Alien: Romulus VFX supervisor breaks down the film’s most challenging CGI sequence. The movie follows a young group of space colonizers who run into horrors that launched the franchise. The latest Alien installment is encompassed by strong performances from Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson, convincing visual effects, and a third-act twist involving one of the franchise’s most haunting monster designs. Alien: Romulus has done well critically and commercially, holding an 80% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics and grossing $350 million worldwide. Recently, it was nominated for the Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects.
While speaking with ScreenRant, Alien: Romulus VFX Supervisor Eric Barba discussed the challenges behind the film’s most complicated CGI sequence, identifying the lift-off into space as the movie’s hardest VFX achievement. The ultimate goal was to convey that the characters’ planet was one where the sun couldn’t be seen because it was hidden by storms and cloud cover. Shooting the sequence was relatively easy enough, as conditions on the day of suitable for the sequence, and Galo Olivares’ photography provided a compelling composition for the VFX artists to work with.
Well, certainly, the lift-off into space, there’s a lot that has to be established in that sequence. When we’re on our set, it was easy to get that dressed and looking every bit as grimy and dirty and muddy. And just because it was in the high 30s on those nights, and it rained and the mud got stuck to everything. So, everyone’s cold, everyone’s muddy, and the sets were beautifully dressed and finished. Obviously, we augmented it to a tiny degree, but for the most part — or the big opening shots, I guess, we did augment. But you want to feel in it, so when they lift off into space, what’s priority is for us to understand that they’re on a planet that we can’t see the sun, because it’s encompassed in these storms and clouds. And Fede had said to me, “I want every shot to look like a painting.” And that inspired me. I’m an artist myself, and I love that kind of challenge.
So, I think the hardest thing was getting the space shots to look beautiful, and like paintings, and scary, because it’s not natural for some of the visual effects teams to essentially underlight, or backlight, or not want to show off what they’ve done. Because we had these amazing models that were scanned and built and then taken into the digital realm from the physical. And the guys, the digital teams, did a fantastic job in transferring them over, but then they want to light them up and show them off. It’s like, “Well, that’s fantastic, but we really need to make this scary and beautiful.” So, that was a constant review process of going, “Well, let’s not maybe have too much light here, too much light there.”
I mentioned an instructor I had back in college, one of my painting instructors, who had taught me that to compose things, was to put a light thing in front of a dark thing, in front of a light thing. That was one of his mantras, “a dark thing in front of a light thing in front of a dark thing,” and just build those silhouette shapes. And that’s what I kind of had them do. And you’ll see that with the rings. We made the rings white, so they were more icy, and we tried to get the planet backlit, and the station back lit, so we always were pulling out silhouettes. They’re good painter techniques, but something that had to be constantly looked after, because of the nature of digital going to overlight, much more than maybe the live-action. If you look at the live-action, it’s beautifully lit, so that was the other bar. Galo had given us such a beautiful palette and beautiful photography just to start with, it’s like, “Wow.” I was excited for that, just seeing it when we were shooting, because it was like, “Okay, great, this will allow us to bed it. And it’s an Alien movie. It’s dark, it’s scary, this will be great.”
An instruction from director Fede Alvarez to Barba was to make every shot look like a painting. While Olivares’ cinematography provided the first half of this, challenges arose when it came to lighting the sequence in post, as it is natural for VFX artists to want to adequately light a scene and show off the work they’ve done. Barba’s solution was to use painting techniques that focused on silhouettes to give the sequence the gritty and grimy look associated with the best installments of the Alien franchise. Read Barba’s full breakdown below:
I literally looked at everything I could get my hands on. And ultimately, you know, the Cassini space probe was launched, and it was the closest probe we’ve ever had that got near Saturn’s actual rings. And it sent back fantastic photography, and that photography was incredibly inspiring. So, as I kind of looked into that, the problem with that photography is it’s still from a great distance, and because the rings are moving at at incredible speed, we tend to see the rings as these kind of solid shapes. But there’s this wonderful “How Saturn got its rings” BBC special that this astrologist kind of explained, and they did their own CG representation of what she was describing, and that became our inspiration.
Once I saw that, I was like, “I’ve got to show this to Fede,” and I sent it to Fede, and he was like, “Wow.” So, that’s what we said to the teams. And it’s ice, and I wanted it to be white ice from the beginning, because of that thing I was saying before about being able to stack composition and backlight everything. It took us a teeny bit for to get there. Fede was on board, once he saw some of the imagery, and there’s an amazing concept artist who I’d worked with at ILM, Fred Palacio, and I kept requesting him to do some paint overs, because I knew his artistic ability would help get us there. And he did, and that became our guide. He did some beautiful work, and then with ILM, “We got it, now we understand.” And then, Weta took over in the third act, when we get closer to it, and they had the same, all the reference and images, and then they picked up. And my comment to Daniel, when we first launched them, was just like, “Look, the rings need to be so thick and amazing that the southern hemisphere should dim while this is rendering.” It needs that type of computational power to throw out this thing, because Weta is well-known to have the largest computational power in the southern hemisphere. They laughed, and they certainly gave it their all.
What This Means For Alien: Romulus
The Film’s Oscar Nomination Is Indisputable Proof Of Barba’s Success
Alien: Romulus was a visual treat, effectively combining practical effects and sets with convincing CGI. Seeing the work that went into the achievement and its results, it’s no surprise that the film’s visual effects were nominated for an Oscar. Barba, who is sharing the nomination with Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser, Daniel Macarin, and Shane Mahan, is facing well-deserved competition in the category. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Wicked, and Dune: Part Two have also been nominated for Best Achievement in Visual Effects.
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It’s worth noting that Barba is already an Academy Award winner, having previously won in the same category for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In addition, his work also ranges from David Fincher’s Zodiac to Terminator: Dark Fate. However, it’s clear that Alien: Romulus required extensive work and creativity to create the xenomorph, the Offspring, and the surrounding world. While it won’t be known until March 2 whether Barba wins the award, there is also a high chance that he could be a two-time Oscar winner. If so, it would be the second installment in the franchise to win the coveted award since Ridley Scott’s original 1979 movie.
Our Take On Eric Barba’s Breakdown
The VFX Team’s Efforts Added Key Elements Of The Franchise To Alien: Romulus
Early films in the Alien franchise, especially the original, were riddled with grittiness that helped distinguish the franchise from its competitors. While I view Prometheus and Alien: Covenant with high regard, the visual effects there almost felt too polished, or, in the case of the latter, the CGI was downright disappointing. Alien: Romulus brought the franchise back to its retrofuturistic basics with low-fidelity technology in its design and a pleasing balance in its execution of CGI.
Alien: Romulus
7/10
- Release Date
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August 16, 2024
- Runtime
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119 Minutes
- Director
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Fede Alvarez
- Writers
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Fede Alvarez, Rodo Sayagues, Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett