On April 25th, 2012, Amalgamated Dynamics published a showreel video depicting their work on the 2011 prequel of John Carpenter’s The Thing. The creatures, which ranged from full-size animatronics, to rod puppets, to suits, were largely unused in the final film; they were replaced with computer generated imagery as the film “felt too 80s”.

Viewers may also have noticed the bizarre and outlandish Creature shown towards the end of the video, at the 4:15 mark. It is labeled as the ‘Pilot’. The final cut of the 2011 film entirely lacks this character — which was edited out and replaced with the Sander Thing. Due to the fact the replacement was applied late into the production — most probably — the Pilot can still be briefly seen in the shadows when Kate enters the ship.

Look to the right! The ‘breathing tube’ and the long and thin toes are visible.

Unlike the various incarnations of the Thing, however, said ‘Pilot’ was not replaced with computer generated imagery, but rather entirely removed from the film; it being visible in the above shot is in all probability not intentional. It is here that a single question comes to mind:

Why was the Pilot Creature fired from The Thing?

The Pilot in the original Climax sequence. It is currently unclear whether the original footage is finished or not.

By no stretch of imagination this ‘unspeakable’ aenigma boggled the mind of the blogger you are reading from. That is precisely the reason for which I sent an e-mail to the directly involved — Amalgamated Dynamics themselves. The long-running special effects company also provided effects for other well known creature features, such as Tremors, Starship Troopers and Evolution. Alec Gillis, Co-founder of the Special Effects Company, was kind enough to answer my questions on the matter.

“Hi,

Thanks for the kind words. Re: the THING animatronics. The Pilot was the Thing perfectly replicating the species of aliens that built the saucer. It was replaced after a screening that apparently confused viewers as to what the Pilot was. It was felt that since the audience had only been shown iterations of the Thing that were asymmetrical, split open and grisly, to present a creature that looked like it evolved through normal biology was a violation of what had been seen in the 2011 film as well as the JC film.

It was then decided that the Thing in the climax needed to be more “Thing-like”. We designed the Sanders Thing as a maquette that was scanned and animated.

There are a few shots of the Pilot head sculpt on our Design Reel on the youtube page. We’ve also done a number of interviews wherein we submitted shots of the Pilot, but we never really know which photos get chosen. Shots will probably pop up on the web soon as we’re still doing interviews for the non-U.S. markets. Keep an eye on our Facebook page, however — there will be some Pilot shots appearing there soon.

Thanks for the inquiry!

alec gillis”

The Pilot was created as a full-sized rod puppet animatronic character, featuring otherwordly characteristics: three eyes, disposed vertically, fill the single socket in the center of the snout. Internal mechanisms allow them to writhe inside the socket and blink. The arms are greatly elongated and arthropod-esque, with an abnormally extended metacarpal section. The legs, instead, feature multiple skeletal toes and seem to be ‘merged’ in the feet area. It is unknown if the Race had their feet permanently merged; when the Thing imitating the Pilot detaches from the cockpit, full leg motion is seen in the storyboards.

The Pilot-Thing corners Kate in Rob McCallum’s storyboard for the sequence.

The Monster also seems to be neurally connected with the ship itself — via cables biomechanically embedded into its back [see video below]. When the Pilot attacks Kate, the cables detach themselves from the Monster’s back. It is here that a digital counterpart of the Pilot was to be added. Carter reaches the inside of the ship, where Kate is threatening the Thing with a grenade; he torches the creature. The Tom Woodruff Jr. himself wore a special ‘fireproof’ suit to shoot the reference scene. The footage would later be finalized with the addition of the digital Pilot-Thing being burned.

In addition to the ‘living’ Pilot, Amalgamated Dynamics also built a featureless mummified Pilot, from the same molds that produced the other model. The tube connecting its lower jaw is cut, suggesting how it suicided. The tube is probably supposed to be a breathing apparatus. In the final version of the film, the Pilot was covered with a luminous tower, with unknown shifting graphics on its surface. It was labeled as ‘the Tetris tower’ by the director of the film — who was disappointed with the change. The mummified Pilot can be seen in great detail in this video.

The mummified Pilot.

The Pilot is a member of the race that built the crashed spaceship from which the Thing escaped. The original version of the story involved the crew of the craft as ‘scientists’: they collected various specimens from different planets across the cosmos. The Thing was part of the cargo, and eventually broke free. Amalgamated Dynamics later added in a description of a video: “The scripted ending to The Thing (2011) featured Kate inside the spacecraft, discovering the mummified remains of the Pilot who first brought the craft to Earth, unleashing the Thing. A second Pilot, still alive, attacks just as it mutates into a Thing version of itself. Shot but ultimately discarded in favor of a different direction, it gave us a great opportunity to design and build a unique alien life form and then push it into Thing territory when it changes. A full size animatronic/rod puppet provided physical elements on stage with a planned CG counterpart to flesh out the action. Watch The Thing Tom Woodruff Jr On Fire [in the video] to see fire elements that were shot for what would have been the death of the CG pilot! All that burnin’ and nothing to do with it…”

The Pilot Thing maquette. Once the creature detaches itself from the ship’s control mechanism, it reveals its nature of an imitation.

Matthijs van Heijningen directed The Thing; he, however, had fairly limited freedom over the finished film. The director explained in great detail on his Facebook page what his original idea was:

“Okay[,] remember the Pilot version instead of the Tetris version. In the Pilot version Kate walks in this room and sees a dead Pilot hanging. He was the last Pilot alive and Kate sees that he killed himself because his air pipe was cut (basically Colin in space) [pictured above]. The back story was that this Alien Pilot race collected specimen from different planets and The Thing was one of them, broke free and killed all the Alien species in the ship (pod room). The Pilot kills himself and crashes the ship on purpose, hoping that it would kill the Thing. Of course it doesn’t, it climbs out and freezes himself. So back to Kate. She sees the dead Pilot and [that] Sander, [who] now has taken the form of the Pilot (he has the genetics because of his spaceship slaughter fest 100.000 years before), has started up the ship. Sander attacks Kate in Pilot form and corners Kate, who pulls her last grenade and threatens to blow them both up. That moment Carter runs in and sees what she is doing and blows up the Sander Thing just to convince Kate that he is human (He basically has no choice because he if fries Kate with his flamethrower everybody would blow up). [A] little complicated but we filmed this. What you see on the picture [below] is Pilot Sander Thing being burned by Carter (ref for CGI). Studio didn’t like this (too complicated and till some degree they were right) so we had to lose the backstory and replaced the Pilot with the Tetris. They thought that the Pilot wasn’t scary enough, so we created the Sander Thing the last minute (which shows unfortunately).”

Tom Woodruff Jr. as the Pilot-Thing gets torched.

The director later added: “What had to be done was showing the slaughter fest while Kate was going through the ship, seeing multiple Pilot aliens dead, half transformed, burned. Something terrible had happened in the ship. I liked that idea because it would be the Norwegian camp in space. Kate sees the pod room and one broken pod [original text: one pod being broken], giving her the clues [of] what happened. What didn’t work was that she wanted to find Sander and stop the ship from taking off and still solve the mystery in the ship. These two energies were in conflict.”

The Pilot was not the only character to be ‘fired’ from The Thing. Built for the film were 6 models portraying some of the specimens collected inside the precedently mentioned ‘pods’ by the Pilot race. They are featureless background models, and they seem to be homaging some of Amalgamated Dynamics’ precedent special effects works.

One of the ‘Pod Creatures’. Notice the Graboid-esque mandibles.

Alec Gillis explained to The Thing Prequel Facebook page: “We did create 6 or so ‘Pod Creatures’. These were weird silhouettes meant to show a variety of aliens that had been collected throughout the universe. They were in frozen pods, one of which had burst open from the inside. There was a hallway one of the characters walks through, where a mummified Pilot alien was collapsed on the ground. Supposedly killed by the Thing.” Even before the Pilot itself was removed from the film, the Pod Creatures received the same fate. Van Heijningen added: “We needed a lot of money to show the [Norwegian camp] version in space with all the dead aliens. The studio thought it was too expensive and too complicated so we erased that whole back story.”

Pictured above in ADI’s workshop, the Pilot received brief days of glory during MonsterPalooza 2012.

Special, great thanks to Alec Gillis of Amalgamated Dynamics Inc.. Be sure to visit their official website and their Facebook Page.

For more images of the Pilot and the lost Pod Aliens, visit the Monster Gallery.

The Gallery will be updated with photos of the various Thing creatures once an article covering those is published.

June the 12th, 1987 saw the first introduction to the cinematic screen of one of the most memorable and well known Movie Monsters to date — El Diablo Cazador de Hombres: the Predator. Since then, the species of Intergalactic Hunters has appeared in a total of 5 films, with the most recent chapter, Predators, released in 2010. Divided in 6 parts spanning through all of them (including the original Steve Johnson Monster), the Predator Metamorphosis Essay analyzes the process which brought each of the incarnations of the character to life.

Please note that each part has not yet been finished. With the release of each article, the links below will be updated.

Prologue: Hunter

Part 1: Predator [COMING SOON]

Part 2: Predator 2 [COMING SOON]

Part 3: Alien Vs. Predator [COMING SOON]

Part 4: Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem [COMING SOON]

Part 5: Predators [COMING SOON]

Last Updated: 08/03/2013

Amalgamated Dynamics, the special effects company behind the Graboids from Tremors and many other fantastic cinematic effects, is currently asking for support for their new project, Harbinger Down. The basic idea for the film is to use Practical Effects wholly, meaning no digitally animated Monsters!

The plot is as follows:

A group of grad students have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming on a pod of Orcas in the Bering Sea. When the ship’s crew dredges up a recently thawed piece of old Soviet space wreckage, things get downright deadly. It seems that the Russians experimented with tardigrades, tiny resilient animals able to withstand the extremes of space radiation. The creatures survived, but not without mutation.

Now the crew is exposed to aggressively mutating organisms. And after being locked in ice for 3 decades, the creatures aren’t about to give up the warmth of human companionship.

ADI Concept Art by Farzad Varahramyan

Alec Gillis describes the project:

“Harbinger Down is a small film. A mere speck by today’s studio standards. Sci-fi/horror films like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Ridley Scott’s Alien are our models. They’re films that tell contained stories about characters you care about who are trapped in enclosed environments. When flight is not an option, the fight is more desperate.

Visual Effects limitations back in the 80′s meant that those sci-fi/horror filmmakers had to tell more psychologically engaging stories. They didn’t have CGI to show expansive worlds, so they told stories that relied on well-developed characters in intense situations. It was those very limitations that made their films better.”

He then assures: “There will be NO digitally animated Creatures in this film.“

You can support Harbinger Down by funding the project over at Kickstarter, at the following link:

—>Support Harbinger Down!<—

Only 50 hours more, and the project still needs 150.000 dollars to go into production!

—>Support Harbinger Down!!<—

Harbinger Down managed to reach its Kickstarter goal! Congratulations to all who contributed to the project in any way they could.

And now we wait for an avalanche of practical effects…

Predator 2 was ultimately only a modest box-office success, and with its lukewarm reception, a sequel was temporarily abandoned. Another project instead surfaced; Twentieth Century Fox decided to conjoin two film franchises together, and brought to the screen Alien Vs. Predator — based on the homonim comic book series published by Dark Horse. Stan Winston Studio, however, did not return to bring the Predators once again to the screen — and much like in the case of Alien³, passed the torch to Amalgamated Dynamics, co-founded by Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis. The duo had previously worked with Stan Winston Studios, but founded their own effects Studios in 1989 — with their first film project released soon after: Tremors. At the time of the production of Predator, the Winston Studios crew had actually been split into two teams — one of which was assigned to work on Monster Squad; the Dynamics duo happened to be in the latter project, and as such, had never had previous experiences with the intergalactic Hunters before their work on Alien Vs. Predator. “The Predator was a bit of uncharted territory,” said Alec Gillis to AvPGalaxy. “Of course, it’s a creature suit and that’s what we do, but there are always fan expectations. We had a lot of input from Paul Anderson so that helped things move along quickly, since he knew what he wanted. He was a real joy to work with because of his decisiveness. We knew that our Predator would in a way be a prototype for our company.”

Johnson’s Predator concept.

Steve Johnson Fx, who had precedently worked for Predator — both for the gore effects and the unused, original Hunter — tried to propose to the production team redesigns of both the titular creatures of the film. The concept drawings were, however, rejected — due to the changes they applied to the design: they were labeled as too radically removed from the original outlines. Following director Paul W.S. Anderson’s rather specific instructions, Amalgamated Dynamics conceived a Predator design that would fit the new role in the film. The story focuses on a Pyramid discovered in Antarctica, which is revealed to be a sacred place for the race of the Predators — or, at least, a specific Predator culture. Three Predators are sent every 100 years to perform a rite of passage: slay an Alien — the ‘perfect prey’ — and mark themselves and their helmets with a stylized symbol, proof of their victory. It is unclear what cultural or religious purpose the passage actually serves; in some interviews and backstage featurettes, Anderson stated that it is an equivalent of a manhood rite of passage; this comes in contrast with another concept, which conceives those Predators as in the hierarchic stage before that of an Elder. In November 2004, Anderson said to Empire Magazine: “the idea is that only once they have hunted enough humans do they qualify to hunt Aliens. Then they become Elders.” The film ultimately leaves the question ambiguous, with the only further clue found in the Elder Predator’s marked face and helmet shown in the climax of the film.

Given the fact Anderson’s Predators were hunting Aliens, and not humans, the director chose to give the characters a more imposing and muscular anatomy, as well as a more complex and protective body armor — that would still mantain the distinct ‘Predator aesthetic’. Woodruff explained: “In this film the Predators would be engaging in ritual combat not with humans, but with Aliens. This meant that they would need more protective armor than previously seen. This new armor needed to retain the aesthetic of the Predator culture we’d seen before but extrapolated to full body coverage. Just what is the Predator aesthetic? The first film showed us a mix of Asian and tribal influence along with a rough-hewn primitive quality to the body armor. Predator 2 introduced a more ornate, almost insect-like look. Our job was to turn these eclectic motifs into a unified aesthetic. The Predator society builds sophisticated spaceships, yet they should not look as sleek and hi-tech as a Star Wars Stormtrooper. They are a tribal culture, yet their look should not be as primitive as the Orcs from The Lord of the Rings. They are also a warrior culture, so the ornate cannot conflict with the practical. Huge samurai-style decorative projections could be a disadvantage in a fight with an Alien, for instance.”

