An excerpt from issue #56 of befores & afters magazine.
In Alien: Earth, a collection of creatures are taken from a crashed spaceship to a place called Neverland island. Chief among the creatures is the Eye Midge (classified as Trypanohyncha Ocellus). This is a parasitic organism that features a central spherical eye with multiple irises, with tentacles, and seeks to embed itself in a series of hosts, including a cat, a sheep and a human.
An Eye Midge prop was fabricated by Second Skin. The team produced a number of acrylic eyeballs in different sizes. Most of them were rigid with a glossy finish, while some were also created as softer versions for actor safety. “Casting the silicone body was difficult,” relates Second Skin creature and prosthetic supervisor Tor Sarawut Sakthamcharoen, “because the creature has many thin tentacles that tend to stick together, almost like octopus arms. The tips of the tentacles were extremely small, around 0.8 mm in diameter, which made the molding process particularly delicate.”
As noted, the Eye Midge embeds itself inside hosts such as cats, sheep and a human. “For the cat sequence,” says Sakthamcharoen, “we fabricated a cat mock-up with applied fur and wounds. During filming we mounted the Eye Midge on a selfie stick, which allowed VFX to use it as a lighting reference. For the sheep, we created a bulging sheep eye version, almost as if the eye was about to pop out of the socket, and this was then sent to Wētā Workshop to integrate onto the animatronic sheep body. For the unfortunate human victim—played by Michael Smiley as Schmuel—we created a bulging eye prosthetic that was applied on set, along with blood tubing for the blood effects. During the scene Michael essentially had vision from only one eye, because we had to tape over his real eye underneath the prosthetic.”
The Eye Midge as a digital creature allowed the visual effects teams to have significant fun with its performance. “What was so cool about the eyes being so prominent was that you could be really expressive about it,” states visual effects supervisor Jonathan Rothbart. “I talked to Noah about the Eye Midge having this weird little fascination with the people and with the other characters in the film, but also it playing up this docile friendly creature when it’s in captivity, and then once it’s released, it’s actually this horribly violent creature.”
“When it was in its sheep incarnate, for example,” adds Rothbart, “I would take videos of my dog doing these quirky little things that he does, and I would send them off to Untold Studios which did the Eye Midge. One of those quirks might be, there’s somebody standing there and he wants to see, so he’s got to lean to the side a little bit and be annoyed that he’s got to look around people. It was all this subtle stuff like that. I hoped that even though it’s not overt that it would bring its character to life, doing these things that a real creature might do in an intelligent one. Unlike the Xeno, which is singularly focused—get people, impregnate people and get more Xenos— the Eye Midge was very different in that it was an intelligent creature that definitely wanted to command what it’s doing, while still being this agent of chaos. He’s just always in there trying to create chaos as he goes and they keep trying to manipulate him and he just keeps creating more chaos.”
To build the Eye Midge, Untold Studios needed to deal with a complicated rig in terms of the eyes and tentacles of the creature that also required a nuanced performance. “When you first read the scripts,” says Untold Studios visual effects studio Chris Ritvo, “the Eye Midge had to both illustrate intelligence and be terrifying at the same time. It always felt like it could pull out something new from his bag of tricks—quite literally with his shooters it uses to grab onto things from long distances. The rigging was extremely complicated, aside from being a tentacled creature, which is complicated enough!”
“Midge had to crawl, climb, jump, shoot and change form usually all in the same shot, so there really was no hiding!” exclaims Ritvo. “Everything you see on camera is something our rig could do. The eye portion had its own technical challenges as when Midge takes over characters, he tries to mimic that creature, first the cat, then the sheep and later we see him in several humans. The pupil area was quite delicate to create, basing it on a real eye construction, then breaking it into seven pieces. We knew it had to have depth and be able to reflect light realistically.”
The Eye Midge’s eyes were modeled, had displacement and had a cornea geometry to get proper bounce and refraction, details Ritvo. “With Midge’s eyes able to merge in different combinations, we modeled final looks for each of our iterations it takes on to be used as blend shapes in the rig, then included tweaker controls to fully allow animation supervisor Tom Nagy and the animation team full creative freedom to get to and from each point, and be able to augment the shapes. This took a lot of setup, but it gave us so much freedom.”
