Focusing on seamless integration of cutting-edge VFX with analog craftsmanship that included stop-motion, animatronics, and models, Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Eric Barba helped director Fede Alvarez ramp up the terror and suspense in his haunting deep space saga.
Narratively sandwiched between two renowned movies by Ridley Scott and James Cameron sits Alien: Romulus, a hybrid of the claustrophobic horror of Alien and the wild action of Aliens directed by Fede Álvarez. The story revolves around a crew on an intergalactic hauler attempting to steal equipment from a derelict, orbiting space station and in the process, encounters a malevolent endoparasitoid extraterrestrial lifeform. Boarding the seventh instalment [not including the two crossovers with Predator] of the franchise that made the xenomorph an iconic cinematic creature is VFX Supervisor Eric Barba, who previously supervised the visual effects work on Tron: Legacy and Terminator: Dark Fate.
“It was a fun two years,” notes Barba. “I’ve been fortunate that the movies I’ve been able to work on have been flashbacks to my youth with Tron, Terminator and now Alien. When I first saw Alien, it literally scared the shit out of me! I had nightmares. Those creatures that Ridley Scott created are so iconic. Then Jim hit it out of the park with Aliens. It’s such a fun movie. I love David Fincher having worked with him so much. Alien 3 is probably my third favorite, and then they fall off and become forgettable. Although I loved the way Prometheus looked. Fede Álvarez wanted to go back to its roots and make it feel like this was set at the same time. I called it going back to the analog future.”
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Blocking was done in previs by NVIZ and two inhouse artists. “They would block out sequences of basic action and Fede would give notes,” Barba says. “But it wasn’t a shot-by-shot thing, which would be a traditional previs, because Fede likes to lens everything himself and tell the story the way he wants to. We would hand those scene files back to him in the 3ds Max format and then Fede would hand us back shots that he liked. It gives the film a singular perspective as far as the storytelling because it is his hand behind not just the live-action but all the shots that we had to do in CG as well.”
The film took advantage of miniatures, animatronics, stop-motion animation, and digital effects. According to Barba, “It comes down to Fede’s love for filmmaking and wanting to shoot, and work with the actors as much as humanly possible. That was the mantra. We’ve all heard that from other directors and when they get in the cutting room things change. But because Fede believed that and had this group of young actors we did try to shoot as much as possible. Then you get into zero-G where you have multiple facehuggers running along the floors and lots of xenomorphs. It becomes almost impossible to do with practicals, so we need our CG versions. We approached it from that way. What is going to work with the actors, what is going to give us the best bang for the buck and that scary, Alien feeling that we all love from those first two films.”
The length on screen of any CG shot is critical to believability. “If you use more than what we’re used to you give the gag away,” notes Barba. “When you think about Alien, Ridley used a guy in a suit for his xenomorph. Those shots are so quick. Some are half a second, but it scares the bejesus out of you because your mind connects the dots. Fede felt strongly about keeping our shots quick so that the audience doesn’t see a guy in a suit or an animatronic or a CG version.”
Adding to the scariness is that the xenomorph is a creature of the shadows because of its black colorization. “You can’t see it in the dark,” observes Barba. “You don’t know what is going on back there. Galo Olivares, our DP, did an amazing job giving us this palette and imagery to work from. From day one of shooting, what came up on our monitors looked beautiful and felt scary and dark like that Alien world. We’re always matching the CG to the live drool. We’re always taking notes on the way things are lit, looking at how Galo did things. Our onset team shot tons of HDRIs and set photography so that our visual effects partners could help.” HDRIs were captured for the chestbursters, facehuggers and xenomorphs. “HDRIs were taken from those positions so we get the same quality of light captured,” Barba explains. “When the CG teams put the characters back, they’re able to sample that actual lighting and get the same color tone and dynamic range. Then it’s trying to match. The dynamic range is what makes it work when highlights get bright and get the blacks falling into nothing because Galo liked to let it go that way.” Noting it was difficult achieving the proper interaction, Barba adds, “Artistically getting CG and compositing artists to match the look of what Galo did took a long time. It took versions, trials and errors, and less is more. We tend to over light things in CG because we make all these wonderful things and people want to see what they’ve done.”
