I wanted to know what was in there
Scroll, or use ↓ → Space. N for notes, F for full screen.
Opening
The derelict in the storm. As a kid my question wasn't "what is the monster?", it was "what is inside that ship, and who made it?"
This deck is the answer I've been assembling since: the painters, sculptors, model makers, set dressers and the director who put them together.
How did anyone make this?
Alien, 1979. Directed by Ridley Scott.
Five sets, all built by hand at Shepperton Studios.
The question
Five worlds, all physical: the jockey chamber, the egg chamber, the Nostromo's decks, the planetoid surface and the derelict. Nothing here is a digital effect. We'll take them apart one by one.
Two worlds, two design languages
Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, Moebius, John Mollo. Function first. Industrial, worn, lit by screens.
H. R. Giger. Biomechanical. Bone, resin, tubes: something grown rather than built.
Two design languages
Cobb and Foss handled the human side (the Nostromo and its equipment); Giger owned everything alien. The two teams were reportedly kept apart so neither vocabulary would bleed into the other.
The film's tension is partly a design collision: an oily, practical truck gets invaded by something that looks organic and ancient.
Alien Anthology Wiki; Screen Rant; Cinemore.
You could walk from the bridge to the mess
Production designer Michael Seymour built the ship as connected sets across three stages at Shepperton, so actors, and the audience, felt trapped inside one real vessel.
A real place
Seymour wanted it to read as science fact, "well used, lived in and slightly battered". The bridge alone had around forty screens, fed from a video centre built out of old aircraft, cars, radios and TVs.
American Cinematographer described an intersecting lobby with two large perspex-fronted wardrobe cases holding spare suits and helmets, which is what this photo shows. I'm not certain whether it's the 1978 set or a later recreation, so I've left the date off.
AFI Catalog; American Cinematographer; Space.com (Roger Christian).
for half an aeroplane
Scrap sold by weight, and aircraft are light. His team bought it up around England, broke it down and fitted every piece as if it had a function. Then everything was painted army green and aged with oil, drips and small graphic symbols.
- CorridorsSections of scrapped bomber aircraft
- Below decksA mirror to make corridors look longer
- Working propsMoving chairs, monitors, motion trackers, flamethrowers (Brian Johnson, Nick Allder)
Dressing with purpose
Christian had developed the scrap-dressing technique on Star Wars. His point was that it can't be random: in a real aircraft or submarine, everything is in order and has a job, so he trained the prop crew to place it that way.
Scott said Christian's "cladding" made everything look absolutely real.
Xenopedia, Roger Christian; Strange Shapes; Ridley Scott Wiki.
Signage for a ship that never flew
Cobb drew a full pictogram system for the Nostromo: colour-coded by category, built on a grid, readable at a glance. Designers still point to it as an ancestor of app icons and emoji.
A system, not a set of pictures
Cobb's full title for it: the Semiotic Standard for All Commercial Trans-Stellar Utility Lifter and Heavy Element Transport Spacecraft. The sheet codes each category by colour, with a key along the bottom: red, white, grey, black, yellow, blue and green.
The icons appear throughout the sets, including on Ripley's keyboard. The Iconfactory compared them to iOS 7's system icons; Typeset in the Future catalogued them in detail. His originals are collected in his book Colorvision.
The Iconfactory; Typeset in the Future; Inverse.
Real computer graphics, in 1979
- StudioSystem Simulation Ltd, Russell Square, London
- TeamGeorge Mallen, Colin Emmett and Brian Wyvill
- RenderingAn FR80 vector film plotter at the Atlas Computer Laboratory, near Didcot
- On setAbout forty monitors on the bridge, fed from one video centre
The team
System Simulation (Syssim) was one of Britain's pioneering computer animation studios. John Lansdown, who ran the Computer Arts Society from Syssim's Russell Square offices, was part of its story; George Mallen ran the Alien job.
This is the real Deorbital Descent screen, the one the crew watch as the Nostromo drops towards the planetoid.
Brian Wyvill, "My Work on the Film Alien"; Wikipedia, System Simulation and Atlas Computer Laboratory; American Cinematographer, Aug 1979.
The screens that set the standard
In 1979 computer graphics in films were a few years old and rare. Many screens were still hand-drawn animation or backlit slides. Alien's were real computer output, plotted frame by frame and played on the set.