In terms of lighting, Untold Studios began with the captured set lighting to get a realistic base. They then added an array of specular lights to be able to add additional specular highlights that are seen moving across the Eye Midge’s slime-y body. “This also gave us additional depth and reflections in Midge’s pupils which Jonathan Rothbart really thought was the final piece that brought the creatures to life,” notes Ritvo. “So much of Midge’s personality and performance comes from his eyes it was essential to get it right.”
In terms of gross animation, early incarnations of the character had it moving in a more slithery or octopus-like manner. “However,” says Ritvo, “Noah thought it would be scarier if it moved with more speed. The animation team quickly worked up the more spider-like movement, also allowing his eyes to lean forward, which is terrifying when it comes at you at speed!”
“Then, getting Midge in and out of creatures was definitely the most complicated action it had to do in the show, and it was important to us that we never had to cut away. The earliest test we did when bidding on the project was Midge crawling up a face and digging its way into a human’s eye to help experiment with movement and the logistics of replacing itself with a human eye. This was really informative on how Midge would/could move, establishing his weight and scale, how much he would need to squeeze vs. the eye socket would or could. Everyone liked the test so much they cut it directly into the show for episode 1! We ran with this idea when Midge was attacking the sheep, really showing Midge digging deep into the socket is a really unique and shocking image.”
A signature moment with the Eye Midge sees it launch itself onto Nibs (Lily Newmark). The actor had to mime the interaction. Rothbart praises the work on on-set visual effects supervisor Jeff Okun who “made sure that action was right for the creature and what was going to happen. There was a lot of guidance. You don’t want the actor to be waving her hands all over and moving too fast, but you want to feel it to have the energy and feel dangerous. She was directed to do a really nice balance of that, where you got a sense of desperation from her, but she still maintained a level of control that felt like she was battling a creature that is trying to pull itself into her, as opposed to just being frenetic and trying to shake this thing away.”
The interaction remained a challenge for Untold Studios, shares Ritvo. “When we saw the attack on Nibs, it was obvious we were going to need a tight body track on anything Midge interacts with, in this case her face and hands. We built a model based on her scans and did an approximately 70% lookdev for textures and skin for any pulling or squeezing of her hands. Tight body tracks were then performed with the model and animation started blocking. When Midge pulls on her face, animation had controls to create the pinching skin. Once we were happy with the animation, Midge went through a CFX simulation to help with collisions, stretch and squeeze to make sure nothing in the rig breaks. Due to the amount of differently lights in the scene and they are all moving, lighting and compositing was difficult, the CG Midge’s cast shadows and highlights had to match into the hands perfectly and eventually did a frame by frame pass to make sure we matching the lighting and shows as close to the plate as possible.”
For moments with the sheep, a combination between a real animal, a Wētā Workshop puppet and Untold Studio’s CG sheep were relied upon. “As far as the character of the sheep goes,” observes Rothbart, “Noah and I had these extensive conversations about, well, it’s now not the Eye Midge anymore, and it’s not the sheep anymore, it’s a sheep vessel being controlled by the Eye Midge which doesn’t know necessarily what a sheep is. We wanted all the character to come from the head and the eye, and not feel cartoony in the sheep doing something. The one time where we play it up is when it first enters the sheep and it stands up trying to mimic a person and then realizes that sheep don’t do that and it can’t physically do it and it drops back down, which gives the impetus for the eyeball dropping out, which is super fun. It was all about the Eye Midge trying to understand how to drive a sheep. Still, we always thought the sheep was at its creepiest and best looking when it’s just sitting there, still. staring, perhaps studying.”
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This ‘stillness’ is something Ritvo describes as behavior that could “swing from unnatural terrifying stillness to sometimes almost comical. We started by match-moving and tracking both the real sheep and the lighting double to get a base performance to work from. The double was able to do simple movement and performance which was a great base that we used a lot of for our final performance. Animation would then take the match move, add performance to the face, eyes, nose, and add sometimes smoother more natural movement where it was needed, it was a great combination of using a practical as a base for a full CG replacement. There were a few sequences where we cut between the real sheep and our CG when it’s being attacked by Midge. And sometimes post fight we would match-move the sheep and add our Midge back on top of the practical, a testament to the asset and animation artists as it holds up right against the practical sheep interchangeably.”