Appearing both in Alien and Alien: Romulus is a generic android science officer produced by nefarious corporate conglomerate Weyland-Yutani. “We had to take some license because this isn’t actually Ash from Alien, who was destroyed in the explosion of Nostromo,” says Barba. “This is maybe from the same assembly line or a model that came after that has a likeness of Ash, but obviously it’s a different robot. Rook has gone through his own unfortunate series of events, including being burnt in half and hit with him. It’s a slightly different personality. Rook is meant to remind us that these androids are out there. We used the likeness of Ian Holm but of course he’s no longer with us. We had another actor give us the performance that Fede wanted for Rook. That immediately led to a different personality and look because even when we retarget someone’s performance to a different likeness - this is the problem with the recreation of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - it changes the likeness. Even though it starts off as one character, the second character doesn’t move the way you expect it to because we all have different facial movements and timings.”
Machine learning streamlined the process in cinematically resurrecting Ian Holm. “Having done The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [for which Barba won an Oscar] where everything was horse and buggy,” notes Barba, “everything had to be done by hand. If you fast forward to the way Rook was done it is leaning on a machine. It’s not perfect. The tools are being written and worked on as we speak, and every day are getting better. It’s so much faster, better results, and certainly more affordable for shows with modest budgets. The team at Metaphysic.AI did a great job in adding new tools. For example, we had a head camera performance that had to drive a machine learning solve as well as redirect the eyeline and make other adjustments from our live-action. So, it was a blend. Deepfake stops here. We had to take it much further and they did a great job helping us do that.”
One major action sequence that brought multiple departments together unfolded in an elevator shaft. “Humans perceive an elevator shaft as being vertical,” remarks Barba. “We built a five-story elevator that was put on its side because we had rails to bring the actors back and forth. In order for the audience to believe it was zero-G, we had to look at our camera and always use different angles to help sell it. There was also a two-story vertical set that we cut in-between. We added CG bits of atmospherics and things flying like nuts and bolts to help sell the zero-G. Then just as Jim did in Aliens with Sigourney Weaver, Cailee Spaeny was constantly bombarded with wind so that her hair didn’t necessarily go in one direction.”
At times the live-action actors are taken over by digital doubles. “Cloth moves in a certain way in reality and maybe it doesn’t move exactly like that in our CG simulations,” states Barba. “The same with hair. Those little things can be telltale. We’ve got a few shots in this film where we go from live-action Cailee to CG Cailee and CG xenomorph back to the live-action Cailee. We even had a shot where the arms of David Jonsson had to be taken off, put CG arms on him, adjusted his body a tiny bit and gave him a pulse rifle to finesse what we shot in live-action to get things to line up. It’s tricky. Fede made some of the executives at the visual effects companies a little nervous with trying to get those details as we asked for maybe more versions than they were comfortable with. But they were all happy with the end result. Sometimes pushing it along the way is what we do.”
In addition to CG, miniatures were part of the creative equation for the exterior Corbelan IV spaceship shots and the probe that opens the film. “Fede wanted us to build miniatures to shoot all of the space shots,” reveals Barba. “That became a shot design and a budgetary problem. We agreed that we should still build them, and it was my push to build them because model builders bring an artistry that is different than a CG artist will bring to the table. The way they finish things, the paint, and details, it’s an art all its own. Part of us wanting to go back to the analog future meant we needed some of that hand artistry brought to our models. We had amazing designs and then Ian Hunter’s team built us two amazing miniatures. We scanned the Corbelan IV and the probe, then ILM built them. There are two shots in the movie where we actually did shoot the Corbelan IV in front of an LED screen but the rest of them are CG. The miniature gave the CG artists another level to hit that helped to sell those shots.”
