Creature effects

Paul Davis

of something in the darkness. And they put scotch light in the eyes so that you could just see the eyes glowing in the background. But again, for whatever reason, I guess John wanted to conceal the monster as much as possible. And they kept it out of the movie. That guy laying there, right there, he was the former dean of British stuntmen, Paddy Ryan.

16:53 · jump to transcript →

Paul Davis

And John, for the longest time, thought that this clip was something that Frank Oz and Jim Henson made specifically for John for the movie, and that it was a commentary on violence and all this kind of stuff. But it turns out, after 20-something years, I asked Frank Oz about it, and he said, no, that was actually from a 1980 episode in which the special guest was the prolific puppeteer Señor Wences.

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Paul Davis

The reason they did it as a post-production thing, it's actually very smart, you know, so that they could then whittle the crew down to the bare minimum, because this was on the sound stage at Twickenham, which was built about four and a half feet off the ground so that they could manipulate the floor, they could puppeteer the floor, and of course David is in the floor in this shot with a fake body.

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So this was the genesis of animatronics for our little dudes. It was unbelievable. I called myself the Snow White of the 80s because I was with the Garbage Pail Kids, and they were all played by the most extraordinary little people actors. Yeah, the other MVPs of the film. The MVPs. Those guys endured. It's just unbelievable what they put themselves through in order to play these characters.

4:07 · jump to transcript →

and they did it so beautifully. And we had, this was the genesis of animatronics. Like it was not what we now know of to be, I don't even know if they still use animatronics. Like they use CGI, they use a series of things. No, these were dudes that were behind the furniture, scenery, moving like wires to get their mouths to be open and their eyes to be. Here we go. There's a cutie on the screen.

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And they also couldn't hear us when we were talking to them because they got a giant foam head on them with all kinds of stuff happening. Terror and, you know, just... Right, so the animatronics, like, worked, you know, it was simple servos, pneumatic servos that, you know, like... What is it? The switch that you see thrown when the electric chair goes on in a movie. Like, that same size switch...

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Jim Piddock

early in the movie and we've already run across the dog. Anyway, so again, you have to admire the confidence there. If you're wondering, as I did, how they got the dog to do these various things on cue and walk to various places, well, of course, it all looks very natural, but if you think about whether you can get a dog to go to a specific place on cue without so much as a wayward step or glance, I think you'll appreciate that it's not so simple, though the explanation is indeed very simple. The dog you see is animatronic.

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Jim Piddock

I have the animatronic dog again. Again, so persuasive ears going up. And now, oh dear, what's all this? A fight or a struggle, more accurately? The return of the unpleasant character. Well, you'd expect a struggle, wouldn't you, with him coming back in? And here it is. All this action, rapid cutting, battle royal, although not really much actually going on. Rather angry acting again from the unpleasant character.

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Jim Piddock

And there's a fly. He seemed to have drawn the attention of a fly crawling on his temple. Not a real fly, obviously. There's no such thing as a trained fly. And animatronics were out of the question, the scale here defeating the capabilities of even the finest fabricator. No, no, this fly was digitally created by computer artists long after the scene was shot.

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a couple, two or three days, unfortunately. Do you recall which scenes he tried to address during that period? I think it was in the underworld. I can't remember exactly which ones they were, but it was in the underworld. I mean, in this film, we do get a theme which emerges a lot in Clive's work, which is a commitment to the idea that the monster or the monstrous or the apparently monstrous is not your enemy.

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of blood and muscle and tissue. And these hypodermic needles erupt through his body. Now, it was an animatronic that was built by Peter Litten's crew. It was all ready to go. And the producer turned around and says, sorry, we can't spend three days filming this. We haven't got the money. You'll have to do something that you can shoot in the morning. And so this was the end result.

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But, you know, we must have been running out of money by this stage. You know, the money must have been tight. But it's funny, isn't it, that the effect had already been designed and the animatronics were ready to go. So that's a large part of the money that had been spent is now going to go to waste if you don't actually shoot it. It was annoying. I mean, it's sitting there. I could see it in the corner waiting to go, but it needed three days. They said, you can only shoot for a morning. I don't get the logic. And they did the same thing with me on Rawhead, you know.

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Stan Winston

I'm Stan Winston. I created the creature effects and the alien effects for A/ens. I remember Jim trying to figure out how he could make the beginning of this movie impressive. He said he wanted to use a robotic laser. It was an afterthought and it wasn't in the budget and I remember having the gall to say to him "If you wanna use it, you have to pay for it." And he did. - Is that right? This robotic arm and the laser came out of his pocket. I wanted a seamless blend from the end of the first film into the beginning of the second film. I certainly wanted to honor all the things that were good about the first film. So I went to school on Ridley's style of photography, which was quite different from mine, cos he used a lot of long lenses, much more so than I was used to working with. But the smoke, the backlight, the textures, the way he forces the frame by putting a lot of equipment, machinery and foreground pieces, I really studied all that. I wanted there to be a stylistic continuity. I also wanted to have my own style grafted onto that so that I felt enough of a sense of authorship to make it worth doing.