Don Lanning’s Predator maquette.

Many aspects of the new Predator designs were also considerably influenced by Dark Horse’s comic versions of the character. “This film owes as much to the Dark Horse comic series as it does its cinematic predecessors,” said Woodruff. “In keeping with that, we decided that the Predators themselves should reflect a comic book-style silhouette, possessing more heroic proportions: wider shoulders, narrower waists, smaller heads. We also lengthened their dreadlocks to help punctuate head movement.” Kevin Peter Hall’s successor as the Predator performer was Ian Whyte, a 7’1″ tall former Basketball player. As such, one of the key aspects of the creature’s presence was kept. Stunt performers played the other Predators when a scene required more than one individual in the same shot. Like in the case of Alien³, they were filmed with certain camera tricks (such as standing on boxes) that made them appear taller.

Unlike the previous films, Alien Vs. Predator featured not one, but three main Predators (Ian Whyte played each one in key scenes). Such a choice derived in the necessity of differentiating them and giving them their own visual personality; taking direct inspiration from Predator 2‘s production, the Predator bodies, armors and weapons came from single common moulds, sculpted by Bruce Spaulding Fuller and Don Lanning. As the Predators were required to take their armors off, the body sculpture was separated from the armor sculptures. 16 basic bodies were casted and painted with the same color scheme, so that they could be replaced at any time, if needed. The copies were ‘customized’ with different armor parts or weapons (designed by Joe Pepe), casted in fiberglass or in flexible urethane. Over 500 individual armor and weapon parts were built by the special effects crew.

• The ‘Chopper’ (or ‘Gill’) Predator was given long, singular scimitar-esque wrist blades — over 3 feet in length — attached to the underside of the forearm. Its mask featured a mostly smooth and oval-based outline, with Gill-like patterns on the cheek area. In addition, skulls are mounted on his backpack, to visually imply some of the character’s history.
• The ‘Celtic’ Predator retains wrist blades with an outline rather similar to the original design. Its other weapons include the new “sleeker” spear (a combination of a practical model and digital imagery), and a net launcher mounted on its left forearm gauntlet. Its mask — as the crew nickname suggests — is based on Celtic knotworks.
• The ‘Scar’ Predator has telescopic wristblades, as well as the new spear, and throwable “collapsible buzz saws,” (again, practical models mixed with digital counterparts), AvP‘s version of the disk. Its mask was conceived as a homage to the original Predator’s, although it features a more angular outline in the facial area.

All the Hunters shared a common, protective armor covering most of the chest, arms and legs, as well as ‘foot blades’ — conceived with the idea of aiding them in climbing ice; such a feature is, however, not shown in the film. A common weapon given to all three is a dagger-like cutting weapon, implied — in backstage material — to have ritual or religious significance. The ritual shoulder cannons were all considerably bigger than their predecessors, and their appearence fundamentally draws inspiration from the first Predator’s. The cannon Scar acquires also features an auto-cocking function.

Of the three Predators, only Scar is seen without his mask. Following the character’s role in the story, ADI elaborated a modification of the Predator’s facial connotations that would fit its part, which would also require a wider amount of expressivity. “Because Scar teams up with the film’s heroine, Lex,” said Woodruff, “we thought of him as a romantic leading man. Okay, there was really no intergalactic, interspecies romance going on here, but the subtext was there, at least in our twisted minds. This Predator was not here strictly for scares as before, but as an actual character! He was to spend more time without his armor mask, and needed to convey emotions such as rage, respect, pain, surprise, and even a bit of sadness.” Traits and colors of the creature’s face were changed into gentler and more “heroic” configuration. “He is the Brad Pitt of Predators,” joked Alec Gillis in an Empire magazine article, “so we’ve sculpted him to make him more handsome. After the first little bit of disgust, you can see intelligence in his eyes.” Woodruff added in the Creature Effects of ADI book: “He became sculpturally more regal (dare we say it: handsome?) and in color scheme, we opted for less pale, clammy amphibian tones and more human skin tones. His eyes were based on a predatory cat’s, and imbued with warm golden tones and a slightly larger iris. Finally, we reduced the amount of slime coating of prior incarnations, deeming that more of a trademark of the Alien than the Predator.”

Earlier eye iterations featured colors inspired by the original Predator’s, but were eventually discarded. A particular change to the mouth design was the inclusion of a row of upper teeth, something previously seen in an unused concept art piece, dating back to the pre-production of Predator 2. The Predator’s forehead was also modified and given a more convex shape, and the lower jaw was considerably increased in size, with a more highlighted chin. In the concept art pieces for the film, the Predators are depicted with the original ‘mandible closure’, seen in the former Stan Winston Studios designs. In the final film, however, none of the Predators display it, with the mandibles merely lying on the sides of the face.

In the climax of the film, in yet another homage to Predator 2, the Predators’ tribe deactivates its camouflage technology and appears in front of Alexa and the dead corpse of Scar. Four background Predator suits were built — their numbers would be multiplied in post-production. An Elder Predator — played, again, by Ian Whyte — faces Alexa, and, seeing the ritual mark on her left cheek, gives her a Predator spear (with the collapsing action depicted with computer-generated imagery). The Elder’s design was based on the sculpture of the main Predator, which was modified to portray an aged an experienced Predator — again, in a similar manner to how the Elder from Predator 2 was based on moulds of the first creature. Other changes included a pair of longer canines (that somehow reach the lower jaw), as well as thin, needle-like growths on the head. The fangs of its mandibles were also adorned with small incisions.

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

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Main Articles:

• Alien Mutation – Part V: Alien Vs. Predator [COMING SOON]
• Predator Metamorphosis – Part III: Alien Vs. Predator

Would you like to know more? The Main Article is Army of Klendathu.

“The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.”
-Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

Producer Jon Davison was first approached in 1991 for a science-fiction project — initially titled Outpost 7 – which narrated the struggle for survival of a group of soldiers, stranded on a remote planet whose inhabitants were enormous insectoid extraterrestrials. Writer Edward Neumeier was encouraged to propose the project to TriStar Pictures — but it was turned down. Eventually, it was realized that the idea bore some similarities to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers — mainly for the giant insectoids, the driving force behind the project. “[It] had bugs in it, and we wanted those bugs,” Davison told Cinefex. An adaptation of the novel was thus proposed, and this time endorsed by the Studio. To direct the film, Davison approached Paul Verhoeven — who found the idea “silly” at first. He eventually changed idea — mainly for the prospect of working again with Phil Tippett, who had precedently collaborated in bringing ED-209 to the screen for RoboCop. “I’d found our relationship on RoboCop very stimulating,” the director told Cinefex. “Phil’s a genius-type guy, and ever since RoboCop, I’d been looking for another project to work on with him.”

On Tippett’s part, Starship Troopers represented an opportunity to advance the computer animation techniques whose foundation was made during the production of Jurassic Park. He said: “prior to Jurassic Park, I’d produced stop-motion mostly through traditional methods — by incrementally moving and photographing three-dimensional puppets on a frame-by-frame basis. But our studio’s Dinosaurs for Jurassic Park were not created traditionally. Instead, a special piece of equipment, the Digital Input Device, was developed for that picture by a talented guy named Craig Hayes. The DID is a metal puppet armature, rigged with electronic sensors. The sensors record movement information on a controller box that translates it for computer use. When an animator moves the armature by hand, those movements are mimicked by wire-frame representations inside a digital environment.” Essentially, Tippett realized that Starship Troopers was the chance to improve those effects in fields such as software, hardware and render time.

Before any animation began, the effects team focused on designing the castes of Bug society, based on the original story. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers portrays a dystopian future, where humanity engages in war with an alien civilization — the Pseudo-Arachnids of Klendathu, also denigratingly labeled as ‘Bugs’. Despite their apparently primitive appearence, the creatures have considerably advanced technology, having been able to conceive advanced spacecraft and weapons of war (“stupid races don’t build spaceships”). Their social structure is divided in castes: a Queen is the progenitor of a specific colony. The novel never describes this caste detailedly, and goes no further than mentioning that its purpose — much like the queen in many terrestrial Hymenoptera — is only to lay eggs and that it is unable to move on its own accord, once it reaches adult stage. Strategic administration of the society is a task assigned to the so-called Brain Bugs, which — despite their enormous intelligence — depend on lower castes to survive. In fact, they are described as having “barely functional legs, [and] bloated bodies that were mainly nervous system,” and are telepathically connected with the lower castes. The basis of Bug society is composed of the Warrior and Worker classes: the Warriors are “biologically incapable of surrendering,” and move forward in battle with energy weapons. Workers are less aggressive, and are generally assigned to manual labour — even though they can also be strategically used as decoys by other castes (such is the case during the invasion of Planet P).

Craig Hayes with the maquettes of the Bugs.

The film adaptation’s version of the Bugs (also unscientifically referred to as ‘Arachnids’) is widely different from that of the novel. The major departure is represented by the fact that the film Bugs have not crafted any kind of artificial technology. This was a decision taken by the director himself. Neumeier explained: “Heinlein described them as looking like spiders, and yet the Bugs seemed to have evolved physically beyond that because they were able to shoot guns and to behave in an athropomorphic way. This was one of the earliest things Paul Verhoeven and I talked about; and it became clear that our discussions were leading down the path of anthropomorphic aliens, portrayed by actors in elaborate costumes. Verhoeven quickly put a stop to that line of thinking. He told me, ‘I can’t see a Bug holding a gun.’ He did not want to see some sort of man in a suit with a funny crab claw, or a six-foot-tall ant with its head in a space helmet. Eventually, we came up with the idea that we should do the Bugs as bugs, as believable giant insects.”

The Warrior Bug maquette, sculpted by Peter Konig.

Designing the Bugs was a task assigned to visual effects supervisor Craig Hayes. Brainstorming sessions with Verhoeven included reviews of footage of various insects and other arthropods — with focus on their structure and systems of biological defense. Although no Queens or Workers are shown, the caste system of the film Bugs is far more diverse than the novel Bugs; as the film was influenced by World War II, the Bug castes would represent the various kinds of troops. Hayes explained that “since these Bugs were supposed to be intelligent, or, at least, a whole lot smarter than our homegrown variety, we posited that a hierarchical structure would have evolved within the alien community, mimicking the division of labor seen among insects on earth — workers, drones, et cetera. Also, to follow up on the ‘World War II in space’ idea, we invented a sort of military analog for the Bug troops. Some would act as foot soldiers, some as heavy artillery.” Dozens of design ideas were conceived; ultimately, only six types, each with its ‘function’, were chosen and refined.

The first design to be approved was the one seen the most in the film — the Warrior Bug, “an eight-to-ten-foot-tall insect infrantryman,” according to Hayes. The design is entirely devoted to its function: the Warriors use their enormous jaws and their sharp, mantis-like arms to brutally slaughter their enemy. Their slender anatomy also guarantees considerable agility during combat. The four legs configuration was chosen due to being “purely practical,” according to Hayes. Even after  the initial approval of the project, the studio executives were uncertain as to how the creatures could be efficiently brought to the screen. To erase those concerns, Davison convinced the executives to fund a “Bug test” — on a $225,000 budget. The short film was not only crucial for further development of the film, but also a chance for Tippett Studio to estabilish how to render the creatures — especially the Warrior Bugs themselves, whose design was finalized by the time the test was filmed. The four legs configuration was conceived to render animations less complex. Hayes continues: “four legs meant that our animators needed to spend only half the time moving them around. We also had a chance to tweak the colorization of these Bugs during the test. Paula Lucchesi, who led the paint jobs on all of the Bugs, originally came up with a dark red pattern for the Warriors. Later, we decided to change it to yellow — the coloration you see on wasps and yellowjackets. It is a natural warning sign, signaling other creatures to stay away.”

The Plasma Bug.

The Plasma Bug represents the heavy artillery of the Bugs. Hayes said: “we spliced together the biologies of real stink bugs and fireflies to come up with Plasma Bugs — gigantic creatures that could eject plasma from their lower abdomens into a planet’s upper atmosphere, resulting in spaceships being knocked out of orbit or asteroids off course. The Plasma Bugs became the heavy artillery of the aliens.” Due to their size, their limbs are proportionally thickened; and since the plasma projectiles are ejected from their enormous abdomen — the last pair of limbs is bigger than the others, in order to properly lift the ‘biological cannons’ into position.

Anatomically similar to the Plasma Bug is the Tanker Bug, the Bugs’ version of a Tank. The structure of the Tanker Bugs is mainly inspired by earth beetles, with — again — thickened limbs to support the creature’s immense mass. The creatures also have enlarged claws or toes to aid their stability when walking. Their name is derived from their organic long range weapon, violently ejected from an orifice in their forehead region: a flow of “corrosive acid ignited by organic sparkers near their mouths, spewing out a cross between an acid bath and a flame-thrower.” The final design applied cosmetic changes in regards to the maquettes — such as an additional pair of locomotory limbs.

The air troops are represented by the Hopper Bugs, “capable of gliding on air currents and shearing off human heads.” The design was obtained by reverse-engineering the Warrior Bug design, with several changes and additions — such as the wings, appropriately large to support the creatures in flight; the legs, structured for long jumps (or ‘hops’) and for take-offs;  and a less angular shape of the main jaws. The Hopper Bugs also sport a considerably different color scheme, which is mainly composed of an iridescent green — inspired by certain species of beetles, such as the goldsmith beetle — in contrast with the Warriors’ more opaque configuration.

The Bugs’ strategic mind is the Brain Bug, which aesthetically follows the vague description in Heinlein’s novel, with an enormous, bloated body and atrophied limbs. Hayes commented on the design: “I thought it would be interesting to have pulsing ripples periodically moving just under the flesh on the top of the Brain Bug’s head — an effect we dubbed ‘the meat wave.’ For his face, we hit on using multiple eyes, like a tarantula’s, and a slitted, sexually suggestive mouth organ. From that unfolds a hollow, pointed proboscis — another sexual suggestion — which can spike the top of a human head and suck its brains out.”

