what makes these creatures so amazing and scary. ”

Tom Woodruff said of the experience: “It was great. Every time we get to work on one of these movies it’s great to have the same kind of enthusiasm and energy you had three or four years previously. You pull everything out of the box again, and you reinvent some things and try to show something fresh. But the truth is that they are still very effective Movie Monsters.”

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

Previous: Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem
Next: Neill Blomkamp’s Alien… maybe?

A little notice: This is what I have been able to collect so far on the creatures from In the Mouth of Madness. As you can see, it’s not a lot! If you are reading this, and have worked on this film — or know someone who has — it would be absolutely fantastic if you could send me any kind of information or behind-the-scenes picture regarding Greg Nicotero and KNB Efx’s creature effects work for In the Mouth of Madness, so that I can provide a proper, organic image of the making of these Monsters. Any contribution is greatly appreciated, and I will give you credit once I am able to write a proper text. The address you can send pictures and/or information to is:

• monsterlegacy426@gmail.com

Thank you!

Sandy Collora’s Kickstarter project, Shallow Water, has gone live today! The filmmaker and special effects artist has worked on various films, including Leviathan, Predator 2, and Men in Black. He has also directed the popular short film Batman: Dead End. With Shallow Water, Collora proposes to go back to the creature features of the 1950s, such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, while at the same time trying to create a new iconic Movie Monster.

Sandy Collora with props from the project.

“I hear so many people complaining about all the sequels and reboots the Hollywood machine is cranking out lately,” Collora said. “I grew up on the Alien and Predator films… I love them and watch them all the time; but where are the new iconic creatures? How long has it been since we’ve seen a creature truly unique and powerful in a genre film? Too long. If Hollywood won’t do it, I will.”

The Tiburonera. “He who hunts sharks”. Personal opinion incoming: it looks badass.

Shallow Water‘s predatory Monster — whose design was based on various species of reptiles, including snapping turtles — is linked with humanity’s impact on our oceans. “With all the time I’ve spent in and on the water over the past 40 years,” Collora said, “I’ve seen the impact man has made on the ocean environment firsthand. I’ve dedicated a lot of my time to helping preserve our ocean resources and manage our fisheries, in the hopes of keeping them sustainable for generations to come. Shallow Water embodies all this and is a perfect fit for me as a filmmaker.” He further elaborated: “so much of the unique and odd life — that we see come out of the ocean — dwells in the darkness of the deep. The abyssal plain. Depths of 500 feet or more. There’s life in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of our seas, that is yet undiscovered. Hydrothermal vents over a mile deep contain life almost alien to our human eyes, but what about the shallows? How hard would it be for something that lives in the deep to swim up into the shallow water? Especially if it was hungry. It’s a chilling thought what dangers lurk right under our feet in the murky shallow waters of our shores.”

Another goal of the project is, of course, using as many practical effects as possible. “These effects involve the use of sculpture, prosthetic makeup, animatronics, puppetry, body suits and other techniques,” Collora commented, “that most realistically create the appearance of organic, living creatures. Especially for a film that has a creature with a human form, this is the best and most realistic way to achieve the desired effect.” Shallow Water‘s crew includes Clark Bartram, Eric S. Dow, Dale Pearson, and Felipe Perez Burchard.

Making a film is, by its nature, an incredibly complex and challenging endeavor. But this isn’t my first barbecue. I’ve been in and around the industry almost 30 years and learned from some of the best in the business.

We’ve got a great story, and an excellent script, and I’ve already created the primary creature. A significant portion of the crew is already aboard and they are accomplished veterans, many of whom have worked with me before on my previous films and commercials. The locations for the shoot have been determined and negotiated, and there are a limited number of sets. All these variables increase efficiency and ensure that upon funding, everything promised will be delivered.

I understand the film making process; developing a realistic schedule, a scope of work, and a budget. I know how to adhere staunchly, and when to adjust. And I’ve asked for the amount of money needed to deliver a supremely high quality product, on schedule.

Finally, I am a veteran project creator on Kickstarter. Backer rewards from my earlier campaigns were not just delivered on time… many were delivered early.

For all these reasons, if this Kickstarter campaign succeeds, the film Shallow Water will be made, all rewards will be delivered fully and on a timely basis, and I believe you will be proud to have backed it.

Thank you.

— Sandy Collora

Click here to support Shallow Water!

Main Articles:

• StarBeast — 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 [do for real] 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 budget and time however they could. 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. 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 the upper body appears to match the practical version. All of the aforementioned changes were only 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 appearance 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 brought 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 movable 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.

Previous: Alien: Resurrection
Next: Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem

With the worldwide success of Alien Vs. Predator, a sequel was greenlit by Twentieth Century Fox. Due to their familiarity with both the Alien series and the first AvP film, the special effects artists of Amalgamated Dynamics were again hired to bring the creature effects of the new film to the screen. Accompanying them in the task was Hydraulx — directors Greg and Colin Strause’s own visual effects company, which provided digital counterparts for all the Alien creatures. Requiem would feature the least stages of the Alien lifecycle — with a script devoid of both Eggs or a Queen; despite that, it would introduce to the screen the so-called ‘Predalien’, an Alien born from a Predator host, which only had been portrayed in the AvP comics up until the film’s release.

Reappearing in the film was the Alien hive, this time more overtly influenced by reference photographs of the sets built for Aliens. The hive was carved from styrofoam and coated with elastomeric sealant.

The Facehuggers were again built starting from moulds that had been created for Alien: Resurrection. The creatures were given a new paint scheme, based on brown and red hues. The Facehuggers were built as a series of models, including hand puppets, stunt dummies (maneuverable with wires), and an animatronic Facehugger able to run by itself with a rhythmical motion of its limbs. The battery-powered puppet, in order to actually move, had to be supported with a wire — being unable to sustain its own weight by itself — which was also used to determine the Facehugger’s path in the scene. Another Facehugger was radio-controlled and fully articulated. Reverse photography was used for certain sequences of the creatures leaping onto victims’ faces. Digital Facehuggers were implemented for more complex actions, such as those where the creatures escaped from the Predator ship.

The Chestburster, like the Facehugger, was again a recycled mould from Alien: Resurrection. To portray the film’s first chestbursting sequences, “a rubber skin casting of the creature was quickly inflated while high-pressure blood lines were fired, rupturing a tear-away shirt and providing a bloody reveal,” Gillis said in AvPR: Inside the Monster Shop. “Next, an articulated puppet was attached to the actor’s under-clothing harness to writhe and snap its jaws, while blood tubes again provided a wet and horrific environment.” Animatronic versions were also used in combination with fake pregnant bellies in the ‘belly-burster’ sequence.

Justin Murray’s concept of the new Alien head.

The Alien Warrior design began from the Alien moulds from Alien: Resurrection, including the renewed, ‘bulkier’ hands devised for AvP. The directors, however, wanted to make new changes to the creatures for their film. Based on the Aliens’ appearance in Aliens, the Strause Brothers wanted the heads of the creatures to be domeless and ridged. “Having been such fans of Aliens,” Gillis said, “the Strause brothers were very partial to that particular iteration of the Alien Warrior head and the absence of a translucent dome. The new head sculpture was assigned to Tully Summers, who began by inspecting a casting of the head from Aliens. The goal was to capture the essence of that sub-surface structure, but with greater detail than what Woodruff had created 20 years ago in sculpting the original head while working for Stan Winston.”

In addition, the directors felt that the ridged head, as opposed to the domed head, would aid the Aliens’ ability to camouflage within the environment. “Part of the idea behind [the design] is that the Aliens try to conceal themselves in the spaceship,” Colin Strause said. “Their long, smooth surfaces blend in, like in Aliens. The rigid head helps them camouflage into their environment.” The head was also otherwise redesigned, with a different teeth disposition and proportionally bigger upper canines, as well as newly sculpted lips and thinner jaw tendons.

Detail of the new Alien neck design.

The Alien’s neck was also resculpted and refined with more intricate biomechanical texture. “The neck must not only conceal the performer’s head and provide vision and breathing accommodations,” Gillis said, “it must more importantly compliment and complete the design of the Alien. Sculptor Mike O’Brien tackled the redesign, relying on castings of the neck of the Queen Alien from AvP as a source of reference. O’Brien was able to capture the strong design lines and preserve a balanced sense of the revered bio-mechanical hallmark of the Alien while still making possible actors’ vision and breathing from within.”

