How the ‘Alien: Romulus’ VFX Team United Old and New Technology to Bring Ian Holm’s Android to Life
Released just a few months after the 45th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” “Alien: Romulus” brings the franchise roaring back to life after a seven-year hiatus. Director and co-writer Fede álvarez leveraged its complex mythology by staging his installment between the events of the original film and its 1986 follow-up “Aliens.” But just as important was álvarez’ combining filmmaking techniques used on those earlier chapters with the most up-to-date technology available to deliver its many thrills — and in the process, to cement the series’ reputation as one of the great cinematic showcases for artisanal creativity.
In addition to a $350 million (and counting) worldwide box office haul to mark the success of the movie, álvarez’ collaborators Eric Barba, Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser, Daniel Macarin and Shane Mahan received a collective Academy Award nomination for best visual effects. It’s an honor shared by four previous “Alien” films, and one that’s especially welcome given that the two films that “Alien: Romulus” is set between both won the same category. “Knowing that this movie sat between ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’ — those two icons of science fiction and action and horror — meant we had a lot to live up to,” says visual effects supervisor Barba, who previously won an Oscar for his work on “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” “The biggest challenge was, ‘How do we make it look like it we’re going back to the analog future?’”
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To begin the process of synergizing decades of institutional knowledge about the franchise, fellow visual effects supervisor Macarin says he merely had to visit a colleague’s office to find someone with firsthand experience creating alien xenomorphs. “My friend Gino [Acevedo], who’s creative art director at Weta FX, worked on the original films, so it was nice to just walk over to his office and be like, ‘Hey, how did you build this?’ And not just what was the material meant to be, but how did you make it?”
Macarin’s fellow collaborator on “Alien: Romulus,” Mahan, was also a veteran of the series, having worked on “Aliens.” Though Mahan insists that “the heart and soul of [the process] is still artistry,” he indicates that computer technology has streamlined and shrunk an effects pipeline that used to extend a production’s schedule by weeks or even months. “In ’86 when we were working under Stan Winston, you were using clay to sculpt by hand. Then you’re using very basic animatronic systems of the day to make things operate and move. We had no CGI to rely on to clean up operational rods or wires, so everything was done in camera and hidden.
“Today, you have the advantage of using 3D sculpting tools that you can design in the computer. So we have a much more scientific way of constructing the same artistic ideas, but manufacturing them in a more precise way.”
Ultimately, however, Sepulveda-Fauser says that it wasn’t the series’ namesake creature that best tested the film’s army of technicians, artists and supervisors rather it quite appropriately was Rook, the re-animated science officer designed to look like, and pay tribute to, Ian Holm’s duplicitous android in the original “Alien.” “To replicate a real person but mix it in with a real robotic character on set so that it feels like it’s really sitting there, we had to bring all the latest facial capture technology, and beyond that, the AI work that [visual effects studio] Metaphysic did in the end,” Sepulveda-Fauser says.
“That had really never been attempted in some ways. It was a real hybrid between old school and new.”
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