Much of the film takes place aboard the derelict Renaissance Space Station, owned by Weyland-Yutani Corporation, that is on a collision course with the planetary rings of LV-410. “When Fede and I first started talking about this, I had some ideas about what we should do and he had some thoughts, but nothing was completely thought out,” Barba reveals. “There wasn’t much of the rings in the concept art because we see rings and it can be simplistic, like what we are used to seeing from Saturn. But I came across this BBC special called How Saturn Got Its Rings and it was fascinating because there is CG showing how this happened with some closeup shots. This woman was doing the narration explaining a lot of things. It gets to the point where I was blown away by some of the imagery that came back from the Cassini-Huygens probe of Saturn’s rings. It was spectacular. That was our creative inspiration for our rings.”
In total, 1,400 visual effects shots were created over a period of 10 months. “Initially, because ILM is one of our sister companies at 20th Century Studios and Disney, they were brought in to be our lead vendor,” states Barba. “As time went on and the shot count grows, which it always does, we brought in Wētā FX to support our third act. Then we had a number of others like Image Engine, Fin Design + Effects, Wylie Co., Metaphysic.AI, and Atomic Arts to assist us as we needed to split the work up in order to hit our timeframe. It doesn’t always go to plan because there is this thing called the almighty rebate which tends to drive some of our financial decisions to help us meet our budgets and get the shots that the studio and director want. But in this case I did want to keep all our xenomorph and facehugger work at the same companies because it becomes a performance issue. Once a team understands how a xenomorph moves and the director is happy with it, which he was specific about things and picky, you don’t want to then pass it off to another team or different company because you have to go through all of that again.”
“Having said that,” he continues, “we did end up having to do that with Wētā FX helping us out because of timing issues. It’s casting and trying to get the right people. We brought in Andy Jones, who is an amazing animation director, to assist us with our xenomorph work at ILM. We kept all the offspring work with Wētā FX for those reasons. However, there were shared shots. The Corbelan IV was shared between Wētā FX and ILM.”
Alien: Romulus offers a different spin on the franchise that will generate a new audience. “What Fede brought was building that world of Alien again but adding his own twists and turns with the zero-G moments contributing some new thrills to our action,” remarks Barba. “We all want to know what happened after the xenomorph gets pushed out of the airlock in Alien. Now we actually know, and there is so much more backstory to Weyland-Yutani’s nefarious plans. Also, we introduce a whole new young cast.” As anticipated, the zero-G sequences proved to be one of the biggest challenges. “That’s because trying to shoot in harnesses and rigs in sets that allow you to do so means we have to roll this wall out but allow for this much stunt rigging and the performances must always be adjusted if something is not quite right. Every actor reacts differently to the harnesses. Planning those sequences I originally felt would be the hardest.”
Rook underwent a last-minute alteration, which became a big challenge because of time and money. According to Barba, “It’s a big endeavor having been down that road. I didn’t want to go down it again and have a lack of time and resources because you need time. It’s about being able to flesh it all out, look at it, put it together in the sequence, look at it again, make adjustments, and fine tune. It’s not something you finalize shot by shot and hope it all works out in the end. It’s much more challenging.”
Tippett Studio was responsible for the stop-motion animation such as a rat being crushed and regenerated. “The Tippett team was amazing. I was so thrilled when they sent us their version,” Barba says. “We had conversations where Fede would tell what he wanted. However, Fede was also like, ‘You know what you’re doing. Have fun and show us what you’re thinking.’ I wish that we had done more of those shots in the film because editorially we had more to work with. But the way it was cut works for the film., However, they did some fun stuff.” Barba concludes, “We had great teams that put their heads down and knew what they needed to do and worked hard to get it there.”
Alien: Romulus is now available on Digital, Blu-ray, VHS and streaming exclusively on Hulu.
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