The Aliens were built as a series of stunt and hero suits, with Woodruff returning as the main creature performer — supported by stunt performers in scenes that featured multiple Aliens. Both hero animatronic heads and stunt heads could be fitted onto the suits. The hero heads were self-contained, radio-controlled units; each head could be singlehandedly controlled by one puppeteer, who could maneuver all of its functions from a distance. Both floppy tails, maneuverable with wires, and stiff, self-supporting tails could be attached to the suits depending on the demands of the specific shots. Also built were dummies portraying the dead Aliens, dummies that were to be damaged by Predator or human weapons, and Alien skulls for the trophy room sequence.

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

Previous: Alien Vs. Predator
Next: Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem, the Predalien

A little notice: This is what I have been able to collect so far on the creatures from In the Mouth of Madness. As you can see, it’s not a lot! If you are reading this, and have worked on this film — or know someone who has — it would be absolutely fantastic if you could send me any kind of information or behind-the-scenes picture regarding Greg Nicotero and KNB Efx’s creature effects work for In the Mouth of Madness, so that I can provide a proper, organic image of the making of these Monsters. Any contribution is greatly appreciated, and I will give you credit once I am able to write a proper text. The address you can send pictures and/or information to is:

• monsterlegacy426@gmail.com

Thank you!

Sandy Collora’s Kickstarter project, Shallow Water, has gone live today! The filmmaker and special effects artist has worked on various films, including Leviathan, Predator 2, and Men in Black. He has also directed the popular short film Batman: Dead End. With Shallow Water, Collora proposes to go back to the creature features of the 1950s, such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon, while at the same time trying to create a new iconic Movie Monster.

Sandy Collora with props from the project.

“I hear so many people complaining about all the sequels and reboots the Hollywood machine is cranking out lately,” Collora said. “I grew up on the Alien and Predator films… I love them and watch them all the time; but where are the new iconic creatures? How long has it been since we’ve seen a creature truly unique and powerful in a genre film? Too long. If Hollywood won’t do it, I will.”

The Tiburonera. “He who hunts sharks”. Personal opinion incoming: it looks badass.

Shallow Water‘s predatory Monster — whose design was based on various species of reptiles, including snapping turtles — is linked with humanity’s impact on our oceans. “With all the time I’ve spent in and on the water over the past 40 years,” Collora said, “I’ve seen the impact man has made on the ocean environment firsthand. I’ve dedicated a lot of my time to helping preserve our ocean resources and manage our fisheries, in the hopes of keeping them sustainable for generations to come. Shallow Water embodies all this and is a perfect fit for me as a filmmaker.” He further elaborated: “so much of the unique and odd life — that we see come out of the ocean — dwells in the darkness of the deep. The abyssal plain. Depths of 500 feet or more. There’s life in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of our seas, that is yet undiscovered. Hydrothermal vents over a mile deep contain life almost alien to our human eyes, but what about the shallows? How hard would it be for something that lives in the deep to swim up into the shallow water? Especially if it was hungry. It’s a chilling thought what dangers lurk right under our feet in the murky shallow waters of our shores.”

Another goal of the project is, of course, using as many practical effects as possible. “These effects involve the use of sculpture, prosthetic makeup, animatronics, puppetry, body suits and other techniques,” Collora commented, “that most realistically create the appearance of organic, living creatures. Especially for a film that has a creature with a human form, this is the best and most realistic way to achieve the desired effect.” Shallow Water‘s crew includes Clark Bartram, Eric S. Dow, Dale Pearson, and Felipe Perez Burchard.

Making a film is, by its nature, an incredibly complex and challenging endeavor. But this isn’t my first barbecue. I’ve been in and around the industry almost 30 years and learned from some of the best in the business.

We’ve got a great story, and an excellent script, and I’ve already created the primary creature. A significant portion of the crew is already aboard and they are accomplished veterans, many of whom have worked with me before on my previous films and commercials. The locations for the shoot have been determined and negotiated, and there are a limited number of sets. All these variables increase efficiency and ensure that upon funding, everything promised will be delivered.

I understand the film making process; developing a realistic schedule, a scope of work, and a budget. I know how to adhere staunchly, and when to adjust. And I’ve asked for the amount of money needed to deliver a supremely high quality product, on schedule.

Finally, I am a veteran project creator on Kickstarter. Backer rewards from my earlier campaigns were not just delivered on time… many were delivered early.

For all these reasons, if this Kickstarter campaign succeeds, the film Shallow Water will be made, all rewards will be delivered fully and on a timely basis, and I believe you will be proud to have backed it.

Thank you.

— Sandy Collora

Click here to support Shallow Water!

An adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist was first considered by Frank Darabont (director of several other film versions of the author’s novels — i.e. The Shawshank Redemption) in the late 80s, with a script produced in 1988. Both Greg Nicotero, head of KNB Efx, and Everett Burrell, head of Optic Nerve Studios, were initially contacted for the project. Darabont, however, became occupied with other films and adaptations of King’s novels — including, most importantly, The Green Mile — thus delaying the creation of his film version of The Mist. In a matter of 18 years, the same team was brought together again for the project.

Trial by stone– oh, wait, wrong film. Sorry. Go on. Keep reading.

It was ironic,” Nicotero told Cinefex. “After all the prestigious films Frank had done, and being such a fan of the genre, this was the first time he had an opportunity to design his own creatures. It was an intricate design procedure; and, as I had known him for so long, Frank allowed me to drive that process. We brought in some great artists — Aaron Sims, Andy Schoneberg, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Broom, Jordu Schell — and I had my own ideas.” Additional concept art was also provided by John Bisson, as well as CaféFX’s Raymond Lei Jin.

Crucial to the filmmakers’ vision was the concept that the Monsters in the mist were actually part of an ecosystem from another dimension. “We decided the creatures were not ‘Monsters’,” Nicotero explained, “they were animal species from a different dimension, and they all had specific forms and functions. When a tentacle-creature reached in and grabbed a character, it was an exploratory act, which was a much more interesting concept than a mindless Monster out to eat human beings.” He also told Lilja’s Library: “these aren’t monsters, but animals that have just been misplaced into a new ecosystem… and if they happen to eat someone it is almost [like a] mistaken identity, like a shark attack.” The core concept behind the characters was in line with King’s story. “They were no Lovecraftian horrors,” the novel reads, “with immortal life but only organic creatures with their own vulnerabilities.”

Concept art by Lei Jin.

Darabont was in contact with King throughout the creation process, and sent the author various designs and photos of the creatures. Another challenge for the director was creating unique designs that would not resemble previously seen creatures in films. “I would email [King],” Darabont said. “Every once in a while there would be a really cool sketch or something and I’d send him that as an email and say, ‘hey check it out. Here’s kind of in process what we’re thinking of.’ And of course he’d get excited because he loves stuff like that, too. Ultimately, the challenge was to try and create these designs in such a way that they feel very unique to this film and not like somebody else’s creature. There have been so many designs through the years. Not somebody else’s dinosaur, or dragon, or spider, or whatever, but to do stuff that was very unique to ours. That was the primary goal and the great pleasure of working with Greg because he’s incredibly versed in film history and genre history. He knows, as I have, what’s been done, what designs have existed. And we’d see something that looked a little too much like some Monster from some movie we knew we’d veer away from that. We’d kind of take it in another direction.”

Concept art by John Bisson.

Planning of the creature effects, including designs and practical and digital approaches to specific sequences, began in an early meeting at CafeFX, of which Burrell was visual effects supervisor. The director had further been convinced in hiring the digital effects company after seeing their work for Pan’s Labyrinth. Burrell elaborated: “[Frank] was fascinated by the way we had set up a production pipeline for creature effects on a relatively small budget. He wanted complete control; and, in order to do that, he’d worked out a deal with Dimension Films for a much lower cost than he had originally conceived.”

Jordu Schell’s original spider creature maquette.

Darabont’s plan included eight weeks of pre-production followed by a tight six-week production schedule. KNB Efx provided maquettes and reference models of the creatures, whereas CaféFX provided the entirety of the film’s visual creature effects. Although many sequences were initially planned as practical, or partially practical, the final version of The Mist mostly features digital creatures. KNB’s effects ultimately mostly served as reference for interaction with the actors, as well as lighting of the digital creatures. “Frank’s intention always was that he wanted to do digital creature work,” Nicotero told Lilja’s Library. “Everett and I pressed on him that even if the puppet pieces didn’t appear on screen they would be invaluable for reference, animation, lighting, etc… so we had always known that our main contribution would be puppets and then most likely they would serve as a guide shot on set under our supervision to ensure the perfect blend and as much creative control as we could put forth. Given Everett comes from a make-up FX background and we’d known each other for 20 years it was really a perfect match.”

Close-up of the bird creature puppet.

