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How the ‘Alien: Romulus’ VFX Team United Old and New Technology to Bring Ian Holm’s Android to Life
'Alien: Romulus''s Oscar-nominated visual effects team explains how they merged old and new technology to bring Ian Holm's android to life.
In addition to a $350 million (and counting) worldwide box office haul to mark the success of the movie, Álvarez’ collaborators Eric Barba, Nelson Sepulveda-Fauser, Daniel Macarin and Shane Mahan received a collective Academy Award nomination for best visual effects. To begin the process of synergizing decades of institutional knowledge about the franchise, fellow visual effects supervisor Macarin says he merely had to visit a colleague’s office to find someone with firsthand experience creating alien xenomorphs. Ultimately, however, Sepulveda-Fauser says that it wasn’t the series’ namesake creature that best tested the film’s army of technicians, artists and supervisors rather it quite appropriately was Rook, the re-animated science officer designed to look like, and pay tribute to, Ian Holm’s duplicitous android in the original “Alien.” “To replicate a real person but mix it in with a real robotic character on set so that it feels like it’s really sitting there, we had to bring all the latest facial capture technology, and beyond that, the AI work that [visual effects studio] Metaphysic did in the end,” Sepulveda-Fauser says.
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