Due to the Brain Bug’s inability to move considerable distances by itself, Hayes conceived the Chariot Bugs as its “transporters” — small creatures with a plated dorsal region, able to coordinate their efforts to support and move the considerable weight of the Brain Bug accross the nests. Hayes commented on the design: “because [the Brain Bug] is so fat, it is relatively helpless, physically, and rides around on the backs of little courier insects, which also act as information gatherers. We called those Chariot Bugs.”

The aforementioned first “Bug test” [also seen above] was screened for studio executives in september 1994, and finally achieved the greenlight for the film. Compared to Tippett’s earlier effort in photorealistic digital creatures — Jurassic Park — Starship Troopers presented considerable challenges: not only it presented a far more massive number of digital effects, but it would represent fictional entities without an actual point of reference from reality. Tippett explained: “we’d had concrete reference points for [the Jurassic Park] dinosaurs. And when the weight and the joints of a real animal — even an extinct one — are available to you, you pretty much know what to do with it digitally. But when you’ve got something that’s never really existed, such as the insects of Starship Troopers, suddenly the tail is wagging the dog. We had these great Bug designs that Craig had come up with; but trying to figure out what these creatures could do — what, for them, could be a realistic gait, or a lifelike action — became an enormously complex enterprise.” In addition to that, the creatures would be shot in full daylight for most of the film, further complexifying the process.

At least one hundred digital artists — from animators, to compositors, to other technicians — worked on Starship Troopers to bring the extraterrestrial Bugs to life. Each animation sequence started with a series of low-resolution animatics. Digital scans of the maquettes (some of which were articulated) sculpted by Peter Konig and Martin Meunier provided the wire-frame of the models, which were then finalized. An exception to this was the Tanker Bug, who was created in Softimage by Blair Clark without going through the digitizing process. All models were then refined in Softimage, and set up with kinematic chains, which enabled them to be animated. Responsible for the color scheme and surface texture of the creatures were Paula Lucchesi and Belinda Van Valkenburg.

Two animation techniques were used by Tippett’s team. Standard key-framing animation was used for the most part, including the entirety of the sequences involving the Tanker Bugs, the Hopper Bugs and the Brain Bug. A considerable number of sequences involving the Warrior Bugs also used the Digital Input Devices (DID), a Tippett Studio invention first experimented in Jurassic Park and Tremors 2: Aftershocks, built by Merrick Cheney in the shape of the Warrior Bugs. The DIDs are small scale articulated models, which are fitted with motion sensors that transfer the movement applied on the DIDs to the digital models being animated.

For Starship Troopers, the DIDs were refined, and made “more sensitive.” Tippett told VFX HQ: “we’ve refined the DID since Jurassic Park, in the overall cleanup of the design. Craig made sure that the DID would be much more responsive to the animator’s movements… all of which was preparing for the massive amount of animation that was to be done on the DID for Troopers.” Two types of the devices were used: one, which functioned in real time, was used for quick background shots of the Bugs; the other was used for more complex and detailed sequences, and brought the animation process to a method similar to that of stop-motion animation. To link this second type of DID directly to Softimage, the effects team wrote a new hardware interface board and a specialized software. “Much of the way the bugs moved was dictated by Craig’s designs,” Tippett said. “We did a lot of animatics, and assigned the Bugs weights and the extent of its movements to come up with an animation design, to see how realistically these beings could move and run and attack.”

Another animation tool that proved crucial to render the scenes featuring swarms of Bugs was Dynamation (not to be confused with Harryhausen’s stop-motion technique), used in scenes such as the Tango Urilla carpet bombing. Software developer Doug Epps explained: “normally, Dynamation is utilized to generate things like smoke clouds or jet exhausts. But Dynamation also allows you to do procedural animation of points and particles — a capability that was critical in laying out the swarms. We knew we had to do hundreds, or even thousands, of Bugs in some shots, and we certainly didn’t want to have to hand-animate all of them. So we used Dynamation’s particle systems — tweaked with software written by Eric Leven and Darby Johnston — to generate dozens of little dots that we could then apply en masse to a plate. Dynamation gave each Bug its own radius and terrain maps and maximum velocity vectors, which allowed it to maneuver over the landscape of a given scene without hitting other Bugs or obstacles such as rocks. That process really saved us. We’d still be doing swarms if it hadn’t been for that software.” To differentiate the Warriors, specific animation cycles were assigned to each one of the ‘dots’, and some of the creatures were also slightly downsized or oversized. Hand-animated ‘hero’ Bugs were placed in the foreground, whereas less-detailed Bugs — called ‘Jacks’ — were positioned in the midframe and background. “We called them Jacks,” noted Danny Boyle, part of the visual effects crew, “because these particular Warriors were going to be tossed up into the air by the force of the explosions, just like a child’s set of jacks.”

The most complex sequence featuring Dynamation was the Whiskey Outpost attack, one of the first to be taken on. Epps recalled: “on any effects film, we like to get the big shots out of the way first. Anything you learn at the front of the schedule makes subsequent shots of the same nature a lot easier to accomplish. So we tackled the first two swarm shots in that sequence right away.” Nearly a dozen swarm shots was made for the sequence and carefully detailed to be as realistic as possible, such as dust or shell parts being blown off. “These elements were either CG or real elements filmed against greenscreen,” said Doyle. “The dust kicked up by the Warriors was a separately photographed element, as were a lot of the squib hits and gore effects you see on the Bugs.” The second swarm did not have to move in separate paths; as such, “instead of run cycles,” Epps said, “the animators set up ‘milling about’ cycles, which were inserted over the Dynamation-generated Bug dots.” Rendering time for the swarm shots clocked in an average of 60 hours per frame first, then 25-30 hours as the process was eased down.

In the early encounter with the Plasma Bugs, the creatures are seen ejecting their deadly weapon into the skies of Klendathu. Layers of computer-generated transparencies were provided by the art department to render the translucent abdomens of the creatures, with the plasma projectiles rendered with RenderMan and Dynamation.

Another challenge was posed by the Tanker Bug’s lethal acid flow. Weiss recalled: “in designing the look of the Tanker spray, we looked at a lot of lava footage for reference. It wasn’t supposed to be lava, but it was meant to have that kind of consistency. We played around with Dynamation for a long time to come up with the final look.” The last detail was a layer of heat distortion to suggest the extreme temperature of the acid. Transparency layers were again used to portray the exploding Tanker, after Rico inserts a grenade in its damaged hide. Doyle commented: “you see all of these multicolored organs inside what is left of it. The art department used a separate, gutted CG Tanker model for that shot, showing its exposed innards as the Tanker rocks back and forth to a halt.”

The Hopper Bug was “one of the most challenging Bugs for the art department,” said Lucchesi, “because of its iridescent surface quality. It is beautiful to look at in the real world, but very difficult to replicate in the digital one. Our department worked with Doug Epps to come up with a custom, metallic surface shader. By applying that shader and experimenting with red-green-blue texture maps of varying degrees of intensity, we came up with a refractive quality on the Hopper’s body that was pretty successful. We used displacement to deform the surface so that light would catch certain areas of the wing more than others, giving them a wispy, delicate look. Then the compositing department blurred whatever enfironment was behind the wings to suggest their semi-translucent qualities.” Animating the Hoppers was considerably difficult due to the fact they had to be affected by small changes in wind currents during flight; as such, they made small course changes, in a manner similar to real flying insects. Tippett and Hayes initially estabilished ‘flight rules’ for the creatures: “when Hoppers decelerated, for example, they flared their wings out. When they dove, they adjusted the attitude of their wings. So there were definite rules — but other than that, the animation of the Hoppers was done mostly by feel.”

Phil Tippett inspects the Brain Bug maquette on set for lighting reference.

The digital Brain Bug was modeled by Martin Meunier and Merrick Cheney, and animated by Jeremy Cantor entirely by key-frame. The meat wave effect was achieved with procedural software shaders, written by Epps for RenderMan. Trey Stokes, part of the crew, noted that “the tricky part was making sure that the meat wave movement was adjusted to the overall animation of the Brain Bug, so that the wave didn’t change the character of the Bug’s animation. One way Jeremy approached that was purely procedural — he got in there and digitally grabbed the Brain Bug’s flesh and warped it all over the place. For the actual wriggling mounds of flesh, Jeremy used another shader, created by Doug Epps, called ‘Blorph’. If Jeremy wanted one of the Brain Bug’s cheeks to hit the ground and jiggle for a second, Blorph would allow him to do that. That piece of software, combined with the meat wave effect, gave the CG Brain Bug a convincing look of weight and fleshiness.”

When the Brain Bug is captured, it is dragged outside the nest inside an enormous net. The complexity of the sequence was due to the net itself, as explained by Lucchesi: “the CG net had to be close enough to the surface of the Bug that it wouldn’t look as if it was floating, but far enough away so that it wouldn’t appear that the net was going through the surface. We also had to be careful when casting shadows of the net onto the Brain Bug’s body so that they wouldn’t emphasize any contact problems.” Tippett added: “Jeremy Cantor, in particular, was great at finding just the right level of procedural and texture-based animation to make the CG Brain Bug look like he was encased in that net, while at the same time making sure that the Bug did not absorb the netting beneath the surface of its skin.”

The four-foot long Chariot Bugs — the carriers of the Brain Bug — were animated with the intention to impart the sense of being the worshipful servants of their master. Stokes said: “they adore the guy. We tried to suggest that by animating moments where the Chariot Bugs’ feelers are touching and stroking the Brain’s body. To suggest that they are also a form of bodyguard, we animated one to stand guard over a rifle that Zander has dropped. It is a subtle throwaway, but it’s there.”

The Arkellian prop on set.

Accompanying Tippett Studio’s digital effects was Amalgamated Dynamics’ wide array of practical creatures, ranging from animatronics to featureless props of dead creatures. One practical addition entirely designed and built by ADI (since it would not be brought to the screen digitally) was the Arkellian Sand Beetle — an insectoid, cockroach-esque alien species unrelated to the Monsters from Klendathu. The three-feet long, two-feet wide creatures are used during a biology lesson to be dissected (not in case, they were nicknamed ‘Dissection Bugs’ by the crew). Each one of the eight models was composed of 12 main parts, among which the head and legs — moulded in translucent skinflex, a more flexible type of urethane. The body was instead moulded in more common urethane. Among the props one was a hero Beetle, painted with acrylics and detailed with horse hairs (each individually ‘punched’ into the skin). Its insides were rendered with ultraslime, methocel and nylon — other than silicone organs. The internal structure was held together by a thin silicone membrane placed under the urethane abdominal shell, which was severed during filming to simulate the dissection. To create the effect of pressurized internal organs, a simple internal air bladder was inflated manually with an air rig.

Alec Gillis and ‘Snappy’.

Two full-size animatronics of the Warrior Bugs were engineered by George Bernota, and based on full-size sculptures by Steve Koch and Brent Armstrong. Their shell was moulded in fiberglass and painted; soft skinflex portions were the finishing touches, and covered jaw, wrist, elbow, and shoulder joints. Both were driven by a combination of pneumatic, cable and hydraulic mechanisms. ‘Snappy’ — nicknamed by the crew after its articulated jaws — was an insert upper-torso animatronic, detailed from the shoulder area to the head. The nine-feet tall puppet featured fully articulated front legs, arms, jaws and head, and was hydraulically operated for head rotation. In order to properly lift actors as certain sequences requested to, its internal structure was built in steel. A collision avoidance program also prevented the puppets to damage themselves.

‘Mechwar’ on set.

Where Snappy needed only three puppeteers, the other animatronic — a full-body creature, nicknamed ‘Mechwar’, needed five. Measuring a total of 15 feet in length and 10 feet in height, Mechwar was able to perform a wide range of at least 30 separate movements. Its head was hydraulically powered — as was its thorax, which combined hydraulic, pneumatic and electrical systems. The jaws and arms were puppeteered with cables and hydraulics, whereas the legs were maneuvered via rods. Head, jaws, arms and the creature’s smaller parts (such as the eyes) were separately puppeteered. Interestingly enough, the controllers were custom-made small-scale armatures that corresponded, section for section, to the full-scale animatronic. Fitted with motion sensors, similarly to Tippett’s DIDs, the devices could transfer the movement applied to them onto the puppet. General body movement were provided with a simple support crane, built by John Richardson’s department and operated by eight crewmembers. It was attached to the Monster’s thorax to achieve upward, downward and rotational movement.

One of the Bugs in ruin.

Numerous full-size models were constructed to portray dead Bugs. A total of 15 props portraying the deceased Warrior Bugs was built: five charred creatures and ten bloody carcasses, riddled with gunfire. Co-founder of ADI, Alec Gillis, said that “those were scaled-up from the maquettes, moulded in silicone, seamed, and cast out of fiberglass. We decided to do the full-scale Bugs modularly in order to quickly pop them together as needed, and each Bug was broken down into 34 separate pieces. We also made backup pieces, in case of location damage. With 34 pieces for each dead Warrior, multiplied by 15 dead Warriors, multiplied by backups, just manifacturing these things turned into a huge job.” Other minor creations were insert arms. Made of fiberglass and four-feet long, the appendages were maneuvered offscreen via handles on the shoulder end. The Bugs’ entrails were achieved with a combination of chopped latex and foam rubber scraps. The blood was instead methocel, tinted green, orange — in the case of the Tanker Bugs — or cream-like — in the case of the Brain Bug (the reason for the different coloring within the same species was not addressed — neither within the film nor by the filmmakers).

‘Mechwar’ being prepared.

The painting process revealed itself to be far more complex than originally expected. Despite the fact the paint schemes had already been elaborated by Tippett Studio, ADI had to scale them up. Tom Woodruff Jr. commented: “it’s a different ball game when you’re interpreting the coloration of painted reference models into full-scale props. Once we applied the Warrior’s initial paint job to our magnified versions, it suddenly looked toy-like, just because of the immense size of our Bugs.” The final paint schemes were enhanced with a lacquer seal, then toned down and ‘aged’ using sandpaper, dust and other tools. The burned texture on the charred Bugs was obtained by cutting the models in selected areas, and applying liquid urethane — precolored with black tones — that “foamed up and gave the Bugs a crinkled, charred texture,” as told by Woodruff. “We also peeled back the Bugs’ exoskeletons and added bits of colored foam inside to give them a more charred appearence. Then we touched everything up with black paint.”