Since then its vocabulary has been copied everywhere: vector lines on black, boxed data rails, capital-letter labels, one phosphor colour. The look even has a name now, cassette futurism.
first digital image processing in a feature
early 3D computer images
wireframe Death Star briefing
a whole ship of working screens
dropship display echoes the twisting-rectangle path
rebuilds the 1979 look on purpose
return to the same analogue screens
Why they mattered
Before Alien, computer imagery in features was a handful of moments: Westworld's pixelated robot's-eye view, Futureworld's 3D hand and face, Star Wars' short wireframe trench briefing. Alien filled a whole set with working graphics, from System Simulation's vector plots to the Atlas lab's raster wireframe landing terrain, in a film that won the Oscar for Visual Effects.
Sci-fi Interfaces points out that the flight-path display in Aliens (1986) bears an uncanny resemblance to Ash's dropship interface here. Alien: Isolation built its whole game around the 1970s vision of the future, and Romulus and Alien: Earth went back to the same grimy analogue tech rather than the sleek look of the prequels.
"Set the standard" is my framing: what's documented is how often later work goes back to it.
Wikipedia, Atlas Computer Laboratory; Sci-fi Interfaces; TV Tropes, Cassette Futurism; HUDS+GUIS on Alien: Romulus.
Mother speaks in text
Navigation got vector graphics. The ship's computer got words: blocks of green type scrolling past as the crew log in and ask questions.
- The roomMother has her own space: the computer annex on A deck
- The keyboardKeys carry Cobb's Semiotic Standard symbols
- A typoIn Dallas's login sequence, "alignment" flashes past with a double L
My homage to the text interface. The lines are my own.
The real screens waking up, reflected in a helmet: the film's first look at its interface.
Two interface languages
The film splits its UI in two: pictures for piloting, text for the computer. Mother never has a face or a voice until the end; she's all type on a screen, which is part of why she feels cold.
American Cinematographer, Aug 1979; Inverse; IMDb trivia; Wikipedia, MU / TH / UR.
Even the explorers belonged to this world
- MoebiusSpacesuit concepts
- John MolloCostume design
The suits were so heavy and airless under 100°F studio lights that actors passed out. Oxygen was kept on standby.
Costume
Moebius (Jean Giraud) was one of the first two concept artists hired, with Chris Foss. John Hurt, Tom Skerritt and Veronica Cartwright wore the bulkiest suits.
Dark Visions (littlegiger.com).
H. R. Giger's imagination
Dan O'Bannon put Giger's book in front of Scott. On one page, the creature already existed.
Necronom IV, 1976
The starting point
O'Bannon had met Giger on Jodorowsky's abandoned Dune and remembered him. Scott travelled to Zurich to meet Giger in February 1978.
Wikipedia, Xenomorph; AvP Galaxy.
“One brain on all the Alien stuff.”
Ridley Scott
Giger proved so reliable that Scott handed him the landscape too. He designed the planet, the derelict inside and out, the Space Jockey, the egg chamber and every stage of the creature.
One author for the alien
Scott's instinct was to keep a single sensibility across everything alien, so the planet, ship, pilot and creature all feel like parts of the same biology. Giger then worked at Shepperton with his own hands, often in a boiler-room workshop.
Empire, oral history; AvP Galaxy; Alien Explorations.
The Derelict
A crashed alien ship, found on the planetoid the sequels call LV-426. The film never names it: the crew just call it the derelict.
The miniature: polystyrene, netting, plasticine
- ShapeAbout 12 ft wide in polystyrene, on a steel frame
- SkinNetting, then plasticine, fitted with cables and technical parts
- DetailingPeter Voysey, straight from Giger's plasticine models
Naming the craft
In the 1979 film the ship is only ever "the derelict". Later films and expanded lore link it to the Engineers' ships, sometimes called Juggernauts.
Giger takes over
Giger felt the first builders didn't understand his architecture. He told them to get bones and work in plasticine, and ended up doing much of it himself. In stills there's far more detail on the derelict than you can see on screen.
Alien Explorations, "The Derelict during construction"; AvP Galaxy, Giger's Alien Diaries.
A bone mountain
- EntranceTimber frames, styrofoam ovals fixed with jute soaked in plaster
- SurfaceCork chips in the plaster to look storm-corroded
- LandscapeBones and tubes. Giger climbed it himself to set them organically
- SculptorsPeter Voysey and Brian Muir, on Giger's designs
In the GIF: Dallas, Kane and Lambert walking to the derelict.
Building the planetoid
The custom styrofoam tubes first came out with ribs far too big; Giger had to climb over the "bone mountain" inserting them by hand. Brian Muir, who had sculpted Darth Vader's helmet, joined Peter Voysey on the derelict entrances. Sand, fibreglass and rocks were shipped in for the ground, and a 45-foot Nostromo landing leg was built on the set for scale.
Alien Explorations, "Derelict entrance"; Screen Rant; Dark Visions; Alien Anthology Wiki.
Fox said no. Scott built one wall.