Among the practical effects visible in the film itself are models of the dead, or dying creatures, gore effects, and make-up prosthetic effects. CaféFX’s digital creatures were modeled by Miguel Ortega and a team of modelers, based on reference photos of KNB’s models. The company Crack Creative provided a previsualization camera system that enabled CaféFX to properly integrate the visual effects within Darabont’s documentary-like scenes.

The mist and the creatures within it are brought to our world through a portal, opened by the military team of the Arrowhead project. The beginning of the film was initially supposed to portray said accident, but the scene was cut for budgetary reasons. Regarding the film’s titular phenomenon, “Frank wanted the mist effects to look alien, but not scary enough to frighten characters away on first sight,” Burrell said. “He wanted to base the effects in reality. He didn’t mind using CG elements, but he didn’t want to see CG by itself, and he didn’t want to use chemical cloud tank elements. It had to look like an odd natural phenomenon.” Research and development of digital mist elements were led by Akira Orikasa. Programs used to animate and integrate the mist elements into the footage included Cebas Computer ThinkingParticles and Ideate FumeFX. Practical dry ice elements were also shot against black screens, pouring vapour over shapes representing objects in the original plates, and then composited into the shots, blending with the footage and the digital effects.

For scenes inside the market, in-camera mist effects were achieved with glycol mist pumped by physical effects supervisor Darrell Pritchett. “Once the mist touched the store front, it was all practical,” Burrell said. “It made sense from a budget point of view — otherwise we would have had a thousand greenscreen shots looking out the window.”

“A tentacle came over the far lip of the concrete loading platform and grabbed Norm around the calf. […] It was slate gray on top, shading to a fleshy pink underneath. And there were rows of suckers on the underside. They were moving and writhing like hundreds of small, puckering mouths.”

-Stephen King, The Mist

Much like in the novel, the first creatures seen in the film are tentacles of an unspecified, unseen Monster that remains otherwise shrouded in mystery — to the point where only the tentacles of it were designed. Nicknamed by the characters “the tentacles from Planet X”, the film versions of the creatures were partially redesigned compared to the original portrayal — with additional mouths and beaks implemented into their suckers. “Berne Wrightson, Aaron Sims and I designed the tentacles,” Nicotero said. “We did a little bouillabaisse of our ideas, including design aspects of giant squids. I remembered the giant squid in 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea — its hooked beak was hidden in its flesh and it would come out and snap. We emulated that that with little hooks, like sea anemone mouths, that pushed in and out as the tentacle opened up and grabbed its victim.” The on-set tentacles were sculpted by Jaremy Aiello, mechanized by Jeff Edwards and David Wogh, and painted by Mike McCarty. The tentacles were cable-maneuvered and had a wide range of movement; they were mounted on a dolly crane, which could be rolled forward “to make tentacles reach in underneath the floor.”

Tentacle concept by Bernie Wrightson.

The tentacle animatronics were used as reference for CaféFX’s digital versions. Burrell recalled: “the intent was always to have the tentacles half CG and half practical, but when we got on set, Frank wanted them to move really fast and have an organic earthworm-like undulation that the puppets couldn’t do. KNB did a great job on the tentacles artistically, and they were very useful for the actors on set, but we replaced most of them digitally.” Composition of the visual effects was aided by LED and fluorescent tape tracking markers on set.

Mike McCarty paints one of the tentacles.

Norm’s gruesome demise was achieved with a combination of practical and visual effects. Nicotero explained: “for Norm’s death, we filled a bunch of blood balloons, covered them with latex ‘nurnies’ and silicone strips and attached them to the actor. One of our puppeteers — Shannon Shea — wore a green arm glove with tacks on the fingers. On ‘action’ he would reach in, grab the balloon and tear the flesh away. Everett then added the tentacle over the top of the green arm, with all our interactive blood hitting the actors’ faces and spraying into the air. When I showed the first test to frank, he said, ‘Tom Savini would be proud!'”

“It was maybe two feet long, segmented, the pinkish color of burned flesh that has healed over. Bulbous eyes peered in two different directions at once from the ends of short, limber stalks. It clung to the window on fat sucker-pads. From the opposite end there protruded something that was either a sexual organ or a stinger. And from its back there sprouted oversized, membranous wings, like the wings of a housefly. They were moving very slowly as Ollie and I approached the glass.”

-Stephen King, The Mist

One of the reference bugs.

Next to appear in the film is a swarm of insectoid creatures. Compared to their novel counterparts, the Bugs were conceived to be more arthropod-like and dynamic. Wrightson’s design was based on electron microscopy images of insects, as well as reference photos of scorpions and crabs. Gino Crognale and Jaremy Aiello sculpted the creatures in full size — 18 inches of length — and produced reference models in latex, fiberglass and vacuform that were also able to adhere to windows. Close-up versions with articulated head, eyes and mouth were instead mechanized by Jeffrey Edwards and his team.

Burrell and Darabont with one of the reference bug creatures.

Hollow versions of the creatures — cast in latex — were filled with silicone, latex, tissue paper and UltraSlime — those stunt creatures were to be damaged, squashed, or otherwise destroyed. CaféFX’s digital versions featured “little sucker pads that could animate with blend shapes that flattened against the glass,” said Burrell. “We then added texture maps so that every time a Bug moved its feet it left little oily footprints.”

“The fog appeared to darken in exactly the way Ollie had described, only the dark smutch didn’t fade away; it solified into something with flapping, leathery wings, an albino white body, and reddish eyes. […] Its red eyes glittered in its triangular head, which was slightly cocked to one side. A heavy, hooked beak opened and closed rapaciously. It looked a bit like the paintings of pterodactyls you may have seen in the dinosaur books, more like something out of a lunatic’s nightmare.”

-Stephen King, The Mist

Early design maquette by Jordu Schell.

As part of the ecosystem, the bug-like creatures are preyed upon by larger, pterodactyl-esque Monsters. Schoneberg, Broom, and Wrightson devised winged designs attempting to stray from generic dragon-like creatures. In particular, flying vehicles from Star Wars served as inspiration for the creatures. Nicotero explained: “we started talking about the X-Wing fighter from Star Wars, and all of a sudden we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be interesting to give the bird two symmetrical pairs of wings, one on the top and one beneath that, forming an ‘X’? The top wings were used for lift, the lower wings were for steering; and when it landed, the back wings folded back like a bird, while the front wings moved like a bat.”

Shannon Shea paints the bird creature puppet.

The maquette of the Monster was sculpted by Schoneberg. The same artist, with Aki Horohito and Steve Koch, devised a full-size animatronic with a wingspan of eight feet, maneuvered with a boom arm. “We locked down the feet,” Nicotero said, “and the boom arm moved the creature up and down, or side to side. The neck was on a four-way cable, so that could move side to side and up and down. The jaw was a three-part mandible, radio-controlled. It had circular eyeballs on slight stalks, and we took a cue from nature to make it blink like a bird. We rigged a radio-control mechanism that pulled the eyes back through a silicone section in the head, and the weight of the silicone closed the lids around the eye.” The wings were rod-maneuvered. A hand puppet version was also built for insert shots, and dummies of the shot or charred creatures (cast in silicone and polyfoam) were constructed.

Miguel Ortega’s digital bird creature.

In post-production, most of the models were replaced with the digital versions. CaféFX used luminance keys and difference mattes to place digital Monsters behind practical glass-breaking effects and rotoscoped 3D flashlight beams to light the entire scene. Real fire elements were filmed in the supermarket set to portray the burning creature set ablaze by Drayton.

“One of the spiders had come out of the mist from behind us. It was the size of a big dog. It was black with yellow piping. Racing stripes, I thought crazily. Its eyes were reddish-purple, like pomegranates. It strutted busily towards us on what might have been as many as twelve or fourteen many-jointed legs — it was no ordinary earthly spider blown up to horror-movie size; it was something totally different, perhaps not really a spider at all.”

-Stephen King, The Mist

Schell’s original maquette.

The spider-like Monsters first encountered in the pharmacy were initially designed by Jordu Schell in maquette form — in a configuration that closely followed the description from the novella. Darabont, however, decided to stray from that design. Nicotero recalled: “Frank wanted the Spiders to have an almost human grinning face. We didn’t want it to be literally a guy’s head stuck on a spider’s body, like The Zanti Misfits, so Mike Broom and I came up with a design that looked like a grinning death’s head when the Spider closed its mandibles over its mouth.” An animatronic version of the Spider was built by Mike McCarty (who also devised the creatures’ colour scheme), Jake McKinnon and Rob Derry, and operated by Jeff Edwards.

The spider creature maquette.

