How Alec Gillis orchestrated the intense effects for the chestburster, and more, on Alien: Romulus. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine in print.
Creature effects designer Alec Gillis has a rich history with all things Alien.
He worked on James Cameron’s Aliens as part of Stan Winston’s creature crew, and later with his Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc. company on Alien3, Alien Resurrection, AvP: Aliens vs Predator and AVPR: Aliens vs Predator – Requiem.
With Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus, Gillis has returned to the franchise via two new effects outfits.
The first is Studio Gillis, through which he oversaw the chestburster effects and baby Offspring egg effects. Then there’s Pro Machina, a practical effects outfit that built miniatures for the film.
Designing a chestburster like no other
In the film, a chestburster emerges from Navarro (Aileen Wu), which ultimately turns into a Xenomorph. When Álvarez came to Gillis for the chestburster effect, it was soon apparent that the director was looking for something different than had been seen before. “It was intended to be a lot less explosive than it has been,” shares Gillis. “I thought that was a really great way to ground the effect. Even though it’s not explosive, it’s more like a slow birth. It’s a little more grisly, in a way. I liked that Fede was interested in giving this chestburster some time to live and breathe and be alive.”
“I always want to be respectful of the original source material from Ridley Scott and from H.R. Giger,” continues Gillis. “We’ve seen Giger’s designs from the ’79 film for the original chestburster. It was kind of like a turkey–he had a different idea for it. But one of the unsung heroes in the chestburster lineage is Roger Dicken. He was the guy who actually built the chestburster. From what Ridley told me, he had a lot of design input as well. Those guys are all geniuses, so I was thinking, what are we going to do to build on the legacy? Well, Fede said that he felt like we had seen that violent, explosive, chestburster moment, and he wanted it to be more like a live birth.”
Concept artist Dane Hallett produced a number of designs for the chestburster. “Dane’s work is very precise,” applauds Gillis. “It’s very exact. And so when I saw his chestburster design–and he also did the egg and the baby Offspring inside it–I thought, ‘Wow, this is such great material.’ We interpreted it in our way and brought the materials to it and the mechanism and Fede’s ideas of how the chestburster should work.”
Studio Gillis then began work on a digital sculpt of the chestburster in ZBrush, spearheaded by concept artist Mauricio Ruiz. “That 3D model went straight to my mechanical designer, David Penikas, who could start designing all the mechanisms in 3D,” says Gillis. “He didn’t have to wait for a mold to be made or a core to create the skin. I impressed upon him that we needed to have a more fluid and more organic mechanism than we’ve had in the past. He did a terrific job of it, alongside Zac Teller, with the animatronics.”
An early consideration was size. Gillis points out that the chestbursters on Alien Resurrection were the same size as those in Alien and Aliens, but the desire on Romulus was to make the creature smaller. Partly this was because the actress, Wu, was more petite. “In the end, our chestburster is about half the size of a traditional one. I actually thought, ‘Well, that fits the story. If we’re compressing the time that it all happens, maybe this creature is like a premature birth. You see it in that beautiful shot that ILM did where she holds the X-ray wand behind her back and you see the size of the creature inside squirming.”
The director further requested the chestburster to color-shift during the scene. Gillis initially pushed back, suggesting that this could be something done digitally. But, he says, Álvarez was looking to realize the effect practically. “That meant we had to come up with a way of making the dome darken by injecting dark fluids underneath. We made a separate transparent dome on the top of the head and we injected a black fluid that would coarse under. We created a capillary system in the head so it wouldn’t be just like a smooth gradation. I wanted a kind of grisly, membranous, cartilaginous, fleshy look out of this thing.”
