Legacy Effects and Metaphysic combined to make the character. Excerpts from befores & afters magazine in print.At one point in Fede Alvarezs 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 Ashs head off with a fire extinguisher. They certainly made something, but it doesnt 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. View this post on InstagramA post shared by Amy Byron (@shmamy_b)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.Its pretty satisfying to bring back that character, reflects Mahan. It wasnt easy. I think its a very admirable attempt to resurrect somebody whos no longer with us to be in a movie again. I mean, if you wouldve 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 wouldnt have believed it. Its very cool.The VFX side of RookFede said to me, It needs to start as a puppet, shares VFX supervisor Eric Barba. He said, Its a broken android, so it didnt have to be perfect. It had gone through some hell, half its bodys missing, part of its face is going to be missing, but were going to have to augment it probably if we dont get it right in camera.issue #22 Alien: RomulusI 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 Id moved away from doing that because its excruciating. I used to joke with people that I had property in the Uncanny Valley, and its really difficult to get rid of. No one wants to live there, and when you finally move out of there, you really dont want to go back. And so I said, Look, were going to make the best puppet we possibly can. Well put a headcam on our actor that well cast, well get his performance and well get the audio from that performance. On the day, well play that back for the cast so thats what theyre reacting to. But it just means you have to have all those things done ahead of time and be happy with those choices. Its easier said than done but thats 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 puppets 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 lets 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 directors cut. We had something there other than the puppet. And I cant 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 shotsknowing that budget and timeline were criticalBarba 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, lets do a test and show Fede. And thats what we did, and thats what led us to using Metaphysic, which really helped us solve a lot of problems.They have amazing AI tools that you cant 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 wasnt 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. Fedes 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, weve 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 wasnone other than the director, Alvarez. (Its worth looking back at Alvarezs 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.Go further into Alien: Romulus in the print magazine.The post The making of Rook in Alien: Romulus appeared first on befores & afters.