CaféFX created the digital Spiders and their acidic, corrosive webs. Burrell explained: “James Straus’ animation team built a very clever keyframe Maya web rig; it fired a long thin strand with ‘bones’ that could contract and move down a spline. We set up point A and point B where we wanted the web to go, then slid the web along and broke up the pattern to give it some noise.”

Darabont films the spider creature puppet for reference.

Prosthetic make-ups portrayed the victims of the Spiders, which are parasitoid and lay their eggs inside hosts. The prosthetics included chest extensions with gelatin blisters and bladders, which were digitally augmented to portray the baby Spiders erupting from the host’s face and body. When the victim falls and the baby Spiders are released from his back, a practical dummy of the actor was filmed, with digital Spiders added in post-production.

Raymond Lei Jin’s design was translated into a digital model by Miguel Ortega.

“It appeared to be red, the angry color of a cooked lobster. It had claws. It was making a low grunting sound, not much different from the sound we had heard after Norton and his little band of Flat-Earthers went out. […] I caught a nightmare glimpse of huge black lusterless eyes, the size of giant handfuls of sea grapes, and then the thing lurched back into the mist with what remained of Ollie Weeks in its grip. A long, multisegmented scorpion’s body dragged harshly on the paving.”

-Stephen King, The Mist

Concept art by Lei Jin.

As the group of survivors runs out of the supermarket, Ollie is snatched by an enormous crustacean-like creature — the only Monster in the film whose final design was devised by one of CaféFX’s artists. Burrell said: “our resident concept artist, Lei Jin, worked up the design. It was a low, scuttling thing, with big lobster arms. […] We see Ollie pulled up into the mist, kicking in silhouette. A big maw opens, chomps down and then pulls away and leaves just legs dangling. It’s all CG, even the blood landing on the car.” The mantis-lobster is perhaps the design that has taken the most liberties with the description offered in the original story.

“A shadow loomed out of the mist, staining it dark. It was as tall as a cliff and coming right at us. […] It may have been the fact that the mist only allowed us to glimpse things briefly, but I think it just as likely that there are certain things that your brain simply disallows. […] It was six-legged, I know that; its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark brown in places. Those brown patches reminded me absurdly of the liver spots on Mrs. Carmody’s hands.

Its skin was deeply wrinkled and grooved, and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish “bugs” with the stalk-eyes. I don’t know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body, although she craned her neck up to look. She saw only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight.”

-Stephen King, The Mist

As the characters drive away from the supermarket into the mist, they see a gigantic six-legged creature walking by, unaware of their presence. Certain creatures from the novel — such as one that resembled “a grossly oversized dragonfly” — were not included in the film adaptation, and the Behemoth was initially supposed to have the same fate. The key climactic sequence from the novella was, in fact, going to be excised from the film adaptation — as Darabont had deemed it unnecessary. Eventually, both Nicotero and Burrell convinced the director to insert it regardless. “It was not in the script,” Burrell explained. “Frank didn’t feel that it was dramatically important, but Greg and I both felt it was a moment that every Stephen King fan was living for.” Darabont was only convinced after the first actual attempts: “we showed our storyboard to Frank — but he still wasn’t into it,” Burrell continues. “It wasn’t until we started temping it out that he became excited. He showed the scene to Stephen King, and Stephen loved it. It’s only two shots, but they are standout shots.”

Behemoth concept by Bernie Wrightson.

The 300 feet tall creature was described by King as “something so big that it might have made a blue whale look the size of a trout.” Again, the film version of the Behemoth was designed by Bernie Wrightson; Nicotero’s input included the base for the design — an old illustration for H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror. “I had an illustration in an old Lovecraft book,” Nicotero recalled, “that looked like elephant legs topped by a mass of writhing tentacles. I talked about it with Bernie; and he did some sketches of this huge creature with a ring of tentacles around its head, a weird mouth and long, overlapping teeth. It had cockroach legs along its abdomen and six giant alien legs under that.” The Behemoth, as it was called by the crew, was first sculpted in maquette form by Jaremy Aiello, then as a moulding sculpture for a small scale. The rod-operated creature was six-feet tall. “Frank wanted to do it old-school,” Nicotero said. “He wanted a miniature car with a puppet creature that could just walk over top of it, which we’d shoot by pulling back from the miniature as it walked past, and maybe angles looking up.”

The digital model under construction — without the tentacles.

The approach involving the miniature puppet, however, proved unfeasible for the film. The Behemoth maquette was thus scanned by CaféFX; the scan was then refined to match the original design perfectly. Ultimately, the entire sequence involving the Behemoth was created digitally. “The Land Cruiser and the road were CG,” Burrell explained. “The creature lumbers across, taking out a few telephone poles and interacting with the ground.” Congruent with its novel counterpart, the creature hosted various other animals that lived on its body. “It was so huge it had its own ecosystem,” Burrell continues. “We animated parasites crawling on it and bird creatures flying around like seagulls on a dead whale. In the second shot, it moves off through the trees and we see a glimpse of its face and tentacles on top of its head. It’s very Lovecraftian. The scary part is what you can’t see.”

For everyone involved, The Mist was a satisfying experience. Darabont elaborated in an interview: “Because we have a common language, Greg and I grew up with the same influences, we’re very conversant with the genre. We know a lot of what’s been done before and we were very consciously trying to not design creatures that owed something to somebody else’s movie or somebody else’s design. It’s not easy to do of course because so much has been done, but I think we struck a really terrific balance of representing what Stephen King wrote but not making it feel like somebody else’s movie, somebody else’s creature design.” Nicotero added in an interview with about.com: “I have to give tremendous amount of credit to Everett, because I think he and his team at CafeFX have gone above and beyond even what I had hoped the creature work would look like.” He also concluded in a Cinefex interview: “we worked so well together because of our friendship and mutual knowledge of creature effects and visual effects, and we are both tremendously proud of the results.”

For more images of the Monsters in the Mist (if you can see any with all that fog), visit the Monster Gallery.

Main Article: Monsters in the Mist

You may not know Fede Ponce by name, but you have surely seen his work — in the main titles of many recent Marvel films. “Fede has been in the entertainment industry for more than 15 years,” said Nacho Abia, part of the crew of Ponce’s upcoming project. “And he is humbled by having had the lucky opportunity to work on some of the biggest blockbusters to date.”

Ponce has been working on, literally, a dream project of his — Sebastian: The Slumberland Odyssey — which will soon launch as a Kickstarter campaign. The project was described by his creator as a mixture of science-fiction and fantasy.

The Slumberland Odyssey is the first ‘Sci-Fan’ tale to take the viewer on a mind-bending adventure through two worlds that have seldom been intertwined before. One world is the future, where thanks to the miracle of sentient A.I., humanity has finally united in overcoming war, poverty and disease. With one small price to pay… The citizens of the Earth have forgone their ability to dream. And with just cause, since unauthorized dreaming is now punishable by death.

However there is a legend — a legend of a world that exists beyond the reach of the A.I. A world known as Slumberland. It is a realm created from the remainder of human dreams and desires, a place where the last unassimilated renegades escape to in the middle of the night.

It is there that men search for the remaining scraps of human emotion in hopes of saving the last glimmers of imagination. Our story begins in a small house on the outskirts of the city of Vigilas. There, Sebastian and Mika — two unassimilated siblings thick as thieves and a few years apart — take turns assisting their mysteriously ill grandfather, as the try in vain to suppress their imagination and risk being discovered by the A.I. But the clock is ticking and danger looms near… for neither sibling can stop themselves from dreaming. When the A.I. senses their dreamwaves, Mika inexplicably disappears, leaving Sebastian and his grandfather alone. Despite the impending danger, the old man tasks Sebastian to venture into Slumberland and obtain a magical cure before his time runs out. Armed with only his wits, Sebastian enters a world where anything is possible… where both adventure and deadly peril await him. Terrible Nightmares with the power to devour him… and lost remnants of Imagination.. with the power to save him.

Monster Legacy had the great chance to have a little chat with the director about the project.

ML: What inspired you to create the concept of this story?

Fede: The story began a long time ago, when my younger brother and I were separated by the circumstances of life.  I moved to the US and he remained in Mexico. We wouldn’t see each other very often so when we did our time was precious. I would spend the days playing with him and at nights I would tell him stories about two brothers who always had adventures in Slumberland, no matter where they went.  It was a way for me to connect with him and share a world despite the distance or time.

ML: The premise to the story is certainly intriguing and juxtaposes two very different visual concepts. How are you going to balance practical and digital effects in bringing your vision to life?

