Without question, the greatest challenge of Project A34K was doing justice to the special effects of the Xenomorph itself.
While the rod puppet used to create the Alien had a lot of promise, a rushed post-production and the limitations of the technology meant that it never quite reached it’s full potential, and the end result was at times jarring and immersion breaking, detracting from the overall experience.
While I eventually decided to enhance all visual effects in the film (environments etc), improving how the Alien looked running on all fours and feeding on its prey was the inception of the project, and has been where most of the work has been put in.
The core problems with these shots were predominantly the color grading, which was seldom a good match for the background plate, often leaving the creature as though it were separate from the environment and other elements in the frame, and the rushed process of trimming the puppet from the background, leaving a jagged and unclean edge around the Alien.
This was corrected by first breaking each shot down, one by one, into individual frames.
Then moving the image into Photoshop, and painstakingly tracing around the Alien, first with a mouse and later with a Wacom tablet. The compositing was often so messy, and the rod puppet itself so intricate, that using a software like ‘Silhouette’ would have been impossible.
When the Alien was isolated from the background frame, the outlines were painted out to remove the ragged edge, and then the background plate itself painted inward, to create a cleaner line. When the two elements were separated, blur methods were used to make the creature more at home in its environment, and color masking was used to uniform it with the plate.
This process was completed hundreds of times, for each individual composited frame in the film. More than twenty Xenomorph shots have been enhanced, frame by frame. Each frame, depending on the complexity of the shot, could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours.
All Xenomorph shots were completed in-house at Project A34K.
Watch below to see a before and after frame of each shot enhanced to date.
Most of the Xenomorph shots were completed using this process, but there was one shot, where the Alien darts from one tunnel into another across the mold, just after killing David, where the movement of the puppet made it unworkable to fix. The closer the color came to matching the plate, the worse it looked. This was the single most difficult and time-consuming Xenomorph shot in the project, as I attempted it six times without a successful result.
Ultimately I decided to remove the Alien from the background plate entirely and build from the ground up. This was done using an image of the NECA 51597 Ultimate Dog Alien action figure, pictured below.
I put the image onto the shot and mapped it onto the existing Xenomorph model, positioning it frame by frame in Photoshop with the puppet warp tool. When it was positioned correctly and the animation looked right, I moved it onto the blank background plate. There I went through again frame by frame and painted in details to make it blend more authentically with the environment, and naturalized the Alien's body shape and details (painting out joints etc), before finally adding a motion blur effect (Reel Smart Motion Blur) in After Effects.
Two Xenomorph shots were removed from the film entirely, as they were so low in quality that no significant improvement would have been possible. The final shot in the tunnel after the explosion, when Junior runs into the waste tank to draw the creature away from the others, and later the shot where the Alien flees the tank after Golic sets it free and it kills him.
Great efforts where made to enhance the visuals of Alien ³ and to have the special effects compliment the gothic horror of the story, instead of being moments of wincing distraction. I felt that if a shot didn’t meet this standard, it wouldn’t be included. In both cases I feel the scenes flow just as effectively without them.