The Tanker Bug shell on set.

For the scenes were Rico is seen on the back of the Tanker Bug, ADI constructed two fiberglass shells, sculpted (in green foam) as well as painted by Bob Clark. They were joined together to form the back plate of the Tanker Bug. The actor was attached to the shells with thin wire tethered to a belt. To portray the wild movements of the Tanker as Rico tries to penetrate its hide with gunfire, a twenty-feet long tractor was installed beneath the shell through a system of metal supports, hydraulic rams and a gimbal. Two crewmembers puppeteered the shell.

The most complex task for ADI was building the close-up animatronic of the Brain Bug. Since the full body would only be brought to the screen digitally, only the head of the creature was built; it was 12 feet tall and 10 feet wide. The creation of the animatronic started with a full-size sculpture — in green foam and clay — by Bob Clark. The face of the Brain Bug was sculpted separately in clay and other materials by Steve Koch. The head was moulded in separate pieces of fiberglass, which were joined together to form the underskull. The structure was then covered with foam latex skin — again casted in pieces due to the sheer size of the animatronic. The face was instead moulded in skinflex and positioned over the complex articulation mechanisms. Gillis commented: “Craig Hayes did a remarkable job designing that face. It was detailed with long, thin, paddle-like appendages near its mouth, called feeder claws. It had eight eyes and a huge, vertically slitted mouth. All of those things had to be replicated in the full-size puppet. We made the feeder claws out of fiberglass, operated by radio control mechanisms. The eyes were cast of high-gloss urethane, misted with a silicone oil during filming to make them reflective and alive. The sphincter-like mouth was also made of skinflex. We attached air bladders on either side of the underskull, which could be manually operated by little hand bellows to make the Brain Bug look as if it was pulsating.”

Steve Koch’s sculpture of the Brain Bug’s face.

The practical version of the ‘meat wave’ effect was designed by David Penikas. He built a eight-feet long and two-feet wide endless conveyor belt system, which followed the curvature of the Bug’s upper skull and was installed under the skin. Two rollers with gripping servomotors were placed on the creature’s brow area and on the back of the head, connected by the belt — which was covered with crescent-shaped pillows. A motor equipped with a speed controller produced the rippling effect by running the conveyor belt, whereas the pillows damped its actions. The creature was also supposed to express emotions through its bodily language. “One of Paul Verhoeven’s big concerns,” Woodruff said, “was that we be able to get a variety of expressions out of this face. That was one of the difficult challenges, to make it not only look fearsome but fearful as well.” Five puppeteers controlled the Brain Bug’s movements from inside the animatronic itself.

The Bug’s proboscis (or palp) was puppeteered with cable mechanisms. Yuri Everson, part of the ADI crew, recalled: “we made a number of triple-jointed, cable-controlled palps, operated from inside the puppet head, through what looked like a little t-shaped motorcycle handlebar.” The exterior of the proboscis was moulded in translucent vacuform and then airbrushed. For the scene where Carmen severs it, a pre-cut tip was attached with superglue, and a hollow tube was inserted — to pump colored methocel, which simulated the creature’s blood spurting out.

The brain-sucking effect seen when the Brain Bug kills Zander was a collaboration between ADI and Kevin Yagher Productions, which provided the gore effects of the film. Technician Bryan Blair commented: “working alongside ADI, we did that in two stages. For shots where it’s obviously actor Patrick Muldoon looking horrified, we came up with a mohawk-type wig for him, with a fake silicone wound attached to the top of it. ADI took off the top of one of the hollow vacuformed palps and attached it to our fake wound and hair appliance. At the same time, we’d hidden flexible, hollow plastic tubing, about an inch in diameter, under Patrick’s hair. That tube trailed down behind his back and into a plastic bucket, where we’d deposited this sausage-like rope of silicone ‘flesh’ that was attached to a string and drenched in stage blood. We ran the string out the opposite end of the tubing and into ADI’s hollow spike. On ‘action’, Patrick started to grimace while I pulled the string, yanking the sausages up through our hidden tubing into the translucent spike, making it look as if Zander’s brains were being sucked through the palp.” The sequence was completed with two puppet heads of Zander, respectively simulating his pain as the palp pierces his head, and his death.

Ultimately, Starship Troopers presented an array of groundbreaking effects that carved their place in Creature Feature history, and inspired generations of films after them; no film before had tried such a massive quantity of creature effects. “I’m exhausted,” Tippett said. “But it worked out pretty well.”

Would you like to know more? Visit the Monster Gallery.

In the early 70s, filmmaker Steven S. Wilson was working for the Navy in an isolated area near China Lake. One day, whilst the writer was sitting on a rock, an idea came to his mind: he wondered what would happen if something under the ground forbade him to get off that rock. He remarked in an interview with The Official UK Tremors: “one of my first jobs was working as a film editor for a naval film company that worked in the desert at a naval base in California. We used to hike around the gunnery ranges out there and I was always making notes for ideas for movies. So at one point, I was hiking on these big rounded boulders which were very much like the ones that we ended up shooting in the movie, and I made the note: ‘what if there was something under the ground, like a shark, and I couldn’t get off this rock?'”

Said note remained in Wilson’s file folder, until 1984 — when he (and his writing partner, Brent Maddock) found a chance to finally bring it to the screen. Having sold the script for Short Circuit, and having been hired by Steven Spielberg to collaborate on the scripts of Ghost Dad and Batteries not Included, Wilson and Maddock were allowed to propose a project of their own. Wilson recalled in an interview with Cinefex: “our agent, Nancy Roberts, sat us down and said, ‘okay, guys, now comes the fun part: for a brief time, anybody will listen to anything you have to say. What’s in your files?’ So Brent and I got together and we picked from each of our files ideas that we had jotted down, including my ‘Monster in the ground’ concept, which at the time was called ‘Landshark’. Nancy loved it and we began working on a twenty-five page treatment.” Long time friend Ron Underwood — with no previous experience in creature features — was attached to direct the project, and also collaborated to the script.

According to Maddock, the film was initially shaped more like a comedy than the final product, mainly due to how the Monsters were narratively treated. He recalled: “the project was much more comedic in its early stages, and we got to a point where — towards the end, a number of drafts in — we made the decision that we wanted the audience to take the Monsters seriously; to feel that the Monsters were a real threat. So we went back and we took out some of the humour. We didn’t want to go so far that we were poking fun at the idea of the monsters. We went about as close to it as we could get without losing the sense of real jeopardy.” In an attempt to differ from usual Monster films, the creatures’ origins were also deliberately left unknown. “There was a big debate about it early in the process, Wilson said in the Making of Tremors. “First of all, we didn’t care. Since I’m the one who comes out of science fiction films, I was saying, ‘there’s only four places they can come from: they’re either radioactive, or they’re a biological experiment, or they’re from outer space, or they’ve always been there. These are the only options you have.’ So I didn’t want to say it. In fact, I said ‘let’s say all of them at the same time.'” Underwood added: “it was more reality-based that [the characters] wouldn’t figure it out.”

Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis pose with the dead Graboid.

Veteran Monster Makers Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. were hired to bring the subterranean creatures to life. Tremors, in fact, marked the first creature effects work of Amalgamated Dynamics, which the duo had recently founded. Gillis and Woodruff came highly recommended by executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, having already collaborated with her during the production of The Terminator and Aliens. Wilson recalled: “Tom and Alec were excited about having a fairly big project land in their laps, but their company was so new that they did not have a facility set up yet. So we met at Marie Callander’s in Burbank to discuss the script and what we wanted the creatures to look like. The script had just a few lines of description. It said that the mouth opened like some kind of grotesque flower and there were horrible tentacles inside it and it had spines all over its body — and that was about it.” The spines were conceived to be the creature’s method of locomotion. Maddock explained: “it had these spikes on it that it moved along with. This was all based on what I knew about earthworms – which was not much, except that they have these stiff hairs on them and that the hairs point backwards and that’s how they move.”

Then — A HUGE MOUND OF EARTH RISES UP UNDER VAL AND EARL!! The cowboys tumble down its side, Val losing his rifle.  They roll over and stare dumbfounded at the mound.

VAL (cont’d)
(gasps)
There must be a million of them!!

The mound of earth turns toward them.  The ground splits open and out rises — a huge head!

EARL (awestruck)
Nope… just one.

The monster is a horrendous thirty-foot long eating machine! Its head is eyeless, utterly alien, covered with tough boney plates which close together to form a cork-screw point. The cowboys stumble back toward the fence in speechless terror.  The creature slides toward them, pushing through the earth like a whale through water.

Now it opens its mouth — but it’s like a grotesque flower, boney plates spreading open like petals, revealing a huge, slimy, fleshy, oozing orifice! And inside the mouth, a ghastly multi-tentacled tongue! These are the “snake things,” not snakes at all but actually the horrid hook-tentacles that can shoot out six feet to snag their prey! -S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, Tremors early draft, 1988

Based on the simple descriptions provided by the script, Gillis and Woodruff began designing the Monsters — which at the time had no precise label. In the script (and film), Walter Chang proposes the term Graboid, a name that would become official in the sequels. Gillis and Woodruff were inspired by a variety of real animals. “Whenever we’re designing a creature,” Woodruff said, “even if it’s some fantastic Monster, we really like to go to research books of real animals — looking at forms and details like skin texture, coloring, even the way the animal moves — so it has a basis in reality. If there’s no reality, it’s all completely made up, completely fantastic — there’s a sort of unreal quality to it that’s hard to get over.  and were also aware that they should not imitate precedent creatures, such as the Sandworms from Dune. “What we did not want to do,” Gillis said, “was repeat what had been done in Dune. Because in Dune, the Sandworms were like earthworms, sort of more muscular, you know. They seemed to be kind of like a long muscular tube — rather than anything with a skeletal structure or armor plating.”

They’re under the ground!

Curiously enough, in fact, worms were not used as reference. “We actually did not look too much at worms because they are very boring,” Gillis said. “We used a ‘form follows function’ kind of thinking. We wanted something that looked like it could come from this planet — or could come from another planet — but it had to be functional and look like it was part of a desert environment. We started off by considering its mode of movement — whether it was a muscular movement or more like a locomotive that could barrel through the ground. For dramatic reasons, Ron liked the latter idea. With that in mind, we went with a heavy armored look rather than something slimy and soft and undulating. The outer surfaces combined the look of a crocodile skin with the leathery dry look of an elephant’s skin — cracked and wrinkled around its points of movement.” Dinosaurs and rhinoceroses were also used as reference. The ‘battering ram’ movement through the dirt (“like killer whales,” as described by Gillis) implied a mechanism that would enable the creatures to propel themselves through the ground; the spines, now distributed on the sides of the torso, became that expedient.

The Graboid animatronic arrives on set.

The head of the Graboids was a key element of the design, and one that went through a considerable number of iterations. Since the beginning, the special effects artists wanted to make it bony and armored — so that the creatures would be able to overcome most obstacles. “If a creature were to be swimming through sand or dirt,” Gillis said, “it would need a pointed, armored head, so that it could push that matter away, and then the rest of the body then would have some sort of muscular action.” The Monsters also lacked eyes — another challenging aspect. Woodruff continues: “the script also specified that the creature not have eyes — which makes sense for something that lives underground, but it was a challenge for us — because eyes are such an important point for emotion and expression. Without that focus point you have to rely more heavily on the body movement. Since its entire head was just kind of a big bony shell, there was not much we could do to make it register any kind of feeling. Its only real feature was a mouth.”

Wilson and Maddock in fact wanted “an unusual mouth,” and Gillis and Woodruff provided one — trying to stray from usual design tropes. “We also got rid of the idea of sharp teeth,” Gillis said. “We based the look on the head of a snapping turtle, with side mandibles angled down that could act as scoops. It looked threatening and like it could cut you up, but there were not the standard pearly white fangs you normally see on a Monster.” The duo originally conceived the head of the creatures moving independently to the body — functioning like a turtle neck. The concept, however, proved controversial and was discarded. Gillis explained: “at one point we designed the head so that it could move in and out of the dirt independent of the body. We had big thick folds of skin — kind of like a turtle neck — to bridge the body and the head. But we found that nobody who saw it called it a turtle neck — immediately they began calling it a foreskin. So that idea was out. We were dealing with something that was phallic in shape, so we had to take the curse off of that as much as possible.”

A promotional still of a Graboid tentacle.

Another signature element of the Graboids is represented by their tentacles. The script refers to them as simple appendages with no particular features. As the creative process progressed, however, the tentacles’ role was expanded — to the point where they fundamentally became a red herring for the audience. Initially, they seem to be the antagonists themselves, and not part of them. Wilson explained: “somewhere along the line, we decided to convince the audience that the movie was about big snakes that lived underground. It occurred to us that it would not be immediately apparent that the tentacle torn off the truck early in the film was actually part of a larger creature, so we decided to try and keep that a bit of a surprise. Then Tom and Alec came up with the idea of giving the tentacles mouths — but without throats. Since the mouths are essentially grasping mechanisms, a throat was neither necessary nor appropriate.”

Sculpting the tentacles.

The design of the tentacles itself went through different iterations — some of which were more ornate and with “almost a flower motif.” The final appearence was mainly inspired by catfishes, with four sensory barbs on the sides of the pseudo-mouth. “We designed the tentacles with a sort of catfish look to them,” Gillis said. “The idea was that they could flatten down and look quite featureless — almost like tongues — until their mouths opened.” Some elements of the design were also inspired by snakes, and the bulk of the surface was based on slugs.

The full-size Graboid dummy’s head.