Fede: Currently, there is no company signed up to do them — but my dream is to work with Mike Elizalde at Spectral Motion. I showed him the project a while ago and he liked it. I would be very interested to see what he thinks now. There are a ton of practical effects wizards out there — like Jordu Schell whom I took a course with, and the people at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The dream is to combine their talents with top notch visual effects. There is something about practical effects to me that has a type of gravity that to this day is hard to replicate in CG. I think it’s also really helpful for the actors to interact with the character rather than a dude in green spandex. A lot of the characters that have ‘meshed’ with the provenance need heavy prosthetics as you can see on Leezo’s concept art. Practical work will be paramount.

ML: what can you tease about the creatures we are going to see?

Fede: Bruno the dog is a magnificent Pegasus Dog! How would you not want to see that! And Jynx is a spliced cat with traits from other animals. Trust me, it will be visually delightful. I am thinking of a way to do an incredibly light rig to create real world wings for the dog. At the moment we have concept art for Timor Alkimos — the half-fish half-ruffian — and the mermaid’s tail, which was created by Jorge Siller — an incredible artist who worked on the Resident Evil movies. We also have bunch of concept art for other creatures.  But the real juice will come from the Slumberland Bestiary a book I want to develop as well.

ML: What’s your goal with the project? 

Fede: I want to change the paradigm on how a Cinematic universe is created — by giving backers unprecedented access to the production and creative process. We will first create a pilot episode that introduces the viewer to this new world and an accompanying 50 page full-color graphic novel that explains the origins of the provenance. There are stretch goals that include more volumes for the graphic novel and more episodes for the series, gaming cards with more character back stories, maps of slumberland and vigilas and more. But let’s start with step one!

Be also sure to visit The Slumberland Odyssey Tumblr page, as well as the Facebook page of the project with constant updates!

Here are also links to the websites of some of the artists who have worked, and continue working on the project:

• Anthony Sixto
• Phillip Dickenson
• Petur Arnorsson

The success of Underworld quickly led to the production of a sequel. Len Wiseman returned as the director of the new film, and with him Tatopoulos Studios to bring the Lycans to the screen again. The same basic design for the creatures was used, and most of the moulds were actually reused. An innovation in the design was represented by the greater quantity of hair on the bodies of the Werewolves; this aesthetic modification was implemented to portray the first generation Lycans of the prologue scene, as well as the climax of the film. “We changed up the Werewolves a little bit, made minor alterations to them,” Wiseman said, “because a lot of the Werewolves in this one were in some flashbacks that show the past, and we wanted them to look a little less evolved.” For issues of time and budget, the same suits were used to portray both the newly mutated first generation Lycans as well as the second generation Lycans — without an explanation within the continuity of the films.

The new designs were also devised to include structural innovations for the suits that would allow the creature performers a wider range of movement. “The first batch of Werewolves we did for the first movie… the design, I think, Len was very pleased with,” Tatopoulos said, “but there were some issues. I tried to give them big necks — and then we realized those necks were very stiff. They did not allow the actor to move as well as he wanted to.” Len Wiseman added: “I wanted much more mobility with them. I felt like I loved the design that we came up with, but at the end of the day [we] had a big action figure that couldn’t move that much. And then so all of the joints and everything, we reworked them to where they could move. [When] I’m casting the guy to play the monster himself – I like his movements, I don’t want to weigh him down and not allow his performance to come through.” Both Brian Steele and Kurt Carley returned as the main Lycan performers. Joining them was Richard Cetrone.

Since the structure of the first film’s Lycans’ neck limited the movements of the performer, it was redesigned to be slimmer, and more comfortable and safe to move in. The fur covering on their bodies was consequently increased, in order to hide a gaping hole inside the neck. This expedient allowed the suits to be mounted onto the actors in less time than before — for the previous production, the actors had to be entirely covered in foam latex, a condition that was also uncomfortable for them. The material the necks were specifically made of was also changed: in place of foam latex, the special effects crew used spandex and sheet foam.

The Lycan guard.

The leg extensions of the creature suits were also changed for practical purposes. Tatopoulos Studios refined the technology used for the first film, and enlarged the foot base to give the performers more stability, giving them the possibility to perform movements that they were unable to achieve with the previous suits. An advanced and adjustable Y-shaped wirework on the back of the extensions enabled the legs to bend without particular effort. “A big issue we had from the first one was a really small footprint that we designed,” Himber said. “It looked really neat, but it was a practical piece. It did not really give the guys a strong platform to walk on. So one of the things we explored on this one before we even built the suits, we did some wider footprints and changed a few bits in the leg extensions. Once we got the performers were really happy with, we based the sculpts on what worked with the foot pieces — kind of a reversal of the first one. The guys do great with them — they can stand on one foot and do all sorts of crazy things with them, which they couldn’t on the first one.”

In the flashback sequence at the beginning of the film, as well as in the climax, the mutation of first generation Lycans is shown. Due to the viral and unpredictable nature of the disease, they do not transform following a precise template, but rather mutate in a seemingly random pattern, depending on the individual. Mid-transformation make-ups were applied on actors to portray the very first stages of the transformation. David Beneke provided the Lycan prosthetic teeth.

The Lycans of Underworld: Evolution were also brought to the screen with their digital model counterparts, created by Luma Pictures, a visual effects company that had already devised some visual effects sequences for the first film. “Every time you see a wolf close-up,” Tatopoulos said, “even full size, it is pretty much a practical beast. In a town where everyone uses CG, it is very refreshing to be able to see real things like this. That doesn’t mean there is no CG in the movie, however — whenever the motion becomes too crazy and the wolf leaps from one side of the castle to the other, we use CG. Sometimes we combine both together.” Luma first showed Wiseman their new achievements with The Cave — which the director was impressed with. The company was thus assigned most of the intensive visual effects of the film — including all the digital creature effects sequences, which surpassed the 100 shots.

Compared to the transformations in the first film, the new Lycan transformations were far more detailed.  “The creatures’ skeletal systems needed to change, stretching the muscles and tissue with it,” explained Luma digital effects supervisor Vince Cirelli. “Skin needed to roll over bone mass, veins pop and blood spurt. One of the transitions happens so close to camera that you can see its pores.” The Lycan digital models and the transforming models were devised by a team of modelers led by Miguel Ortega — using Maya and zBrush.  “The transformations had to look painful and sporadic,” Cirelli continues. “For this we devised underlying influence objects that pushed and pulled the skin. That was sequenced with a shader that output passes for compositors to make capillaries burst and skin bruise. We also employed stress maps to raise the creatures to photo-real level. Even with all this technology, the creatures would not look like they do without the incredible work of the modelers and texture artists here at Luma.”

The process of creating the models started in Maya. “We use Maya for animation and creation of our base cages [low resolution models],” Cirelli said. “But our modeling pipeline is more and more heavily relying on ZBrush for etching out the definition of the models, including the creatures and the CG environments. As a matter of fact, for this movie, we had characters that needed to be able to transform into multiple different characters. So our base character mesh was shared across many of them. Then, all of the detail that was painted into the creature with ZBrush was applied as displacement at render time.”

“At the beginning of production,” he continues, “we experimented with different techniques that would allow us to push the characters range of motion and skin deformation beyond most CG creatures, Cirelli says. Using ZBrush, we painted displacements to simulate muscle flexing, tendon bulging and skin wrinkling for each muscle group. These maps were separated into color and displacement. Once this was done, we needed a way to trigger and blend between specific displacements and surface textures based on how the creature was animated. For this, we developed a system of animating and blending localized displacement maps using a custom shader. The shader evaluates where and what has translated or rotated on the rig. It then sends this information to the blender which determines how much of each displacement to use and where to use it. So when the werewolf rolls his shoulders, muscles flex, tendons bulge and veins become visible on the surface of the skin.” Certain creature shots seamlessly blended the digital versions into the practical suits filmed beforehand.

“…William, bitten by wolf, became the first and most powerful Lycan.”

Underworld: Evolution introduced a new kind of Werewolf — represented by William Corvinus, the original Werewolf and ‘viral’ father of all Lycans. “A totally different take [on a Werewolf],” Tatopoulos said. The bloodthirsty killing machine, forever unable to return to its human form, has no control over its savagery. In the first drafts for Underworld: Evolution, the character of William was conceived differently: the original idea depicted the Monster as an enormous, 14′ tall creature — that moved on all four limbs, and only occasionally used bipedal stance. The massive size of the Werewolf was to be achieved through forced camera perspective and greenscreen techniques. As production progressed, however, the idea was abandoned in favor of another direction — the eight-feet tall William seen in the film.

The original William maquette with quadrupedal configuration.

