
HEAD SPACE: A spaceship crew discover a tomb-like room within the structure which may provide clues to the origin of life on Earth in Sir Ridley Scott's Prometheus.
There are many memorable scenes in Sir Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien. Some are shocking and visceral, including the creature bursting out of actor John Hurt's chest. But others are simply haunting - and it includes one of the film's earliest scenes where the explorers enter an ancient dilapidated spaceship and see the fossilised remains of a giant space-suited entity in a cockpit-like chair.
What it was is never explored or answered in Alien, but the scene - designed by artist H Giger, who won an Oscar for his work - has fascinated fans of the movie ever since. They've even dubbed the entity the "Space Jockey".
Fast forward more than 30 years and one of the fans of the film, Weta Digital's Martin Hill, can't believe his luck. As part of the Wellington visual effects studio's contribution to Scott's new movie Prometheus, he and his team - which numbered up to 400 - got to revisit the "Space Jockey".
"We had to recreate the Space Jockey chair. I remember watching Alien and I must have been far too young to see Alien at the time. You saw the Space Jockey chair and the guy is sitting in it and you're like 'Whoa, who is that guy? What happened there?' That's a mystery that's been there since 1979. For me it was such a thrill to know that Prometheus was being made, let alone getting to work on it. You find yourself at work and you're discussing 'OK, we have to build the Space Jockey chair. How does it move? How does it articulate?' Then you step back and think 'it's the Space Jockey chair'!"
Prometheus is Scott's first sci-fi film since Blade Runner in 1982 - and the springboard for the film-maker was asking the same questions about the Space Jockey.
Prometheus is set more than 80 years from now, with the crew of the spaceship Prometheus exploring the moon of a gas giant. Their hope is to find an extraterrestrial origin for life on Earth. The film stars Noomi Rapace - best known for the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Michael Fassbender as an android (similar to that played by Ian Holm in Alien) and Charlize Theron as the representative of the giant Weyland Corporation.
Anyone who views Prometheus and has seen Alien will see the links, but in interviews Scott has tended to play down the idea that it's a literal "prequel". He's said it began life as one, but "evolved into another universe" and is a standalone film.
Weta Digital was not the only visual effects studio involved in the project, but contributed a substantial 200 visual effects shots. And Weta Digital's work literally opens and closes the film. It includes the creation of all but one of several Prometheus creatures, as well as one of the most important aspects - the alien "engineers".
The film opens with a stunning scene that combines a shoot at the giant Dettifoss waterfall in the volcanic landscape of Iceland and one of the "engineers" created in Wellington by the Weta Digital team.
Hill says that when they were first approached to work on the film Scott had a maquette - a scale model - of how he envisaged what an engineer would look like. "Ridley has never worked with full [computer-generated] creatures before. He's used bits in Robin Hood and Gladiator, but he's never had a fully digital character as this. He is very keen to capture as much as he possibly can in camera so he can direct and interact in the way he's used to in film-making. Doing something on computer is quite a different deal. He wanted to get some confidence in what we could produce."
Scott lit and filmed the maquette in the style of the film and sent the footage to Weta Digital as a starting point for the studio to then bring it to life as a computer-generated character. "They basically said 'can you match this'?"
But not only was Scott impressed with Weta Digital's results, the studio got to contribute to many pivotal scenes. To describe all of them would ruin some of the surprises and impact of Prometheus. But it is safe to at least say that one - which involves Rapace on an automated operating table - is likely to be one of the nail-biting moments audiences will talk about afterwards, as well as another that involves a tentacled creature the Weta Digital team dubbed a "trilobite" and another dubbed "the deacon" or "the ultramorph".
Weta Digital brought the creature to life after going back to the work of Giger on Alien.
Prometheus is Scott's first film shot using digital cameras and in 3-D - which Hills says heavily influenced what Weta Digital had to create, including the creatures.
However, Scott didn't rely solely on computer-generated visual effects, preferring many of the sets to be constructed at the giant Pinewood Studios in England, best known for the James Bond films. While Hill and his team did most of their work from Wellington, Hill had the privilege of visiting the Prometheus sets for a few weeks as part of his interaction with Scott and the film's visual effects supervisor Richard Stammers.
Like knowing that he was working on the Space Jockey, it was another magical moment for Hill, who with his Weta Digital team have also contributed to the film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is released in August.
"I haven't seen production values on sets like that. The sets were just enormous in scope," he says, describing a giant tomb-like room dedicated to the engineers. "You felt that you were part of the alien world. I would say the same about the [space] ships. Walking around the stages and the way the floor sounded under your feet, it has a real sense of quality. You really felt that everyone who was working on it was really giving it their all."
Prometheus opens in New Zealand today.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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