The final Graboid design was conceived to be a vertebrate as opposed to a boneless worm; several details were added — such as the sutures on the head of the creatures — to exemplify this element of their biology. Maddock and Wilson were extremely satisfied with the appearence of the Monsters. “They just knocked us out of our chairs,” Wilson said. Once the subterranean Monsters reached their final incarnation, the special effects team began constructing animatronics in various sizes — from full-scale creatures to miniatures. A quarter-scale maquette was first sculpted: “we knew we were going to do a quarter-scale creature — head to tail — for the miniature work, and originally we were planning to use that for a maquette,” Gillis said. “But we wound up not having as much time as we wanted, so the quarter-scale version only led the Others by about a week. Tom and I blocked out the sculpture and then Carl Sorensen and Dave Miller detailed it. We had the form done on the quarter-scale and pulled a mold and made a plaster duplicate off of the fgront end of it to serve as a model for the full-scale head. Mark Wilson, Howard Berger and Bob Kurtzman did a lot of the sculpting on the big one.”

One of the Graboid animatronic head sections on set.

A total of five full-size creatures were built: four head sections and a featureless dummy of the full creature, used in the scene where one of the Graboids, having recently died, is unearthed and analyzed by the protagonists. The eight-feet long head sections featured an internal structure composed of appropriately shaped aluminium bands; the skin was casted in foam latex — as opposed to the then commonly used polyurethane. Woodruff explained: “foam latex has a nice, compressed look to it; because the creature was so big, though, we had to build a custom oven — an eight-foot box — to be able to cook these things. Inside the foam latex we did pattern tracings of where the body was wrinking on the outside; we did that so we could pad up the inside, but still leave divisions where the wrinkles were so that when the skin moved it would naturally fold along the same lines that were already sculpted into the creature.” The head, jaws and mandibles were instead casted in resistant fiberglass, which infused them with the desidered plated appearence.

Painting the Graboid’s body.

All the creatures were painted with primary grey and brown color schemes. The full-scale head sections were mechanized primarily by Craig Caton and Jeff Edwards. The mobile fiberglass parts were attached to a metal plate and connected to a large spring, which was in turn mounted on a backpack. Depending on the demands of a specific sequence, said backpack could be worn by a puppeteer, or be installed on on one of the rigs devised by physical effects supervisor Art Brewer, who also directed the construction of the shaking building sets for the film and other practical effects. Gillis explained the mechanisms: “the head movements were actuated by four rods that came out from the metal plate like a parallelogram. The rods went back to a T-bar; and whichever way you moved the T-bar, the plate in front would move as well.” The parallelogram mechanism was a modular device that could be “plugged” into the creature.

Halfway through the location shoot — Tremors was mainly shot in Lone Pine, California — ADI arrived on set; working in an abandoned railway station, the special effects artists shot the creatures in six weeks following the schedule. The Graboids needed constant repair, as — unlike many other films — they were shot in broad daylight. “We knew we were not going to have the benefit of shooting them in the dark,” Woodruff said, “with lots of goo coming off of them, and that had moved us to make them look as realistic as possible — more like an actual animal and less like a fantasy Monster. When we got out to the desert, we found we were able to make use of all the dust, though, which took the curse off of it a little bit. Dust became a substitute for other things that we are used to using. It was actually refreshing to be able to exchange dust for slime.”

A Graboid emerges.

Nevertheless, saliva — thus slime — was actually needed for the mouth interior, as recalled by Gillis: “we had just come off of Aliens recently; we said to ourselves, ‘Aliens was a dark movie. Everything in it was wet and slimy. This seems to be more about broad daylight, hot, dust. Let’s stay away from the slime. Let’s just let them be a little drier and create their own character; that way it’s a little different than what you usually see'; and we didn’t slime up the mouth. It was glossy because of the coatings we put on it, but it was dry. We saw it in the dailies; and the editor remarked that it looked kind of like it was painted with nail polish. We didn’t fully understand that comment but understood what he was reacting to — which was the lack of wetness. So we started puttin the slime on it and doing the webbing in the mouth.”
The creature effects team worked in close collaboration with Art Brewer. When one of the creature heads was filmed above the ground, the shot usually required operators in a 12-feet deep pit dug by the physical effects crew, and external puppeteers. Gillis elaborated: “in the pit, the creature was used as a big rod puppet — everything was connected in the back. We had cable controllers hooked up to the jaw and mandibles, and each could operate independently to get the snapping movement. The head itself was operated by using the T-bar at the end of the rods. It would lunge forward by means of a sliding rig that was anchored inside the pit. It took two guys holding the parallelogram, a third guy to help with the upward motion and then three more guys above ground operating the cables. The guys underground were handling the gross movement, while the articulation of the head was operated by three guys up top. The guys in the pit really had the worst of it. The pit was shored up with plywood, like a big box. The top had more plywood around the creature — as snug as possible — and then we would close them up and dress the Whole area with sand and vermiculite. The operators had to wear respirators because the pit would fill completely up with dust. There was no light except the glow of a TV monitor that was supposed to help the puppeteering. In fact, however, the people inside could see nothing at all — especially since there were air tubes rigged up to blow dust all around. So they had to puppeteer the thing by feel alone. We were up on the ground giving them directions by two-way radio and they would just feel around in the dark and to the best they could. The operators were as blind as the creature was supposed to be — but they could not hear nearly as well.”

The sequences involving the Graboids bursting out of the ground were among the most complex effects stunts achieved for the film. For these scenes, the controller backpack was worn by a single puppeteer — Woodruff, usually — whom was lowered into the ground through an elevator rig. “We built a 10-foot aluminium elevator,” Brewer said, “that was 60 inches in diameter. It was operated by means of pneumatic cylinders — the same kind used by NASA on the space shuttle doors. The cylinders are made in Houston and are very clever high-tech rams run by oxygen and nitrogen. We used of them to power the Platform insite the elevator. The prototype Platform had been solid plywood, but we found that it created too much suction when it went up, so we switched over to a grated platform.” The rig was able to move at about 12 miles per hour — even when it carried the weight of the animatronic and the operator.

Preparing a bursting sequence.

The rig was installed in a 11 feet deep hole with a 10 feet diameter and then covered with a 2-inch-thick piece of styrofoam painted dirt brown. The beak of the Graboid protruded from a pre-cut foam lid, and the entire system was camouflaged with vermiculite and sand. The elevator was operated from the surface and could rise, enabling the creature to erupt from the foam lid. Air hoses enhanced the effect by spewing additional dust. Brewer recalled: “we tested it at our shop before we went out on location and it worked perfectly; but then we got out to Lone Pine where it is all sand and pumice dust and the wind was blowing constantly and all of that really sabotaged us. We finally found a silicone-based lubricant that the dust would not stick to and that pretty much solved the problem.” The elevator rig was completely self-contained and could be moved from place to place by a crane, to the point where the set-up time (including finishing touches on the creature) was cut down to about 45 minutes.

What actually infused life into the movements of the Graboid was however the performer himself. Woodruff was positioned inside the elevator pit and lowered 10 feet into the ground, and had to wait for his cue; the experience was not particularly pleasant, as recalled by Woodruff himself: “it was one of the worst things I have done because the creature was so cumbersone and so difficult to move. I had a Watchman monitor inside the elevator to guide me, but it got to the point where I could not concentrate on that. All I could do was move the creature the way I felt it should be moving. It was quite an ordeal — I would strap the backpack on and climb into the elevator, put on goggles and radio gear and a respirator, and then they would drop the elevator down. Because of all the dressing they had to do around the area after the elevator was lowered, I would be down there for about 25 minutes before they were ready for a take. It was a very isolated feeling, even though there was air pumped in and it was very safe. One advantage to it was that it was the coolest spot in the desert. When they were ready to go, I would get into a crouching position and as soon as the elevator went up, I would stand to give it a little extra burst up through the styrofoam piece. Even so, it seemed to move at an agonizingly slow rate most of the time. The sound effects helped and they also minimized it in editing by cutting the shot down so that the creature comes out three feet before they cut instead of eight feet. But the rig moved pretty well. If it had moved any faster I probably would have had the thing crashing around me.” A second elevator rig was built for sequences where characters or objects are dragged in the ground.

Out of location ground, the Graboid was attached to a different rig — described as a “rolling dolly with an arm”. Brewer explained: “the creature was mounted from a parallelogram and hung from a custom-made crane so that it would stay level as it lunged forward. The rig was all steel, and with the creature in place it weighed about 900 pounds — we had to use 120 pounds of weight to counterweigh it.” The dolly rig was used on location, but was employed most prominently for the interior sequences on stage at the Valencia Studios outside Los Angeles. The first scene was the Graboid bursting through the market floor. Brewer recalled: “for the store scene, we put the dolly on a track and then rolled it forward and raised the creature up as it smashed through the floor — which was made of several layers of balsa wood so the creature could break it apart easily. The rig was manually operated by six people — everyone pushing and moving levers and cables. Two of the guys were operating the creature and they ened up actually riding the dolly.” A prosthetic broken leg provided the effect of the violent dragging, whereas the actor could sit in a seat rigged inside the creature’s mouth. The other scene involved a Graboid ramming through the wall of Burt Gummer’s basement. A similar method was employed — with the addition of a section with dirt and sand that the creature bursted through — allowing the visual detail of sand dripping from its head.

The full Graboid dummy.

The only full creature built for the crew, measuring over 30 feet from head to tail, was the featureless dummy of the dead Graboid that had collided with a concrete culvert. “We had built the basic frame for it in LA, and then we shipped it up to Lone Pine in sections. Whenever we got a chance, we would cast up skin pieces and glue them down and paint them. We built the entire thing from head to tail, but you do not actually see it all in the film. The set department had built a fake canal wall and then dug a channel to set our creature into. We had one of the heads in there — attached the full-length body — for the shot of Earl and Rhonda prying the cement off and the creature plopping out. Tom and I were inside pushing the thing out, and there were two other guys pushing out blood and slime. For the cracked skull on top we put slushed liquid polyfoam into the head mold and then sliced it up and offset it and glued it down like a giant worm appliance.”

Gillis also recalled the success of the scene, also determined by the amount of slime used in it. “By the time we got to the point where the dead creature — rammed into the retaining wall — they break it away and the head rolls out, there’s a POV shot were the camera is moving and there’s all this dripping slime. We really went overboard with the wetness there. We saw it at a test screening with a bunch of guys — heavy metal guys, with Metallica T-Shirts — guys that would really eat that up. When they saw all that dripping slime, the roof went off the theater — everybody was cheering. we looked at each other and said, ‘slime. Never underestimate the value of slime’.” The slime was, as usual, achieved with KY jelly.

All the life size creatures could be fitted with the corresponding tentacles, whose movements were inspired by elephant trunks and octopus tentacles. Gillis and Woodruff, supported by crew members Mark Rappaport and Mecki Heussen, built several versions of the tentacles to work in cooperation with the full-sized Graboid heads. The duo were already familiar with the creation of Monster tentacles; Gillis recalled: “the tentacles on Tremors are the third generation of tentacles that Tom and I have worked on. We did tentacles on Invaders from Mars and Leviathan, so we were able to build on our past mistakes and rectify them. We made three 10-foot-long tentacles that were cable-operated — also a four-foot [tentacle] head section with articulated barbs on the head and chin that would stand up to give it more character in close-up. The spine of the tentacles was braided hydraulic hosing — which flexes any way you want, but does not twist. A lot of our previous efforts had ball joints and other things that would twist on themselves causing loss of control.” The internal structure also employed discs of delrin — a machinable lightweight plastic — that were bolted to the hydraulic hosing “to create a series of ribs.” Cables of bulkheads installed inside the model allowed for several points of articulation.

Gillis and Woodruff handle a Graboid tentacle on set.

The jaw mechanism was anchored by a vacuformed underskull. Woodruff commented: “rather than having a single hinge point, we made two hinges to give it a compound movement and help widen the mouth out. It was a double-jointed jaw that hinged not only at the back but also about halfway up the thing. We liked the way it enabled the mouth to open really wide. For shots of the tentacles darting out, we used reverse photography. We started with the tentacles out of the mouth and we would slime them up and put them in a good position. Then we would go wild with them when we pulled them in. A large part of the challenge was just moving these things. The tentacles were not lightweight — especially with all the control levers. Only our strongest guys got to go on set with us. Normally we did not do too much operating of the head for those shots — the focus was on the tentacles coming out, so it was not as critical.”

The Graboid tentacle hand puppet during filming.

Maddock also suggested the use of a hand puppet, a device that unexpectedly proved very useful during shooting. “He said, ‘what about a hand puppet?'” Gillis said. “‘You know; don’t you think we should have a hand puppet?’ We sort of said, ‘okay, we’ll have a hand puppet.’ We used that hand puppet more than we ever expected!” Woodruff added: “the hand puppet was used for close-up shots — like where the tentacle is snapping at the truck. Any of the finer movements like grabbing or snapping were done with the hand puppet. It was better for those kinds of things than the cable-operated ones because it was more maneuverable.” ADI also built nine stunt tentacles, devoid of any mechanical features. Additional gore for other scenes, such as when the third creature is killed, was achieved with latex patches and pantyhoses, both filled with orange methocel to simulate the blood. For the scenes where the Graboid intestines and other entrails are shot towards the characters, air cannons were used to shoot them.

The 1:4th scale animatronic.

By the time principal photography had wrapped in Lone Pine, miniature effects Veterans Robert and Dennis Skotak — in partnership with supervising producer Elaine Edford in 4-Ward production — were hired to shoot the miniatures. The Skotak brothers had already worked with Gale Anne Hurd on Aliens. “We were very impressed with the way the Skotaks approached their work,” Underwood said. “They are true artisans. We had gone into the project knowing that we needed some miniature work, but initially we were leaning much more toward full-scale. By the time we were through, we had a lot more miniatures than we had anticipated. Full-scale — no matter how well it is realized — is just really difficult to control.” Miniatures, in fact, were used for actions and movements that the full size creatures could not perform — or could do with certain restrictions. The miniatures allowed for more creative liberty in the sequences for which they were employed; quite in fact, the miniature work was so exceptional that the final film employed far more than originally intended, creating a whole second part of miniature shooting after the initial one.

Alec Gillis prepares the 1:4th scale Graboid for shooting.