If the Lycans are halfway through the Werewolf transformation, the appearance of William is what results from the completion of the metamorphosis process. The son of Corvinus is the genetic and viral Ancestor of all Werewolves — and as such he is more beastly and primordial than the Lycans. Two types of creatures were thus distinguished by the filmmakers: the first generation Lycans, infected by William, directly or indirectly, display the wolf-like snout and are unable to revert their transformation; they are raging beasts with no control over their animalistic instincts. The second generation Lycans, infected by Lucian, directly or indirectly, inherit his ability to change back to human state. With age, they are also able to transform into their Werewolf form at will.

William concept by Patrick Tatopoulos.

“In a sense, [William is] a more traditional Werewolf as you know them,” said Tatopoulos, “with a more wolf-like head.” Len Wiseman added: “Patrick and I actually went through a lot of designs, in drawing the jawline, and making it look very frightening and sort of bulky — it had to look mean, and not the pointy Wile E. Coyote look, which happens quite a bit. So we actually have a fairly heavy, pronounced jaw on William.” The director further elaborated the concept in an interview: “We’ve got one of the old ones [William] that’s much more in the traditional Werewolf vein. He has a little bit more of a snout, more of a wolf presence than the other ones. I really wanted to make a point that in the first film I didn’t want them to have the long snout, because I wanted them to have a different style that we hadn’t seen before – I’d seen that look, quite a bit. But this character in this film dates back quite a bit further, so it’s like an evolution process; we wanted it to feel like it was a little bit closer to the wolf.”

William was created as a single hero creature suit, sculpted by Steve Wang in all of its components.  Brian Steele performed inside the suit for all the scenes involving the original Werewolf. Like the other Werewolf suits, a gaping hole in the neck was concealed by the fur covering of the creature, and allowed the actor more comfort and freedom in the performance. The suit featured a fully animatronic, radio-controlled head — featuring moving ears, eyes, lips, and mouth — which required up to three puppeteers to animate on set.

The William suit, filming the flashback sequence. In this photo you can see how the hair covering on the Monster has minor differences compared to its appearance in the climax of the film.

In opening sequence, where the capture of William is shown at the hand of several vampires (displaying the strength of the beast), the hero suit for the character was not completely finished for shooting yet — as its hair was not yet properly treated. Due to that reason, it was filmed with quick cuts to hide its imperfections — something eased by the background covered in snow.

As with the other Lycans, William was also portrayed by a digital version devised by Luma Pictures. To portray the character’s gruesome demise at the hands of Michael Corvin, Tatopoulos Studios devised an insert dummy ‘gore’ head with a pre-scored wound and stump. When Speedman ripped the creature’s upper jaw and cranium, blood pumps provided the spilling blood. “We feel bad when we have to cover them in blood,” Himber said, “and chop them and stuff, because they’re really beautiful. But those things happen!”

For more images of the Lycans and William, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Underworld
Next: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Tatopoulos Studios and Luma Pictures once again returned to bring to life the Lycans for Underworld: Rise of the Lycans — which, set in ancient times, also portrays the first generation of Lycans directly infected by William Corvinus. Seven ‘first generation’ Werewolf suits and only one hero animatronic head were used for the film. They were based on the moulds used for the creation of the William suit, with the single hero head actually being the William suit’s head used in the precedent film — appropriately repainted with the new Werewolf colour scheme.

The original Werewolf’s white fur was a peculiarity of the character — recalling the folkloristic concept of the White Wolf of the pack. Guy Himber also referred to the character as an Albino. The Werewolves of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans went back to colour schemes tending to black and brown tones, more akin to the other Lycans seen in the precedent chapters.

Three ‘second generation’ Lycan suits were devised for the film, recycling those that had been built for Underworld: Evolution. The suits were restored, and repainted with subtle changes in the colour scheme — which now presented greyer tones. Brian Steele and Kurt Carley returned as the main creature performers for both versions of the Werewolves; Steele was also featured in the film playing a character among the Lycans. “I said, ‘Brian, you’re not a Werewolf now. You’re a guy now,'” said Tatopoulos, “and he did a great job.”

Much like in its predecessors’ case, many shots in the film were planned as practical, but later changed to computer generated imagery. As an example, the Werewolf killed with a crossbow projectile was first filmed as a practical puppet, which ultimately “looked like dragging a muppet.” The filmmakers were unsatisfied with the result, and changed the shot of the monster falling forward into a digital sequence — cutting to the creature suit lying on the ground. Similarly, the meeting of Lucian and Werewolves was heavily modified with the addition of computer generated shots, as opposed to the wholly practical original sequence.

The french CGI company Duboi joined Luma to create the numerous digital Werewolves for the film. The two companies, however, had contrasting manners of animating the Werewolves.  “When the french [company] did the first Werewolves,” Tatopoulos said, “they had a way of making those guys quite elegant and ‘sexy’ but they were lacking a bit of weight. The opposite came from Luma, who were giving them a lot of weight, but they were a little bit too brutal. We showed [both companies] each other’s work and, you know, by the end, they all got better.” Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is so far the film of the series with the most digital Werewolves in a single sequence: the climax featured over 500 computer generated-creatures, running towards the fortress of the Vampires.

“I have a little bit of a special tenderness towards these creatures,” said Tatopoulos, concluding his experience, “having created them for the first film, and the second one, they’re just such cool beasts. It was fun for that, too.”

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

Previous: Underworld: Evolution
Next: Underworld: Awakening

Patrick Tatopoulos and his special effects Studios did not return to provide effects for the fourth chapter of the series, Underworld: Awakening. Although the french artist was attached to the production of the 2012 Total Recall film, he managed to create designs for two of the new Lycan ‘types’ introduced in the film — the ‘Tunnel’ Lycan and the ‘Uber’ Lycan. MastersFX replaced Tatopoulos Studios in creating the new practical effects for the film; Todd Masters, the founder of the company, had precedent experiences with Werewolves in the production of Howling VI: The Freaks. Underworld: Awakening introduces a far more considerable number of visual effects — most of the creature sequences were completely computer-generated. Luma Pictures brought the digitally generated Werewolves to the screen, remaining as the only CGI company with all four Underworld films on its track record. Fido VFX also collaborated on the scenes involving the Dr. Lane Werewolf. “The Underworld saga has a very distinct view on vfx,” said Kaj Steveman, part of the crew at Fido. “It has to feel physical, practical and real. In other words, everything that feels too much like CG is a big no-no. This legacy was very strong in this film as well, and this was a real challenge in some of our shots.” Given the predominance of visual effects, the practical work was relatively limited compared to the precedent films.

For the first time since Underworld, new sculpts for the Lycans were created — based on production photographs of maquettes and suits from the first film. The design, again, underwent some cosmetic changes: different angles and details in the facial structures were added, the ribcage and pectoral muscles were made more pronounced, and the fur on the neck was decreased in mass and length. Certain changes were also applied to the overall color scheme of the creatures, which now featured a darker nose area and different patterns. MastersFX built three Lycan suits, two of which were provided with mechanized hero heads.

Richard Cetrone and Dan Payne were the main creature performers. Due to advancements in technology, where the previous films needed three to four puppeteers to control the movements of a single Lycan head, only one was needed for each creature in Underworld: Awakening. It was also the first film for which no leg extensions were used: to increase the height of the Lycans for certain shots, MastersFX used rough stilts. Stunt models were built to portray the dead Werewolves seen in the film.

A lot of the difficulty in creating the new Lycans came from the fact Underworld: Awakening was the first film of the series to be shot using 3D filming technology: “Since this was our first major 3D project,” Masters said, “we had to discipline ourselves into a quick learning curve, while we figured out just exactly how our practical FX work was going to appear on-screen. This process involves such an amazing level of data, every detail of our work was going to be suspect—it was like looking at our work under a magnifying glass. Every detail was heightened, and we even had to modify the coloring and design of some of our creatures to satisfy the discerning eyeball of the 3D camera.”

Underworld: Awakening adds new subtypes of Lycans to the series’ mythos. The first introduced in the film are the so-called ‘Tunnel’ Lycans. “Albino and emaciated, these creatures live in the subway tunnels and are sick with disease,” said Steve Wang of the new Werewolves. Underworld: Awakening‘s storyline is set 15 years after humans discovered the existence of both Lycans and Vampires. The former were pushed to the verge of extinction, and certain groups of them tried to hide in the most obscure places.

The Tunnel Lycan maquette, sculpted and painted by Steve Wang.

The Tunnel Lycans are found in sewers. They are albino, and due to an unknown disease, their bodies are plagued with bladders. Steve Wang sculpted the maquette of the Tunnel Lycan — based on a Tatopoulos design — which was then digitally scanned to create the computer-generated creature. Although the monsters were brought to the screen with digital models for the most part, MastersFX built a specific practical model for the scene where Eve rips a Lycan’s head apart.