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Pat McClung

This derelict ship had been in Bob Burns' driveway. He'd been given it by Fox and it was starting to fall apart. We had to put it back together and fix it up. Fortunately, though, it existed, so it saved us a lot of model work because it was there and mostly intact, rather than building from scratch. My name's Carrie Henn and I was Newt. My name's Chris Henn and I was Tim Jordan. It's cool to see what James Cameron had in mind, cos at the time we didn't really know what was going on. Little did we know at this time that our life would change when they came back from inside. That was the first time we saw the facehugger, when we opened the door and we saw it on Jay's - who played our dad - neck. I was really sad for my brother that this got cut out, and for everyone watching it, because it shows everyone why I can't stand the aliens, pretty obvious anyway, but you find out that my dad was the one who brought it back to the colony. It shows how Sigourney and Newt get the connection, too, as mother-daughter, and they have the same enemy. This was interesting, cos it wasn't something we saw filmed. When it happened, they just got out of the car and that was it. It ties it to the first one. It's the same place they went in the first movie. We have another one of our first creature effects that is like the introduction of the facehugger. All of these things were so daunting to me psychologically, because these had now become iconic characters, the facehugger and the chestburster and the warrior aliens. Of course, the queen was brand-new, but we also wanted each of these to have their own life in this movie and at the same time be legitimate to the original. So, to the very discerning eye, if you look at the facehugger from the original, from A/en, and you look at the facehugger in Aliens, there are subtle differences in the detail, more attention to detail as far as the creature itself.

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Bill Paxton

We also had to replicate Carrie for this because of all the shots that Sigourney was gonna have to carry her. And she was too heavy. And it was also Sigourney's back. Exactly. So we built a little replication of Carrie's body. It was actually a really beautiful dummy that she carries through much of the scene after she saves her. It's not enough to build a 14-foot queen alien. It's gotta have a head that comes out of its helmet-like head. This was a great shot. This was a combination of miniature and then we built the last part of the egg sac and attached it to the full-sized queen. This is all full size. This is full-size 14-foot queen when we see her for the first time. That's a big puppet. And the extruding head. We had to come up with a new way of doing the teeth, making them translucent rather than metal, as with the alien warriors. When Jim first came to me, he had a painting of the queen alien. Just like with 7he 7erminator, he had already had her designed. I had some ideas and started doing some drawings myself, one of the rear legs. It ultimately ended up being virtually Jim's original design. I'll never forget the two of us sitting on drawing boards at his house where he would draw one part of her and I'd draw the other part, and it would be all coming together. He's one of the most talented artists I ever had working for me. I think he remembers it a little differently. You don't think he'd look at it like that, as an employee of Stan Winston's? I also love this sequence when Ripley is communicating with the queen. "See, I can wipe out your children." I shot that shot. She wants the queen to call off her warriors, and when the queen doesn't, she goes to town. Kill the eggs. Wasn't there a puppeteer whose hand was dropping the egg? That was Nigel. He would push it out. It was on a plex rod underneath the egg. Somebody was under the set to place it, otherwise it would roll over and fall down. My job was to take that egg and shove it back in. I know Sigourney still has liberal guilt over this whole scene. But this is the classic cathartic purging with fire. You purge the nightmare by burning it out. And the idea that this is the only way she's ever gonna have psychological closure. Not, by the way, a new idea in films. And probably one that doesn't have a whole lot of basis in real human psychology. It feels right to the audience, but if you're that traumatized, it wouldn't help you that much. But she sure unleashes holy hell on these guys. We had a sharpshooter fire a real bullet into the miniature egg sac. This is a miniature. That's a front projection shot. A lot of smoke in the air tends to take the edge off of it. It was a bit heavy. Obscuring the plate.

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John McTiernan

And the external set of jaws that the creature has, I did not want him, would not have countenance to a racial suggestion as to what the predator look like.

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John McTiernan

The monster suit was physically really difficult and I think they found

1:37:37 · jump to transcript →

Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the blog. We're already off to a great start. I already regret inviting you. That was my blog voice. That's all I got. And next to Mark, we have makeup effects maestro, creature effects maestro, and all-around great guy, Tony Gardner. Hello, everybody. And we also have... This is like the dating game. I know. Door number three. And the man, the myth...

0:44 · jump to transcript →

It's within stunt crafts. Now, how did you engineer this blobular thing? Was this miniature with a hand? That's a big miniature puppet. That's Mark Setrakian and his team doing a miniature animatronic that was dressed with a blob quilt. It's not really a hand. It might have been, but it was a... You mean the blob anus? It's a little anus-y. It was actually a mechanical rig on a piston that came up and had flower petals that froze.

1:12:23 · jump to transcript →

a contractor, a carpenter at the base, and he saw this creature being carried on a stretcher into the infirmary, or not the infirmary, the Hangar 84, the famous Hangar 84. He was being carried on a stretcher, and he saw it moving, and the creature looked up at him with these very sad, kind of hound doggy, basset eyes, and kind of transmitted to him telepathically, this is it, I'm wounded. Then you have a daughter, the daughter of a fireman who was

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