ADI built five 1:4th scale Graboid puppets for the Skotaks’ miniature sequences. The first to be built was a seven feet long animatronic, with fully articulated head and neck mechanisms. The miniature puppet required different mechanical systems when compared to the full-size Graboids, since the mechanization would extend to the whole first half of the creature. “The head mechanics were similar in design,” Woodruff said, “but the body mechanics were based on the same principle as the cable-operated tentacles. We sectioned off the body core into disks — leaving spaces in between — and then fed cables through and out the back. If necessary, we could reroute the cables and have them run down and out the bottom.”

The tail section of the miniature Graboid was made of soft polyfoam; a departure from standard procedures, which involved fiberglass understructures. “It was something that Alec and I wanted to try,” Woodruf said. “We wanted the creature to sort of squish down under its own weight to give it more mass and bulk.” The head could be used independently, but the tail section could be attached if the shot required it. Simpler versions of the tentacles were built for the miniature Graboid. “they still had to ahve some movement to them,” Woodruff continues. “Very little of them is seen in the film. There was a feeling that there was a difference in movement between the miniature and the full-sized tentacles.” The 1:4th scale Graboid animatronic was puppeteered by six to eight crewmembers. Gillis recalled: “there would be two people operating the tentacles, and then another person providing the gross body movements. Generally the creature was mounted on a pole that stuck up through the miniature set and the operator would be at the other end of the pole. We would have one guy operating the skull, one guy operating the mandibles and then one operator for each of the three body sections. Each operator had what amounted to a big joystick to control left-right and up-down movement on any given body section.”

Close-up of the 1:4th scale animatronic’s armored head, which carefully reproduces the full size Graboids’.

The miniature animatronic was most prominently seen when the film first reveals the appearence of a full Graboid, bursting from the ground. The creature was filmed in a forced perspective miniature lanscape, built by the Skotak brothers, with a matte painting created by Rick Rische. Robert Skotak recalled: “physical effects had done the initial ground-breaking shot on location, then ours picked up with a POV after Earl and Val have backed away. The ground is just starting to crack — then there is a separate shot of the creature breaking through with dirt blowing up around it. That was our quarter-scale shot. The breakthrough was very straightforward — just a matter of actuating the puppet to break through a thin crust. We had fans outside to create dust blowing by and we had compressors below to kick a lot of dirt up into the air — whatever we could do to make the creatures look explosive. Steve Brien worked out most of the gags with us — and there would usually be several grips involved. Sometimes the creature was pushed out and sometimes it was levered up.” To achieve the gun shots on the Graboid, pre-cut holes in the creature were covered with patches of skin and then filled with air lines. A BB gun was then used to create hits on the ground and the Monster. For the shots of the Graboid traveling underground, a slot was cut into the table and covered with a foam rubber membrane. Thin foamcore plates were glued to said membrane, to simulate surface dirt. A pipe was moved through the underside of the rubber to achieve the effect of the ground heaving and cracking and settle back at the passage of the Graboid — which was maneuvered from below. Fuller’s earth, microballoons and miniature roots were added to enhance the effect.

Tom Woodruff Jr. with the ‘ramming’ Graboid hand puppet, about to strike the miniature landscape.

As production progressed, the special effects crew found that the miniature animatronic could easily be replaced by simpler models — hand puppets. “Originally we expected that [the 1:4th scale animatronic] would do all of the quarter-scale work,” Gillis said. “But once we got into it, we realized that wer needed something easier to handle — which is when we began different hand puppets. We needed one to crash up into the ceiling in Burt and Heather’s basement — just a hand puppet with the mouth closed. Another one had an articulated head that was used for a lot of the stuff. We just built a variety of puppets that we could pick and choose from depending on what was needed.” Shots of the creatures heading down to the ground and other key sequences were achieved with the hand puppets.

Robert Skotak films the miniature Graboid hand puppet.

Crucial to the miniature shooting was not only the necessity to match the miniature footage with the principal live-action footage — but also the fact the small-scale creatures had to be shot at more than 24 frames per second, in order to infuse them with a sense of actual mass. In this field the hand puppets also proved to be more practical than the animatronic. “Because the miniatures were shot overcranked,” Woodruff said, “we had to do our puppet movements twice as fast. We could get more specific movements with the fully-articulated puppet, but with the overcranking it got to the point where the movement was very random anyway. With a hand puppet, we could produce very hard, fast movements which were better suited for the way it was shot. The hand puppets had a grip on the inside that the operator could grab onto to steer the creature around. One of the hand puppets was articulated — the head could turn from side to side and it also had cable-operated jaws that opened and closed.” The basement fight was the sequence where the miniature Graboids were featured most prominently — alternated with the full-size creatures.  “It was a similar idea to what Jim Cameron did on Aliens,” Robert Skotak recalled, “building the Queen and the power-loader in quarter-scale to get the big punches and rolls that would be impossible to do in full-size.” The Skotak brothers built a quarter-scale basement miniature –four feet deep, six feet wide, two feet tall — complete with individually-painted floor and ceiling tiles. The Skotak brothers “suggested things we could do that would have been difficult for [ADI] to do in full-size,” Robert Skotak said. “We did shots where the creature rears up through the ceiling and knocks some tiles off. We also did a shot where it hits the door and knocks it down. Finally we did its death scene where it falls and thrashes about. Much of the basement sequence was done in miniatures.” A prime concern was estabilishing a bond between the principal footage and the miniature sequences. Robert Skotak said: “we discussed with Ron and Steve the lack of shots with the creature and the people together. There was an over-the-shoulder shot where Michael Gross shoots the elephant gun at it, but that was one of the few. So we came up with the suggestion of doing a whip-pan which looks as if it is one continuous shot with both the character and the actor together. The idea was that Michael Gross would drop a gun and we would do a shot of him desperately grabbing for it on the ground. Then we would do a whip-pan off the set and do a corresponding whip-pan on the miniature set of the creature lunging forward. A simple cut in mid-pan would effectively join the two.”

The live-action shot was done with crewmember Ray Greeer playing Burt for that specific shot, plus details like falling cartridges and shadows. “It looks flawless and like it was all part of it,” Robert Skotak said. The scene again featured bullets hitting the Graboid. Robert Skotak estabilished cuts in the backside of the creature. “Then the pyro guy would come along to lay his squibs in and we would replace the plugs and color over them,” Woodruff said, “and add lots of dust so that when the impact happened there would be a puff of dirt. We had three phases of squibs all wired at once. The first was supposed to look like small arms fire. Those would all be blown out first. Next would come larger-caliber rifle hits and machine gun fire. Finally the mouth and back of the head were squibbed for really big elephant gun hits. So the thing was just riddled with squibs.” The basement scene was technically the last intended miniature shoot; when Tremors was shown in its rough workprint for the studio, Universal executives were enthusiastic about the creature effects — to the point where they authorized an additional budget to increase the creature effects shots. “In the rough cut, the creature had been shown only obliquely in many instances,” Robert Skotak recalled, “its presence suggested by moving clouds of dust and rumblings and windows shattering. Now the idea was to go in and add another 16 or 18 shots to flesh it out. This time we decided to shoot indoors because it was now late into August and the days were getting too short to shoot outside.” Unlike the ‘phase one’ miniatures, the ‘phase two’ ones would be shot in artificial light. despite concerns, the Skotak brothers achieved perfect matches with the live-action footage. Among the sequences was the shot where the Graboid is seen circling the boulder on which Rhonda, Val and Earl are confined. “Ron felt that he needed to estabilish at least a couple of shots where you saw a shape come out of the sand and then go back down again,” Robert Skotak said. “He felt he needed that to sell the idea — a down-angle of it coming out and then the hole filling up after itself.” A mixture of fuller’s earth and colored microballoons was used to simulate the sand and the environment.

A featureless 1:8th scale puppet was built by ADI and maneuvered from below through crescent-shaped slots cut into the set. “On both sides of the screscent there were chambers,” Robert Skotak said, “like drawers — full of microballoons and fuller’s earth, and as the creature rose up the hill in its path, someone on either side would be feeding in new soil mixture to bring the level back up to normal as it dove down at the far end.” Air lines eased the creature’s traveling. An additional shot of the Graboid rearing its head to grab the shovel was achieved with the hand puppet. “The whole second batch of shots were here and there shots, rather than whole sequences,” Skotak continues. “They were spread throughout the film — little things that revealed the creature in action. We did a couple of burst-ups against the sky — just shots of the creature going up and then back down. There was a scene in a lot between the general store and the trailer where the creature breaks out and kicks a bunch of timber in the air. Also superfast traveling shots across the yard in pursuit. We did a shot of the creature jamming the underside of the trailer, as well as one where it is shaking the house underneath. There was a scene where the characters are pulling the bomb across the yard and the creature comes up and grabs the bomb, so we had to make a miniature bomb with a smoking fuse. We also did a POV from the rooftop where the creature is heading towards the survivalists’ house and it comes up out of the ground and keeps on going across the landscape. That one was also done in eighth scale, which made it difficult because we found it was harder to get the nuances of the set dressing at that scale. We put heating elements under the camera on that shot so that we could get a telephoto effect — a mirage-like shimmer.” A dual scale shot used both the quarter-scale puppet and the eighth scale puppet, and was achieved with forced perspective — when the camera passes from the former to the latter model. Fuller’s earth was blown diagonally across the set to help achieve the effect. Additional Point-of-view shots were filmed, showing the Graboids’ travel through the ground: dirt and lightweight rock props were shoved into a vertically-placed camera.

Can you fly, you sucker? Can you fly?

In the end of the film, the last surviving Graboid is lured through the side of a cliff when Valentine McKee throws a bomb right behind it — thus making it accelerate for the intense sound. The Monster breaks through the cliff wall and meets a gruesome demise, falling into the canyon floor. A highly realistic 1:4th scale miniature cliff was built for the sequence, which was part of the initial portion of miniature shooting. “Steven and Brent and Ron were very much into desert geology and they really wanted everything to make sense from a geological standpoint,” Robert Skotak said.  To make the Graboid break through, a hole was cut in the side of the model cliff — and a ramp was positioned behind it. The opening was then covered with wet paper toweling and portions of broken plaster and dirt. The creature was then placed on a cart that would be driven up the ramp and rammed through the covering. The first breakthrough was achieved with the miniature Graboid animatronic, which was also used for the last close-up of the creature’s head as it frantically screams to its death. The shots of the falling creature employed a full featureless dummy. For the sequence where the Graboid finally splatters on the canyon floor, a gelatin creature was first considered — but discarded for time constraints. Woodruff explained the process: “we made a polyurethane skin that was prescored and draped around a core section made of rope. Inside of that we put condoms filled with orange methocel creature blood. We had thought we were playing it safe by making the creature strong enough to sustain three takes — but the one that ended up on screen was take number nine. After each take we would open the creature and clean it up while two of our guys filled a new batch of condoms and tied them off. Then we would put them inside the body and superglue the skin shut. Invariably, one would break while we were tying them and worm blood would get all over the thing. Since we had been prepared to do only three takes, we ran out of condoms quickly. So we sent Mitch Coughlin — the youngest guy in the crew — across the street to the pharmacy. Three times in one day we sent him to get more condoms — he wwas getting some real respect from the people over there.”

Tom Woodruff checks the ‘splattering’ Graboid before a take.

Once filled and ready, the ‘splattering’ Graboid was holsted by its tail over the set and released on cue to the canyon floor. Dennis Skotak recalled the complexity of the sequence: “much of the difficulty in the drop was fighting gravity. We had to hoist up all this weight and try to keep the condoms from breaking — and all of this before we lost our sunlight! The drop was actually only about 12 feet to the point of contact — the creature was so heavy, it did not need to drop far. Getting it to drop exactly where and how we wanted was the biggest problem. We had designed the rock so the creature head would kick back and the body would flatten out in a certain way — but of course it never would hit right. Either it would go too far to the left or too far to the right, so we had to do it over and over again and the turnaround time was hours and hours. One of the difficulties we had was that all of the blood and guts splattered out and sometimes hit the two cameras we were shooting with. We would have had a good shot going and then a big wad of stuff would strike the lens and drip down into the frame.” The fall was filmed at 72 frames per second. Wilson was extremely satisfied with the miniature effects work, saying that “there are many miniature shots that you would never know are miniatures. The Skotak stuff is just that good. Full-scale creature and miniature creature are intercut throughout the basement sequence and we literally just picked whichever one was doing the best action. We did not have to concern ourselves with whether something looked like a miniature — after a while we forgot all about it. We were just flabbergasted by their work.” Underwoord ultimately commented on the effects work of ADI and the Skotaks for Tremors, saying that “with the greater complexity of feature filmmaking, you thank your lucky stars for all of the incredibly talented people who come together to help make your ideas possible.” For more images of the Graboids, visit the Monster Gallery.

Next: Part II: Tremors 2: Aftershocks

Main Article: Subterranean Terror — Part I: Tremors

Universal expressed early interest in making a sequel to Tremors — which had achieved a near cult status on the video market since its release. “We didn’t take it too seriously at first, because we couldn’t come up with any good ideas,” writer and director of Tremors 2: Aftershocks, Steven S. Wilson, told Cinefex. “We really didn’t want to deliver the same thing over again; and it wasn’t until some time later — in one of those literal bursts of inspiration — that I awoke in the middle of the night thinking, ‘what if the worms fragment into little creatures?'”

Many of the artists that had worked for the previous film returned for Tremors 2. Wilson recalled: “people wanted to work on this show, and that was a fundamental part of pulling it off. Department head after department head came on and agreed to very painful cuts in their budgets. We joked about the fact that I was one of the few people on the team who hadn’t won an Academy Award. I was surrounded by all these incredibly talented people who agreed to do this because they loved the first film and they liked the new script.”

Among the returning crew was the special effects company, Amalgamated Dynamics — again headed by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr., who had become committed to the series. Woodruff said: “Tremors was our first project, and a real labor of love with a great group of people. We had said that if ever there was a sequel — no matter what we were doing — we would make ourselves available.” Principal photography for Tremors 2 coincided with location shooting for Jumanji, another project ADI was working on at the time. Keeping the promise, the duo signed to work on Tremors 2, assigning Andy Schoneberg to direct the special effects work on the film whilst they supervised it from Vancouver. ADI only had a modest budget and six weeks to build all of the incarnations of the Graboids and their offspring.