The giant ‘prototype’ Werewolf, Quint, was created with genetic engineering by Antigen as an attempt to give the species a renewed glory. Nicknamed the ‘Über’ Lycan by the filmmakers, the Monster stands 12′ tall; it heals without the need to consume more blood first, and is able to control its transformation — changing only certain parts of his body, like a hand, at will. The maquette of the Werewolf was again sculpted by Steve Wang and based on a Tatopoulos design. Left unpainted, it was used as reference for the digital Uber Lycan — which applied some modifications to the design, including different lines and angles, other than the prominent fur covering.

The ‘Lane’ Lycan (no official nickname was given to this new design) is a more humanoid Werewolf, and probably an homage to the early Lon Chaney Jr. Wolfman films. It was created by MastersFX as full make-up on a stuntman, with digital enhancements. The digital transformation, created by Fido VFX, tried to be innovative: “we wanted to avoid a classic linear transformation from A to B,” said Staffan Linder,  animation supervisor, to Art of VFX, “and came up with a concept in which the character goes through a middle phase before becoming a fully developed hybrid. The general idea was to show how Stephen Rea’s human muscles first emaciated, making him shrink to a mummy looking character before the monster tissue and muscles’ growth turned him into the tall and muscular hybrid ‘man-in-suit’ shot at the set.”

The make-up shot on set was digitally altered. “They had shot the sequence with a stuntman made up as a hybrid,” said Steveman, “but had since realized that he wasn’t that scary looking. So they turned to us with an idea of adding a digital buck shot wound on the Hybrid’s face to make him more demonic. Lakeshore had asked Luma to make a concept design for the new face, and based on that Fido’s Magnus Eriksson created a suitably scary CG face. Anders Nyman and Peter Aversten then added all the gory details that made it truly convincing. As a final touch Staffan Linder added small animated flesh pieces that would dangle from the face, covered in blood.

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

Previous: Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

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Main Articles:

• Guest Stars: Shelob
• Fell Beasts 

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s literary works set in Middle Earth incorporated many spiders or spider-like creatures, due to the fact one of his sons — Michael — was affected by Arachnophobia. In the universe of Arda, the spiders were originally spawned by a single being — Ungoliant, a massive demonic entity which entered Middle Earth before the First Age, perhaps one of the Maia corrupted by Melkor. The Sindarin (Elvish) word for spider is, in fact, ‘ungol’. The creature gave birth to innumerable progeny, among which was Shelob, “the last child of Ungoliant.”

Concept by Christian Rivers.

Labeled as “an evil thing in spider-form,” Shelob established its lair in the aptly-named Cirith Ungol (“Spider’s cleft”), a network of tunnels leading to Mordor — and when Sauron claimed the land as his, he used to watch the spider-like Monster kill and devour prisoners for entertainment. The name of the creature itself is a simple compound of ‘she’ (indicating the spider’s gender) and ‘lob’, an archaic English word meaning ‘spider’.

Various design maquettes for Shelob’s head. Final design shown in the bottom left.

The novel describes Shelob progressively, and although many of her traits are directly inspired from spiders, she differs from them in some aspects: “two great clusters of many-windowed eyes” (suggesting compound eyes, a trait not seen in actual spiders) are first mentioned; they are what Frodo and Sam witness when the creature is hidden in darkness. “Monstrous and abominable eyes they were,” Tolkien narrates, “bestial and yet filled with purpose and with hideous delight, gloating over their prey trapped beyond all hope of escape.” Once Shelob is fully revealed to the reader, Tolkien provides a rather detailed description:

“Hardly had Sam hidden the light of the star-glass when she came. A little way ahead and to his left he saw suddenly, issuing from the black hole of shadow under the cliff, the most loathly shape that he had ever beheld, horrible beyond the horror of an evil dream. Most like a spider she was, but huger than the great hunting beasts, and more terrible than they because of the evil purpose in her remorseless eyes. Those same eyes that he had thought daunted and defeated, there they were lit with a fell light again, clustering in her out-thrust head. Great horns she had, and behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs; its great bulk was black, blotched with livid marks, but the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench. Her legs were bent, with great knobbed joints high above her back, and hairs that stuck out like steel spines, and at each leg’s end there was a claw.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

A beak is mentioned, and Frodo is also “stung in the neck”; it is unclear whether Tolkien intended Shelob to have an actual stinger (a trait uncommon to spiders) or used the verb to describe a bite.

Concept art by Alan Lee.

For Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film adaptations, Shelob and her lair were portrayed in The Return of the King, as opposed to The Two Towers, for pacing purposes — and with some cosmetic changes in how the events actually occur. In designing the filmic Shelob, the Weta designers worked closely with Peter Jackson — an arachnophobic himself. Curiously enough, the scenes where Sam fights the creature were filmed before most of the design work on it began. At a certain point of the design process, Jackson specifically established that Shelob should channel — in both appearance and behaviour — a spider native to New Zealand: the black Tunnelweb spider (Porrhotele antipodiana). For reference, art director Christian Rivers literally dug a black Tunnelweb spider out of his own home garden and brought it at WETA Workshop in a glass jar. “It was terrifying,” he recalled.

Concept art by John Howe. This painting was replicated in a sequence from the film itself.

An enormous array of design iterations was considered, from basic spider-like designs (influenced by various species) to creatures with influence from crustaceans and other arthropods, all portrayed in either conceptual illustrations or small-scale maquettes. The body was ultimately designed as corpulent and bloated, much like the novel Shelob. A contest was actually held among the Weta Workshop designers to portray the most “Shelob-like” head for the Monster. Jackson established most of the design himself, as recalled by Alan Lee: “I don’t think anyone who worked on Shelob quite managed to capture what Peter Jackson was actually after until he had attacked it himself with a handful of plasticine.” To add a sense of age to the character, asymmetrical fleshy growths and deformations were added to the design, to show “she’s been around for God knows how long,” Jackson said.

The final Shelob’s head in maquette form, with its mouth closed.

Elaborations by Paul Campion.

Once a definitive design was selected, a maquette was sculpted and scanned to obtain the Shelob digital model. Shelob’s face was sculpted in two poses, with closed and open mouth. The former concretely defined Shelob’s facial connotations. “Combining elements from Jaimie [Beswarick]’s anatomical spider-face sculpts and Greg [Broadmore]’s diseased maquettes,” sculptor Ben Wootten said, “the final version was an attempt to capture all the aspects of design that peter and Fran [Walsh] warmed to the most. The diseased growths were whittled back to a concentration around the left eye, and a more predatory look was introduced by bringing the ‘alpha’ eyes closer together. In keeping with the squat nature of the Tunnelweb spider, Peter had me shorten the length of the face, bringing the eyes and mouthparts closer and creating a more focused creature.” The scanning technology was so advanced that, literally, “it perfectly captured an errant thumbprint on the back of the model.”

The maquette of Shelob’s open mouth. The digital model applied cosmetic changes, such as the removal of the central upper tooth in the inner jaw.

Defining Shelob’s inner mouth parts proved most challenging, as reported by Wootten: “after the initial sculpt had been approved and scanned, Weta Digital quickly realized they would need to have a much more detailed understanding of Shelob’s mouthparts in order to create a working digital model. Due to the deadline imposed on the digital animation team, only a day could be spent designing the mouth workings. The quickest way to achieve this was through an augmented version of the original sculpt. We poured a hard plasticine copy from the existing mold and quickly worked the mouth details into it. The design brief was to the point: scary and disgusting. From memory, I conjured up a combination of the most vile images I could think of and worked them around the existing mandibles: squid beaks, crayfish mouths, and various ‘organic apertures’ were the main inspiration. The only change Peter made to this design was to remove the large middle tooth at the top of the mouth. The digital team did an amazing job of breathing life into the design.”

The design ultimately mirrors the novel creature only partially: the “great horns” described by Tolkien are completely absent, and the mention of Frodo being stung is taken literally — with the presence of a stinger, based on wasp stings, on the end of Shelob’s abdomen. The beak was also replaced with internal jaws hidden by Shelob’s chelicerae.