A huge set for a single scene was too expensive. Scott refused to cut it. One wall was built, Giger airbrushed it by hand, and the pilot sat on a turntable so it could turn between shots.
Approximate, to scale
The pilot
Giger and Voysey first modelled the pilot in plasticine at 1/25 scale, in a hut in the Shepperton car park, on 25 July 1978. Scott wanted it fused into its chair at the centre of the chamber's curve.
Ron Cobb argued for keeping it, calling it the film's "Cecil B. DeMille shot": the moment that stops it looking like a B-movie.
Alien Explorations; Screen Rant; Coyote PR; All The Right Movies.
An egg, designed twice
Giger's first egg was so anatomical the room burst out laughing. Art director Les Dilley suggested it open like a flower, so Giger doubled the slit to four lobes.
Seen from above: a cross.
The redesign
Producers worried Catholic countries might ban the film if the allusion was too strong. Giger's own joke was that from above the four lobes form the cross "people in Catholic countries are so fond of looking at". Others read it as a heart valve.
Giger called the eggs "organic footballs".
Wikipedia, Xenomorph; AvP Galaxy; SlashFilm; Alien Explorations.
Bill of materials
- ShellsPlaster, more than a hundred cast for the chamber
- Hero eggFibreglass, so a torch could show movement inside
- LidRubber, opened by hydraulics
- LiningCaul fat, a cow's stomach lining called "Nottingham lace", steam-cleaned from the abattoir
- MovementRidley Scott's hands in rubber washing-up gloves
- The strikeA sheep's intestine on an air line
Scott inside the egg
The close-up of Kane at the egg was shot later. Scott himself provided the movement you see through the shell, and rigged the facehugger's strike by putting an intestine on an air line; he said it came out like a whip.
Counts vary: some sources say 100 eggs were made, others 130, with only a few carrying the extra detail.
Empire, oral history; Wikipedia, Xenomorph; AvP Galaxy; Weyland-Yutani Wiki; Collider.
The set became something unknowable
Derek Vanlint, cinematography. Ray Evans, gaffer. Ridley Scott, direction.
- The mistA laser, famously borrowed from The Who, rehearsing at Shepperton
- The roomThe derelict's orrery set, redressed
- The floorGiger's clay "carpet" of snaky folds, latex frothed over plaster
Light as set design
Smoke, backlight and a single sheet of blue light turned a redressed set into a place you can't map. For me this is where cinematography becomes part of the set design.
Weyland-Yutani Wiki; Alien Explorations (Giger's Alien, p48).
Each stage needed its own maker
Giger designed the whole life cycle. Roger Dicken built the facehugger and the chestburster.
The facehugger
Giger's early facehugger designs were abandoned on his workbench in the Shepperton boiler room before the final version was built.
Alien Explorations, "Giger's work studio".
1 take
Once it burst, the white set would take about two weeks to clean. The cast weren't told exactly what would happen.
The chestburster
Giger's first chestburster looked, Scott recalled, like a turkey on his arm. Roger Dicken built the final creature from his designs; Francis Bacon's 1944 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was a reference. Hurt sat in a deckchair under a false torso with only his head and arms through.
Empire; NME / Hollywood Reporter; Weyland-Yutani Wiki.
Bolaji Badejo
The Alien. His one screen role.
He rehearsed in the Nostromo corridors in a mock-up head, working out a movement that was graceful as well as vicious.
The performer
Giger sculpted the final adult form in plasticine. Badejo's slow, deliberate movement is what makes the suit read as a living thing.
Bloody Disgusting (Cinefantastique); Screen Rant.
About four minutes
Jaw, inner mouth, cables, hundreds of moving parts. And the creature is on screen for roughly four minutes. Scott built something extraordinary, then kept it in the dark.
Restraint
Rambaldi adapted Giger's design to take the mechanisms for the jaw and inner mouth; one source puts the head at around 900 moving parts. Scott deliberately never shows the creature in full until the end.
Weyland-Yutani Wiki; Interesting Engineering; Coyote PR; Screen Rant.
Made by a lot of people.
Seen first by one.
James Stride. Film stills, GIFs and artwork remain the property of their rights holders.
Close
End on the creature, in the dark, the way Scott would.
Selected craft credits: Ridley Scott, Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett, H. R. Giger, Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, Moebius, Michael Seymour, Les Dilley, Roger Christian, Ian Whittaker, Bill Welch, Peter Voysey, Brian Muir, Carlo Rambaldi, Roger Dicken, Bolaji Badejo, John Mollo, Derek Vanlint, Ray Evans, Brian Johnson, Nick Allder, Martin Bower, Terry Rawlings, Peter Weatherley, Jerry Goldsmith.