Tremors 2: Aftershocks marks the return of the Graboids — “the mexican variety of the creature, and it lives in southern Mexico on verdant plains,” said Wilson. The subterranean Monsters, whose origin was deliberately left ambiguous in the first film, are revealed in the sequel to be ancient creatures from the Precambrian period.

Filming the ill Graboid scene.

ADI refurbished the full-size animatronic head sections used for the previous films. The Graboids bursted through the ground with new rigs devised by physical effects supervisor Peter Chesney. Wilson recalled: “the underground rigs we used in Tremors were powered by air rams, which often jammed and never really moved the worms fast enough. I told Peter early on that one of the things we desperately needed was to see a worm come out of the ground and lift someone in the air.” Ivo Cristante’s physical effects team built a 18 feet tall, 20 feet wide platform in which to place the burst rig — an uneven parallelogram crane on which the creature was installed. A spring-loaded device was employed for the Graboid’s fast movements. Chesney explained: “we vbuilt a nine-foot-wide steel track with skateboard-like guide wheels, and added a lot of counterweight on cables to power it, including a huge amount of bungee cord. We actually had to use a block and tackle to pull it down, like loading a catapult.” The creature’s head was close to a breakaway ground surface, which was easily destroyed. Chesney continues: “we were trying to duplicate the energies of an eight-ton creature with the ability to plow through brick walls, but the puppet had to be light enough to perform properly — which meant it wouldn’t have the strength for a big breakaway. So we prepared the platform surface by layering hinged pieces of plywood in jagged sections, laid out like the scales of a fish. At the intersections we used small sticks — and even finer sticks in the crosshatch. On top of that, we laid peat moss and sod.” For the prologue scene — the most expensive of the entire film — the spring mechanisms had to be precisely calibrated in order not to injure the stuntman contained within the Graboid’s jaws. Movements underground were replicated with a method already used in Tremors, with a wood-lined trench covered in layers of rubber and dirt — under which a cart was moved.

A key scene of the film involves one of the Graboids above ground, in a severely weakened state. The first scenes involving the creature were achieved with the full-scale animatronic head section. At night, the Graboid is seen convulsing in its final moments. For this sequence, a 1:4th scale puppet was built based on the moulds of similarly-scaled puppets from the first film. Where the armoured head was casted in fiberglass, the body was not moulded in latex — like the previous miniature creatures — but in a new hot-melt material ADI had first experimented with on the set of Santa Clause. “It was so jiggly and lifelike,” Woodruff said. “We were able to get some really good blubbery movements to show something we really hadn’t seen in the worms yet — the conveyance of great mass and weight.” The puppet was maneuvered from a puppeteer below the miniature landscape set specifically built for the sequence, which was filmed at 96 frames per second in order to further increase the sense of mass.

Dead Graboid on set.

The creature is later found dead, with its side bursted open and three sacs hanging inside of it. The Graboid carcass was the first model to be built for the film. It was constructed as a wood and wire armature, with polyfoam skin (as well as fiberglass beaks) casted by Marc Tyler — who also painted the creature — based on moulds from the original film. The internal organs and sacs were cast either in latex or in silicone, and once again orange methocel was used to simulate the blood.

…Sure ain’t no damn ostrich.

It is revealed that the Graboid has given birth to its offspring — a baby stage labeled in production as Shriekers, based on the loud sounds they make when they locate prey. Wilson once again wanted to stray from usual genre tropes and audience expectations, as he told The Official UK Tremors that “the obvious thing then is that there’s a graboid queen, five hundred feet long — we just didn’t want to do that.” In his own words, he wanted the characters of the new film to “be behind the eight-ball” once again, not knowing what to expect or how to counter the new creatures. Wilson said in a Cinefex interview: “normally, movie Monsters are indestructible; and that’s what’s scary about them. However, what was scary about our Monsters was that you couldn’t figure out how they worked. Once you knew that the Graboids traveled underground and hunted by picking up sound vibrations, they became less dangerous. But it only took one movie to realize that. So our idea for the new creatures was that they would hunt by infrared instead of sound. We thought: ‘that will be fun. Everybody will be going around trying not to make any noise, when that’s the wrong thing to do.'”

Early Shrieker concept art by Alec Gillis.

Designing the Shriekers proved to be a longer process compared to that of the Graboids years before. “The Shrieker designs went through a number of variations before we finally hit on the right look,” Wilson said. “Partly it was a size thing, and partly it was the fact that these creatures are supposed to be babies — something Tom and Alec and Andy Schoneberg worried about right from the start. There’s an inherent cuteness to babies — but we knew the Shriekers had to be scary; otherwise audiences might start feeling more sympathetic toward the Monsters than the humans.” A key element of the new baby creatures was their heat-based vision that detects the bodily heat of organisms and objects.

Gillis and Woodruff started sketching and sending concepts to the production from Vancouver. Gillis said: “we knew that they wanted two-legged little creatures that ran around, saw by infrared and emitted a scream upon sensing a source of food. One of the features of the original movie’s creatures was the big four-piece head, jaw and mandible assembly; and we wanted to mantain that.” The final design featured a body with infant-like proportions, the signature armoured head, as well as three-toed legs inspired by ostriches and a short, fleshy tail.

The Shrieker maquette, with Andy Schoneberg (left) and S.S. Wilson (right).

Being infant Graboids, the Shriekers were designed with several details that were reverse-engineered from the previous creatures. Woodruff recalled in our collaboration interview with Strange Shapes: “[the Shrieker design was] very much inspired by the Graboid itself.  The idea was to reverse-engineer the original creatures to establish the Shriekers as an earlier developmental stage, hence the translucent beak for example, as if it was still cartilage in development like a baby’s skull.  The growth pattern would eventually have them begin to pack on pounds and become so huge and lethargic that their legs (which were only intended to carry them to a new location where food and protection would be more plentiful) would atrophy and fall off.  They would then create a growth of spines that would propel them underground.” The skull in development was a key trait. Woodruff said in the Monster Makers website: “we designed [it] to look as if it was still in cartilaginous state before the beak shells hardened, like on the adult worms.” Another subtle detail in the design is the Shriekers’ tongue — which ends in three elongated bulb-like appendages joined together, suggesting the Graboids’ signature tentacles still in development.

Once again, the special effects artists wanted to bring to the screen creatures that would feel realistic and actually biologically plausible. Gillis elaborated: “what we liked about Tremors was that there was a logic to it, so Tom and I actually wrote several pages of backstory on the Shriekers, offering different scenarios of how they reproduce, how they communicate — that sort of thing. For example, we decided that they are pack animals; and the purpose of the food scream for a creature that can neither hear nor see is to raise its body temperature, thereby attracting its pack. That provided the rationale for incorporating several brightly colored spots — one on the jowls and one on the side of the tail. We reasoned that those spots, in particular, would heat up during a food scream and work as a heat signature, totally unique to the Shrieker. The pack members would recognize it — and that would prevent them from mistakenly attacking each other.”

A key element of the design was the heat sensor on the Shriekers’ head. This organ, when exposed, allows a better focus on the heat signatures of the surrounding environment. Several variations were tested, as recalled by Gillis: “we tried panels that lifted up from the head like gull-wing doors to reveal the sensory organ inside, but Steve was concerned that those might look like ears. He wanted something totally non-anthropomorphic. Then we toyed with the idea of a plate on top of the head that lifts up; but we were afraid that would look too much like a trap door — something you’d expect to see Thing from The Addams Family pop out of. Finally, Andy came up with a three-plate design that was more organic looking.” A central plate first rears, followed by two side plates — which in turn fully reveal the pulsating heat sensor within.

With the final Shrieker design approved by Wilson, ADI began building the full-scale creature puppets. The life-size sculptures — based on a maquette sculpted by Alec Gillis — were sculpted by Schoneberg, Jim Kagel and Brent Armstrong. The skins were casted in foam latex by Mark Viniello, whereas the head pieces were moulded in semi-translucent fiberglass by Steve Frakes.

Shriekers on set.

ADI built two hero animatronics with fully articulated bodies, three hand puppets with articulated heads, and five stunt creatures whose purpose was to be hit, damaged or shot; they were in fact filled with orange methocel and pieces of latex. Their remains are thrown at the end of the film when Shrieker carcasses are scattered by the enormous explosion. Also built were three insert animatronic tongues for close-up shots.

One of the hero Shrieker puppets.

The mechanical systems of the creatures were designed and constructed by David Penikas; the hero animatronics featured the most complex, cable-driven mechanisms. Jaws and mandibles were fully articulated, and bladders inside the head suggested the pulsations of the heat sensor when the organ was exposed. Bladders inside the jowls also simulated the Shriekers’ breathing. The cables passed through the Shriekers’ feet and were buried in the ground area next to them, only to re-emerge next to the controlling mechanisms. 8 to 16 puppeteers were needed to fully maneuver one of the hero puppets. Producer Nancy Roberts and Tremors director Ron Underwood also occasionally collaborated to the performance.

One of the Shrieker hand puppets.

The hand puppets were operated with interior handholds; the puppeteers controlled the creatures through a backpack connected to “four-way jaw and neck mechanisms.” The performer could only see from a small hole located in the model’s throat area. Once on set, all the models were treated in order to be believably integrated in the environment. Gillis recalled: “to make them look as if they belonged in the environment, buckets full of dirt were rubbed all over the bodies and applied to areas in the corners of the mouth where the bony shapes meet. Then we squirted water in the creases behind the neck and dusted the high points so that it looked like oily sweat where the folds were contacting. We also spritzed the colored areas on the jowls and tail so that the color spots would appear shiny — as if there were extra body oils in them because they heat up.”

Despite being an infant stage of the Graboids, the Shriekers are also able to reproduce asexually: after having eaten enough nutrition, they regurgitate a newborn creature. For the sequence where this new feature is revealed, an almost amorphous fetus was sculpted by Marc Tyler and painted by Tom Killeen — and dubbed the ‘vomit baby’. The fetus was covered in a slimy membrane and pushed out of one of the Shrieker hand puppets — adapted with hyperextending jaws. The subsequent shot of the newborn breaking its placental sac and screaming was achieved with one of the hand puppets, puppeteered by Yancy Calzada and shot in an oversized cage section built by production designer (and original Tremors crewmember) Ivo Cristante.

Unlike the previous film, Tremors 2 employed digital effects for the sequences where the Shriekers perform actions — such as actually running — that the practical creatures could not act on set. Wilson knew from the beginning that the new technologies would eventually have to be used, and for that purpose he hired Phil Tippett to do early animation tests whilst the film was still in development. Tremors 2’s visual effects consisted only of a moderate amount of 14 digital sequences, and was one of the first independent efforts in computer animation for Tippett Studio. The artist recalled: “our goal on Aftershocks was really to generate a great deal of animation as quickly as possible. At the time, we were just beginning to make the transition to digital; so it was an ideal opportunity to take some of the input device work we developed on Jurassic Park a bit further, to get in there and start experimenting with other ways of puppeteering and moving characters around. Since the film would be going straight to video, we knew we could work in broad strokes and concentrate on refining some of our techniques.”

Digital Shriekers.

Tippett actually provided input in ADI’s designs, suggesting wrinkle areas. “Once we had some idea of what Tom and Alec were going to do, we could make a few suggestions,” Tippett said, “such as how to fit certain body parts together or where to put the wrinkles in the skin — things that would make our work easier.” Tippett Studio art director Craig Hayes supervised the creation of the digital Shriekers. He recalled: “we began by scanning photographs of ADI’s Shrieker maquette into our computer and tracing over it. As soon as ADI completed one of the full-scale puppets, they sent it to us for reference and we took our measurements from that.” The digital model was built by Peter Konig and painted and texture-mapped by Paula Lucchesi to be as accurate as possible to the practical creatures (something also aided by reference photos taken on location). Dusty textures were also added.

Animation was achieved with an array of different techniques, as recalled by Hayes: “anywhere from one third to two thirds of the animation was done through stop-motion input, using a Shrieker armature, built by Bart Trickel, and our own motion input software. It was very similar to the methods we used on Jurassic Park.” Said armature was a DID (Digital Input Device), a small scale model with motion sensors that transfer its movements to the digital model. A limited number of shots was also created with standard key-frame animation.

The climactic scene of Earl trying to reach Burt’s truck inside the warehouse was originally going to feature thousands of Shriekers; budget restraints only enabled the scene to happen on a smaller scale — with dozens of Shriekers. For shots of multiple digital Shriekers the model was duplicated, and each copu was individually animated. Tippett explained: “any time you get more than one character on the screen, it really complicates the animation. They have to interact, and the pantomime has to be staged in a way that makes the action clear. We basically built a room full of characters, then animated them individually so they wouldn’t all appear to be moving at exactly the same time. When you’re dealing with a bunch of things, the whole mass takes on a character of its own. You’re really animating an overall texture. Otherwise, the shot can turn into a can of worms (!), with audiences not knowing what to focus on.”

A crew shot.

Lastly, the Shriekers’ heat vision was rendered with an inventive method. “To get the infrared effect,” Wilson said, “the actors were shot wearing red suits and yellow stockings so that in post-production the video engineers could render the faces and bodies in different colors. This effect was also shot on High 8 video tape and blown up to 35mm film, adding an additional grainy effect.”

Wilson ultimately commented on the experience: “what made it a delight was the tremendous support, inventiveness and professionalism on the part of everyone involved — from the producers to the creative team to the effects crew to the cast. Everybody, at one time or another, contributed some idea for how to solve a particular problem — and that always got us through the day.”

For more images of the Graboids and Shriekers, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Part I: Tremors
Next: Part III: Tremors 3: Back to Perfection 

Main Article: Subterranean Terror — Part II: Tremors 2: Aftershocks

General note: to avoid repeating the term “Assblaster”, the article (and further entries featuring said creature) will mostly use abbreviations such as “AB” or “Blaster”.