Although a practical version was first employed for certain scenes, Shelob was an entirely digital character in the final version of The Return of the King — brought to life by Weta Digital. A total number of 16 animators worked on the sequences featuring Shelob — one of the most complex characters in the film to animate due to the number of appendages, as well as its style of movement. Her movements were based on those of spiders — among which the alternation between fast movements and laying still in place. Shelob’s mass, exceeding that of any spider (or arthropod) that ever roamed the world, posed a particular challenge when having to apply spider-like movements to her far larger anatomy. Animator Andre Calder explained: “once you get into animating a two-ton, six-metre-long Movie Monster, clips of garden spiders get left behind quite quickly. You can get the basics of spider movement — which pairs of legs get moved in what sequence as the spider walks and the way the body mass reacts to that. But the broader behaviour is driven more by the requirements of the action and the constraints of what was shot on set with the actors. Plus [Shelob] is a Movie Monster, and behaves with unnatural intelligence and malevolence.”

Many shots of the creature were inspired by photographs and footage of spiders. Shelob is introduced in the darkness, with her limbs held tightly against each other — a sight inspired by a spider photograph Jackson had seen in a National Geographic documentary. It was a documentary-like feeling, in fact, that the visual effects artists wanted to achieve for the whole sequence. When Shelob emerges from her lair to stalk Frodo outside of it, the shot of her legs coming out of the tunnel was inspired by a concept art piece by John Howe, particularly favoured by Peter Jackson.

Rivers ultimately commented on Shelob and the sequence she is featured in, saying: “what I love about the Shelob sequence is that even though she is this disgusting, evil creature, she isn’t actually an emissary or one of Sauron’s minions. She simply lives in [Cirith Ungol], and Gollum is clever enough to use her to try and kill Frodo; but, you know, she doesn’t have any agenda in getting the Ring or helping Sauron get it — this is where she lives, it’s her lair. And so she isn’t willing to risk her life for a meal, and so Sam puts up enough of a fight that she just creeps off back into the darkness.”

For more images of Shelob, visit the Monster Gallery.

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same.

No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.”

-H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Rights for a film adaptation of H.G. Wells’s seminal 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, were first acquired in 1926 by Paramount Pictures. Several years later, after Welles’ radio broadcast, Ray Harryhausen first attempted to create a film based on the novel — as early as 1942. To sell his idea to film studios, he produced test footage portraying one of the Martians — animated with stop-motion — emerging from the cylinder spacecraft (a scene directly taken from the novel), as well as several paintings of proposed scenes for the film. The footage and paintings were shown to George Pal at Paramount — who, unbeknownst to Harryhausen, was already working on adapting The War of the Worlds as a producer. Pal admitted the fact only several weeks after that meeting.

Harryhausen’s stop-motion Martian.

“I think everyone expected to see a man emerge–possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring within the shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two luminous disks–like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me — and then another. […]

A big greyish rounded bulk, the size, perhaps, of a bear, was rising slowly and painfully out of the cylinder. As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather.

Two large dark-coloured eyes were regarding me steadfastly. The mass that framed them, the head of the thing, was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the lipless brim of which quivered and panted, and dropped saliva. The whole creature heaved and pulsated convulsively. A lank tentacular appendage gripped the edge of the cylinder, another swayed in the air.

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth–above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes–were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.”

-H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

George Pal and director Byron Haskin hired artists Hal Pereira and Albert Nozaki (already Pal’s art director on When Worlds Collide) to conceive the Martians and their war ships. Nozaki was inspired by Wells’s original description of the creatures, but decided to take ample creative liberties — and ultimately conceived an entirely new configuration for the Martians. Ultimately, the film design bears no resemblance to Wells’s original idea. Nozaki envisioned a creature with octopus-like skin and “with a single cyclopean eye” bulging from the center of its head, which was barely distinguishable from the wide torso.

Charles Gemora — veteran gorilla costume maker and make-up artist for films — was hired to construct Nozaki’s design and bring it to the screen. The Martian, seen in the iconic farmhouse scene, was one of the first — if not the first — movie Monsters to be brought to the screen as a performer in a suit. Gemora’s own short stature was providential, as he himself could perform in the elaborate suit.

Working alone, Gemora produced a single Martian suit — intended for a 6′ tall performer — which was initially approved. Only a day before the scheduled filming of the farmhouse scene, the art director realized that the suit was too large to work on the set he had devised for the scene. Gemora thus had to rebuild the entire alien creature — in smaller proportions — with less than 20 hours available for the task.

Working with his own daughter Diana — 12 years old at the time — Gemora started construction of the new Martian by salvaging certain portions of the old suit. The recycled parts were the creature’s peculiar three-lensed eye and the arms — which, unaltered, caused the proportions of the Martian to change. The suit was built from the lower body up, and never intended to be shown from the waist down.

Poultry netting was first specifically positioned over a wood armature to establish the shape of the head and torso, with the arms and the “headlight” eye roughly attached. The arms had been built with wood armatures, rubber sheeting inner layers, and vein-shaped bladder systems that could be puppeteered with tubes and squeeze bottles to create the illusion of pulsating veins. The Martian’s fingers could be operated through cables with ring-shaped grips: by pulling the cables with his own fingers, Gemora could maneuver the Martian’s. The back of the creature was left open in order for Gemora to enter the suit more easily.

Rubber sheeting was applied over the preliminary forms of the head and the torso — and sculpted into shape to create an inner structural layer for the suit. “The rubber sheeting for the Martian head was pre-made,” Diana Gemora recalled. “Charlie had gotten down a technique for gooey globs of rubbery stuff. He [could] make it translucent with veins showing distinctly, or opaque with clusters of cloudy veins like a hemorrhage or dye or paint it any way he [wanted].” Portions of the creature were also reinforced with plaster bandages applied over the rubber. The creature’s skin was created by applying foam latex over the inner layer.

Given that the Martian’s proportions had been shrunk, the electric wiring to light the eye had to be positioned on its upper torso — above where Gemora’s head would be — to increase the suit’s mobility. As “a last-minute addition,” in order to camouflage the wires on the upper portion of the creature, Gemora added sculptural veins — as well as vein-shaped bladders parallel to those that had been applied to the arms. “Impromptu should have been his middle name,” Diana Gemora said. The last touches on the skin included adding thin layers of latex over the eye to create the eyelid. The air tubing system to puppeteer the veins on the torso and arms was then run along the torso and the arms. Two bladders on either lower side of the torso were also included to simulate the creature’s breathing. “The throbbing of the veins [was] going to be accomplished by what is called the Venturi Suction Effect,” Diana Gemora said. “The air tubing in the arms and head [ran] to both the pressure and vacuum sides of an air compressor. Operating the compressor with a ‘hand clicker’ [caused] the tubes to pulse like veins.”

Gemora suits up.

The Martian was painted with “studio blood” and glycerin. Once the suit was completed, it was brought onto the set — it had to be moved very carefully due to its fragility — where Gemora put it on. Once on set, the last touch to the Martian included further paint details and final applications of vaseline to achieve a wet, organic effect — also aided by the foam latex skin, which had not dried yet. At 5’3″, the artist had to kneel in order to fit inside the 4′ tall Martian; in such position, Gemora could not move around the set on his own. The suit was thus mounted on a dolly — and could be moved by two crewmembers through wires. They once pulled so strongly that Gemora risked falling over and thus irremediably destroy the suit — something that ultimately did not happen. During filming, Diana was under the floor of the elevated set, pumping air into the vein bladders — with tubes and empty squeeze bottles.

Although the Martian is most clearly seen in the farmhouse scene, the climax of The War of the Worlds features one of the dying Martians as it attempts to crawl out of one of the fallen Tripods. As scheduled, the scene would only show the arm of the creature — as such, Gemora was able to use one of the arms from the suit as an insert effect, and puppeteer it from above. The vein bladders were operated by Gemora by blowing air from a tube. As the Martian dies, the pulsation becomes slower, until it eventually stops.

Although the director was partially disappointed with the final Martian suit, Diana Gemora fondly remembers the work with her father. “The wet, unfinished look gave the Martian a slimy, living appearance,” Diana said. “Watching the scene, you see how the body movement is kind of ‘teetery.’ I still can’t watch the end of that scene — the Martian running away from Gene Barry and Ann Robinson — without remembering those funny off-camera prop guys giving Charlie such a yank that he almost fell backward! My single letdown is that the Martian is only on-camera about 15 seconds, and it’s difficult to see the great vein action on the head created by my feverish clicking. To this day, when I see The War of the Worlds, I still wish for ‘Just a little more time – please!’ But what really struck me, watching the movie for the first time in a theater 50 years ago in 1953, was that I actually was scared to death. Believe it or not, even though I knew the entire process involved in making that Martian, the effect was so incredible and intense that to this day I still get the same feeling that I had when I was a child. All the reasons I thought Charlie’s War of the Worlds Martian wouldn’t work turned out to be the things that made it one of the classic movie Monsters.”

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