Legacy Effects and Metaphysic combined to make the character. Excerpts from befores & afters magazine in print.
At one point in Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, the characters encounter a damaged android, Rook. Rook resembles the android Ash from Alien, played by Ian Holm, who passed away in 2020. With several scenes, and even dialogue, Rook would require a unique combination of a practical animatronic built and puppeteered by Legacy Effects, and visual effects augmentation by Metaphysic using machine learning techniques.
For Legacy Effects, the animatronic Rook build needed to happen fast. The studio would normally look to have four to six months to make such a thing, but here they only had two. One challenge, plainly, was that they did not have the actual actor to do a live cast or 3D scan with. “There were no existing molds of Ian from Alien,” reveals Mahan. “They certainly made one because Yaphet Kotto knocks Ash’s head off with a fire extinguisher. They certainly made something, but it doesn’t exist. And if it does, no one wants to admit that they have it because we searched.”
Below, scroll through for behind the scenes of the Rook animatronic shoot.
Luckily, there was an existing cast of Holm from The Hobbit films, and certainly the original film from which to reference. “That cast of Ian was done many years after Alien, of course,” notes MacGowan, “so all we could get from that really was the placement of his features. What we did do was make two clay portraits of his face. Andy Bergholtz and Jason Matthews did those, and then we scanned these sculptures. It was only a half face, so we scanned it and then Scott Patton digitally re-sculpted the whole thing.”
The Rook animatronic was then ultimately built as a creature effect that could be puppeteered. The sets had to be constructed so that the team could be hidden underneath or allow for the choreography via slots in a table when Rook is shown crawling. The animatronic also featured a less-damaged right arm that a puppeteer could perform, and then a left damaged arm that was an animatronic puppet arm. “The whole body was actually a life cast of my body,” says MacGowan, “that was then re-sculpted with all the damage and it was all put together.”
Part of the performance is the delivery of lines, and for this an actor was cast and his voice recorded. Legacy Effects used the voice to program in the moves onto their Rook animatronic for playback on set. This became the basis of the character, with enhancements made by Metaphysic for eyes and mouth movement, resulting in a hybrid practical/digital approach.
“It’s pretty satisfying to bring back that character,” reflects Mahan. “It wasn’t easy. I think it’s a very admirable attempt to resurrect somebody who’s no longer with us to be in a movie again. I mean, if you would’ve told us when we were walking out of the theater having seen Ash in Alien that someday we were going to make a replica of him in a different movie, I wouldn’t have believed it. It’s very cool.”
The VFX side of Rook
“Fede said to me, ‘It needs to start as a puppet,’” shares VFX supervisor Eric Barba. “He said, ‘It’s a broken android, so it didn’t have to be perfect. It had gone through some hell, half its body’s missing, part of its face is going to be missing, but we’re going to have to augment it probably if we don’t get it right in camera.’”
“I fell back on what I know of head replacement and recreating CG,” continues Barba, who worked on groundbreaking digital human productions such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and TRON: Legacy. “Quite honestly, I thought I’d moved away from doing that because it’s excruciating. I used to joke with people that I had property in the Uncanny Valley, and it’s really difficult to get rid of. No one wants to live there, and when you finally move out of there, you really don’t want to go back. And so I said, ‘Look, we’re going to make the best puppet we possibly can. We’ll put a headcam on our actor that we’ll cast, we’ll get his performance and we’ll get the audio from that performance. On the day, we’ll play that back for the cast so that’s what they’re reacting to.’ But it just means you have to have all those things done ahead of time and be happy with those choices. It’s easier said than done but that’s exactly what we did.”
As noted, Legacy Effects delivered a Rook animatronic puppet for use on set for filming in Budapest. The plan, then, was to augment the puppet’s movements digitally. “Our puppet was never going to look photorealistic from its mouth movements,” advises Barba. “We wanted the stuff coming out of its side, too. Initially, we settled on a 3D approach but that approach became time consuming and costly, and we were on a modest budget and a shortened back-end post schedule.”
“Fede felt strongly about the deepfake technology,” adds Barba. “I actually brought a wonderful artist into post, Greg Teegarden. I said, ‘Look, I want you to do deepfake just on the eyes for our preview screenings and let’s see.’ We were very lucky that we got the studio on board and we pulled the original 4K scan of Alien, of all the Ian Holm photography. We started building a model, and we used that model to do the initial director’s cut. We had something there other than the puppet. And I can’t tell you how exciting that was when we first saw stuff. ILM also did a test and it brought that puppet alive and Fede felt even more strongly about how we should do this.”
To finalize the Rook shots–knowing that budget and timeline were critical–Barba then called upon his former boss Ed Ulbrich, now chief content officer & president of production at Metaphysic, which has broken into the machine learning and generative AI space, including with digital humans. Says Barba: “I was super excited about what they could offer, and I said, ‘Well, let’s do a test and show Fede.’ And that’s what we did, and that’s what led us to using Metaphysic, which really helped us solve a lot of problems.”
“They have amazing AI tools that you can’t do with just a deepfake or even without more 3D trickery,” says Barba. “They could re-target our eyelines. They could add blinks, they could make adjustments from the head-cam footage. They wrote software to drive our solve and then they could dial in or out the performance if Fede wasn’t quite happy with it. Metaphysic was able to give us those tools, and I think they did a great job. We threw them a lot of curve balls and changes.”
One particularly challenging aspect of Rook was the many lighting conditions the android appears in, as well as being displayed on black and white monitors on occasion. “The thing that surprised me the most was how well the monitor shots worked right out of the box,” comments Barba. “Fede’s mantra was going back to the analog future. Everything needed to have that look.”
To get the look, the director sought out a specific JVC camera that had been used on Alien (1979). “Fede loved the look of the head-cam shots and monitor shots,” notes Barba, “especially that burning trail you see sometimes in 1980s music videos. He said, ‘Ah, we’ve got to match that.’ So we did. We literally got that camera and we started shooting with it in principal photography. And then it broke! It lost its ability to focus. Everything started becoming soft. We were in Budapest and it was the only one we could find and no one knew how to fix it. So, we ended up shooting it on other cameras and then Wylie Co. matched the look and did all the screens to keep it concise and cohesive throughout. They did a great job making that look work.”
Relating also to those monitor shots of Rook was the fact that the animatronic had been filmed without a CCTV-like camera positioned in the frame, that is, without something that would show how a monitor shot of Rook would be possible in the first place. So, a camera was added in via visual effects. And the artist responsible for that work was…none other than the director, Alvarez. (It’s worth looking back at Alvarez’s own early days in VFX and directing at his YouTube page, something he discussed in detail at the recent VIEW Conference). Below, from VIEW Conference, a shot of the Rook animatronic without the camera in place, and one where it has been added to the scene.
At the VIEW Conference, Alvarez also acknowledged in front of a public audience (and now on Twitter/X, see below), that the Rook shots were tweaked by Metaphysic for the home release. Here’s what he said at VIEW:
“As we were preparing the version for the Blu-ray, I insisted that we needed to give Metaphysic more time to finish those shots, so we did that. It was a rare opportunity, and the studio was generous enough to give us money to finish the detail as much as we could.”
Here’s a recent Twitter/X discussion about it:
@fedalvar were the effects for Rook tweaked for the home release? https://t.co/MVufieXwi4
— TD3K (@Terrordome3K) December 31, 2024