The success of Tremors 2: Aftershocks led to the production of another sequel in the series — Tremors 3: Back to Perfection — that would mark the return, as the title says, to the original town in Nevada. Unlike the two predecessors, the project was rather quick-timed, with a short pre-production and production process. In particular, budget restrictions forbade an extensive shooting schedule. “To fit  this very ambitious movie with three different kinds of Monsters into our budget meant we had to restrict our shooting days,” Writer S.S. Wilson said. “So we ended up with a 22 day schedule.” Amalgamated Dynamics once again returned to provide the special effects for the film, this time accompanied by HimAnI Productions, which created digital versions of all the stages of the Graboid lifecycle.

The return of the Graboids also meant the return of a small portion of the original props — restored for the production. One of the full-scale animatronic head sections, as well as the tentacle hand puppets were used to portray the Graboids seen early in the film. An insert upper jaw was also used for close-ups. Stock footage from Tremors was also sometimes used. One of the scene features a recently-swallowed Burt Gummer being saved from the Graboid’s stomach. Michael Gross was buried in a hole underground with creature guts made of lathex and orange methocel simulating blood. The actor defined the experience as “a pain in the butt,” and compared it to “being in a grave.”

Tremors 3 introduces an albino Graboid, unable to reproduce, nicknamed ‘El Blanco’ by the production crew, as well as characters from the film. The concept of an albino Graboid actually fares back to a proposed Tremors series during the production of the second film. One of the animatronics was repainted with a pale color scheme, something also reflected in one of the hand puppets, to portray the creature. Digital effects were also used for the first time to bring the Graboid to the screen; the digital model was built based on reference photos provided by ADI, but still presented discrepancies in design when compared to the practical creatures — due to rushed pre-production time.

The Shriekers are only briefly seen in the opening sequence of the film, where a massive pack is exterminated by Burt Gummer’s caliber 50 guns. ADI originally refurbished the animatronics from the previous film, but they were ultimately not used in shooting. Based on the original moulds, the special effects artists also created a new stunt Shrieker to be destroyed by Burt Gummer’s 50 caliber hits. During the scene, the creature was hung by cables, and pre-installed explosives inside of it were set off. Tippett Studio’s digital Shriekers from the previous film were actually not recycled, with HimAnI building a new model from scratch. Over 300 Shriekers are seen in the scene. ADI also built shed skins of the Shriekers in urethane for the sequence where they are discovered.

Writer Steven S. Wilson once more wanted the characters to face an unexpected turn of events — another stage in the Graboid life cycle. “When we started Tremors 3,” he said, “Universal told us that there would be no more Tremors films after that. So we decided to “close the loop” on the life cycle of the Graboid.” Wilson thus conceived the Assblaster, a further stage that acts as intermediary between the Shrieker and Graboid. In conceiving the Blasters, Wilson made reference to Valentine McKee’s speculation in the first film as to whether or not the ‘snake things’ — the Graboid tentacles — and the Graboid themselves could effectively fly. The new stage is thus able to take flight in order to reach longer distances, and lay a single egg (or chrysalis) carrying what would grow into an adult Graboid. The introduction of the Blasters retroactively erases the precedent ideas regarding the life cycle of the creatures, which conceived the Shriekers as direct infant stages, growing into Graboids after enough time.

Blaster concept art.

Concept art of the thruster.

Not wanting to give the new stage literal wings (as in limbs), the filmmakers found inspiration in the Bombardier Beetles, members of the Carabidae family and divided in various Tribes. These insects are able to produce a hot noxious chemical spray from the tip of their abdomen as a form of defense. The chemical is derived from a reaction between quinol (hydroquinone) and hydrogen peroxide, which are stored in separate chambers in the beetles’ abdomen; when threatened, the creatures send the chemicals in a third chamber with water and catalytic enzymes. The heat of the reaction creates a gas that aids the ejection, which is accompanied by a characteristic popping sound. “Building off that idea,” Tom Woodruff Jr. said, “was the notion of wanting to give the new creatures something that we hadn’t seen before.” The Blasters are able to launch themselves in the air through the ejection of unspecified mixed chemicals in their tail — through two thruster-like orifices. The creatures then glide using ‘wings’ composed of membrane supported by long and thin spines on their sides.

The overall design of the Blaster reflected its purpose of gliding through the air: the body became longer and more stremlined, as did the head — which now presented an elongated beak and mandibles. The heat sensor was also modified in two simple side plates that rear, revealing the sensory organ. Some Shrieker traits were kept, such as the two jowls on the throat. The Blasters made quite the impression on the cast. Shawn Christian recalled: “you’re reading the script and say, ‘okay, Graboid, I saw it. Shrieker, I saw it. Cyclone — oh, that’s funny. Okay, then they turn into an Assblaster.’ You flip back, ‘an Assblaster? What?!'”

ADI built several practical versions of the Blasters, which were abbreviated on set as ‘ABs’. One hero animatronic head section was built, with fully articulated jaws and sensors. A stunt head section and stunt bodies (which could be hit or damaged) were also constructed, along with full dummies (such as the one used to portray the comatose Blaster). The animatronics were frequently installed on carts on tracks in order to be able to ram against walls or doors. A complete Blaster dummy was also built and suspended on a cable to simulate the creature’s gliding, but was ultimately not shown in the final film. Creature guts were cast in latex and reused some precedent molds (such as the Shriekers’ tongues, recycled as intestines).

The unused “flying” Blaster.

Another full dummy, used in combination with the El Blanco animatronic, was used to film the scene where the last Blaster is killed and devoured by the Albino Graboid. ADI’s practical effects were accompanied by HimAnI’s digital Blasters, seen most prominently in the film — although they present some noticeable inaccuracies in regards to the animatronics: the wings start at the base of the neck (as opposed to shortly after the jowls) and the interior of the mouth lacks the characteristic red color.

For more images of the Blasters, Shriekers and Graboids, visit the Monster Gallery.

Previous: Part II: Tremors 2: Aftershocks
Next: Part IV: Tremors 4: The Legend Begins

The fourth — and as of now, final — chapter in the Tremors series depicts the Graboids first attacking the city of Perfection (then called Rejection) in 1889, 100 years before the first film. When discussions about the projects began writer Steven S. Wilson met with Universal executive Patti Jackson. “I told Patti that we were really in a corner,” Wilson told Cinefex online. “The fans were going to want a new creature, but we had no idea where to go. We couldn’t just keep doing the same movie over and over.” He then added: “we’d have to do something wacky this time, like set it in the Old West.” Jackson’s response was concise: “that’s fine.”

Whilst Amalgamated Dynamics did not return to provide the effects, Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, Jr. supervised the creation of the new Graboids. Several special effects crewmembers from the original film did collaborate on Tremors 4, including Robert Kurtzman and the miniature artists Dennis and Robert Skotak. The practical effects were provided by Greg Nicotero’s KNB Efx, who had already worked on Tremors: The Series. “We’re definitely going back to the old school,” Nicotero said.

An imperative for the film was not to use digital effects extensively. “The decision was primarily financial, but also partly aesthetic,” Wilson told The Official UK Tremors. “Tremors 3 was the first film in which we used CGI to create Graboids. While we had excellent people doing the work, we found we did not have the money to keep redoing the shots until we got them really looking perfect.” He also added that “Graboids are particularly difficult because they kick up so much dirt and dust, which are chaotic elements very difficult to create in CG. When we ran the budget for Tremors 4, our FX expert, Linda Drake, determined that we could do more shots with miniatures than we could with CG. That suited us fine, because the Skotaks — our Academy Award winning miniature artists from Tremors 1 – were available and wanted to work with us again. That made it a no brainer. Tremors 4 has the most active, aggressive Graboids yet, and they’re all done the old fashioned way — with full scale puppets — from KNB — and tentacles and miniatures.” Listening to the series’ enthusiasts in regards to this matter was a primary concern. “We really listened to the fans,” Wilson related. “The only negative comments we’d ever heard about our special effects — as low-budget as they’d been — concerned the CG Graboids we did for Tremors 3. They were faster and much livelier than the big, heavy puppets we’d used in the earlier versions; but, although the effects were first-rate, fans said that they didn’t ‘look right.’ And, of course, they were also more expensive.”

The hatched Graboid.

In Tremors 4: The Legend Begins, a silver mine owned by Hiram Gummer — an ancestor of Burt — is attacked by recently awakened Graboids. Following the concepts introduced in the precedent film, the Graboids are first presented in a smaller stage, having just surfaced from their eggs or chrysalises. The first task in the production was designing and building the small Graboids. “We took the original design,” Nicotero said, “and then we kind of said what would these thirty foot creatures look like if they were four and a half feet long? They were kind of the cherubic infant version. Ultimately, what we ended up doing was a couple, like four or five different sketches. So we made them look like grubs, they had these infantile little mandibles and little tiny nubs of teeth growing in and little sort of feelers, so that that you get the impression that this was the precursor to the adult.” KNB built the small Graboids as full-sized remote-controlled animatronics and hand puppets used on set with artificial dirt for the scenes where they burst from the ground or drag their victims under it; puppets were additionally composited into shots for the scenes where the creatures are seen springing from the ground “like some demonic trout.”

KNB’s precedent work on Tremors: The Series, for which a full-sized El Blanco puppet was built, proved useful. The new full-size Graboid animatronic head sections, 12 feet long and built based on the original moulds, featured the structural innovations of that puppet. The new models were cable-operated, and were installed on four-wheeled dollies, which enabled greater maneuverability compared to precedent versions; they could perform wide ranges of movements based on a single pivot point. Mechanically, the Graboids featured an additional articulation point in the neck, as well as a different structural design for the mouth interior that enabled actors to actually slide down the creature — for scenes such as Black Hand Kelly’s death — through the use of collapsible panels. Four puppeteers were needed to maneuver the creatures. Full-size tentacle animatronics and hand puppets were also built.

Preparing one of the full-scale Graboids for the sequence of Black Hand Kelly’s death.

Budget restraints did not allow Tremors 4 to be shot in the original locations chosen for Perfection (Lone Pine); as such, the film had to be filmed in a more affordable place, which was found in Acton, California. For most of the bursting scenes, previous films had employed the full-size animatronic heads, installed on elevating rigs and buried in the ground, with a destructible covering. Such a stunt could not be performed on the location of Tremors 4 due to the composition of the ground. Wilson recalled: “the town was half-built, and I went out and selected where I was going to plant our eight-foot puppet. But then, production designer Simon Dobbin came to us and said: ‘Guess what? To dig holes out here we’re going to have to blast.’ The area was solid rock underneath. It caused our visual effects producer, Linda Drake, to go back to the drawing board very quickly and come up with an entirely different approach.”

The full-size puppets were in fact filmed only above ground, and were never seen bursting from it — with the exception of the Graboid trying to devour Juan in the muling station, which was filmed in an elevated set. “That was a very complicated shot, and we only had one chance to get it right,” Wilson said in the Ultimate Tremors FAQ. “We duplicated the entire telegraph room on top of two steel shipping containers (the big ones they put on ships) so we’d have space to work underneath. The entire floor was made of super delicate balsa wood. You couldn’t stand on it. You could barely touch it and it would break. So we had to ‘fly’ Brent Roam’s stunt double on cables above the floor. When the puppeteers smashed the Graboid through from below, the stunt crew tried to yank the double up at the same
speed so it would look like he was carried up by the Graboid. Unfortunately, the Graboid got a little hung up and our Juan double flew up faster. Linda Drake’s visual effects people worked really hard to try to blend the action together — by adding dust and boards and trying to digitally move Juan and the Graboid closer together.” He also added that “in all the closer shots that’s really Brent Roam doing his own stunts. He loved riding the Graboid.” The same scene used miniature tentacles filmed against greenscreen and composited with the full-size Graboid by Kevin Kutchaver’s HimAnI Productions.

Like the first two films, quarter-scale Graboid miniature puppets were built. KNB Efx provided the models, which were inserted in miniature sets and puppeteered by the Skotak brothers of 4-Ward Productions. Quarter-scale hand puppets inserted in miniature landscape sets were in fact used for the scenes where the Graboids bursted from the ground; they were filmed at varying increased frames per second to enhance the sense of their actual mass. Certain shots composited the small scale Graboids, precedently filmed against greenscreen, with live-action footage. “Compositing in the computer allowed us to do very complex composites,” Wilson said. “We could take advantage of image steadying and tracking, and we could do camera moves. It really gave us the best of both worlds to shoot miniatures and then composite them digitally.”

One of the quarter-scale Graboids going through the bridge miniature.

One particularly complex composite shot involved one of the Graboids bursting through the wall of a river bed under a bridge and then ramming through the other side. A miniature version of the bridge and surrounding landscape was built by the Skotak brothers, with a track hole cut into the surface and holes in the river bed walls. A full featureless miniature dummy of the Graboid (about six feet in length) was suspended under the bridge through a rod, which connected it with a moving dolly mechanism on tracks above the bridge. The dolly, itself pulled by a rope, drove the Graboid through the miniature set, making it move from side to side. In the final shot, the dolly was erased and the carriage (precedently filmed against greenscreen) was composited in. The last touches included digital debris at the Monster’s passage, simulating its breaking through dirt and rock. The last Graboid’s death scene was another miniature shot, achieved with a miniature city portion, a miniature locomotive, and a quarter-scale full Graboid dummy, filled with guts, which was dragged against the locomotive with graphic consequences — which were digitally enhanced.

“For me my goal always is to challenge the audience,” Nicotero ultimately commented. “I want to be able to do gags or shots where people will walk out and go ‘okay, how did they do that? Wow, that was cool. I never expected that.’ That’s the fun, that‘s the fun part.”

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

Special, great Thanks to Tom Palleschi, an avid Tremors enthusiast that provided a considerable number of quotes and pictures for this part of Subterranean Terror.

Previous: Part III: Tremors 3: Back to Perfection
Next: Part V: Tremors: The Series

Main Article: Subterranean Terror — Part IV: Tremors 4: The Legend Begins

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

Concept art by Mike Worrall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Queen Facehugger.

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

The Facehugger sculpture.

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

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

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

The failed whippet test.

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

Painting the adolescent Alien stage.

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

Suiting up.

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

The rod puppet.

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

Chris Cunningham sculpts the Alien rod puppet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lead-covered version of the rod puppet.

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

Covering the suit in the lead mixture.

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

The CAT-scan reveal.

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

The Queenburster sculpture.

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

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

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

The Queen bursts.

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

The end of all things (until the sequel).

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