The wide variety of practical facehuggers made by Wt Workshop for Alien: Romulus. An excerpt from befores & afters magazine in print.The central poster for Alien: Romulus features one of the human characters being dramatically hugged by a facehugger, the film franchises parasitoid, multi-limbed alien creature.It certainly gave a clue as to what audiences could expect in the Fede lvarez movie. What the audience would eventually see was a whole host of facehuggers menacing visitors to the abandoned Weyland-Yutani research station, the Renaissance.The on-set facehuggersof which there were several in variety, including ones that scamper along floors and walls, and others that could enter a human host via its mouth and a long proboscis and even ones that were remote-controlled carswere realized by Wt Workshop for the film, under creative lead Richard Taylor.Wt Workshop also built the F44AA pulse rifle used by Rain (Cailee Spaeny) in the film. Here, Rob Gillies, general manager of manufacture, and Cameron May, a supervisor of robotics and animatronics, explore with befores & afters how Wt Workshop brought the practical facehuggers to life, and manufactured the pulse rifle.issue #22 Alien: RomulusThe facehugger buildDrawing upon concept designs for the facehuggers established by production, Wt Workshop set about a build methodology for the many varieties needed for the film. What was apparent on Romulus was that the facehuggers are all through it, declares Gillies. We ended up delivering 73 facehuggers to the show, which is an incredible number. They ranged from animatronic facehuggers to what we call comfort huggers that youd wear on your face with breathing mechanisms, to static prop facehuggers. There were all these different variations and iterations that were called out in the script that we then developed a build list of. From there we could design and build these creatures specifically to the needs of the show. A lot of these breakdowns of the specific gags and builds were masterminded by Joe Dunckley, one of our manufacturing art directors.The build would be driven primarily around both practical and aesthetic considerations, as May points out. We paid specific attention, for example, around what the knuckle joints look like. How were they going to be big enough so that we could actually practically make these things work? How is the skin going to interact with the mechanisms underneath? We were actively thinking about those things and as we were trying to refine the design aesthetic around it, we were trying to already formulate a plan for how we were going to build these things and turn them into practical puppets so we didnt back ourselves into a corner.3D printing and the generation of mass molds for large-scale casting reproductions allowed Wt Workshop to produce so many of the critters. To get the product out wasnt the heart of the challenge, notes Gillies. For us, it was ensuring that the facehuggers actually looked lifelike and could actually wrap around someones head or breathe with the performers body. That was actually the true tricky part.To ensure that occurred, it was vital for Wt Workshop to break down the specific gags that the facehuggers would be required to perform. We visually broke those and mapped those down, outlines May. We said, Right, thats going to have a movable joint over here and this is going to have this type of control. And were going to have rods that are going to go on here. Or, this is going to have this type of digital mold that were going to use to create a silicone cast from. Even though theres such a complex array of them, we were able to break those things down so we had a nice structure in terms of how we were going to approach them. That ended up working really well.In general, the facehuggers were crafted with an aluminum interior armature, 3D printed nylon joints and silicone skinwith different additional materials used depending on whether the creatures were animatronic or more static. Even though the facehuggers movements are quite different, a lot of their end joints were identical just to keep a design language that was quite consistent amongst them, says May.Go much further in-depth on the facehuggers in the print magazine article.The post Why dont we just put a facehugger on top of a radio-controlled car and drive it around? appeared first on befores & afters.