Species: The Awakening (2007)

The last of the Species films had its makeup effects handled by Joshua M. Logan's JML Film Corporation. Producer Frank Mancuso and director Nick Lyon opted to keep a similar tone to the original, which influenced the design of the film's aliens Miranda and Azura.

Logan explained in a featurette, 'The Miranda alien was very much inspired by HR Giger and Steve Johnson's Sil designs from the original film. The look we were going for was a very tall, very thin, extremely sexy, very streamlined alien. Nick's original input was that he wanted her to look like a runway model on heroin, and so that was our departure point.'

Another factor that influenced the Miranda alien's creation was the short deadline! ''We had a total of seven weeks from start to finish to build everything for the film before we began shooting. The timeline was extremely tight, and because of this schedule we actually began sculpting the alien bodysuit before we had a performer to go inside it! '

The sculpture had to double for both female aliens. It took about one week from start to finish to sculpt the suit, almost singlehandedly by Doyle Trankina. He then sculpted a crown piece to overlap the suit, and a face which would overlap the crown as a one piece prosthetic.'

'Once the sculptures were finished, the moldmaking process could begin which in the case of the bodysuit was done as a two-piece fiberglass mold due to its size. I believe the mold took two days to finish.'

A subtle difference between the two suits was the facial prosthetics, according to Logan. 'We sculpted different faces for the Miranda and Azura aliens, with the Azura alien looking far more sinister and menacing, trying to match her character.'

The Miranda facial prosthetic.

The Azura facial prosthetic.

The sculpted cowl piece.

'It took our makeup team about an hour to apply the alien suits on top of our two performers, Natalya and Veronica. The suits were painted by Mark Jurinko. The colour schemes of the two aliens were different. Miranda was a fleshy pink, and Azura was kind of a cold blue'.

Logan touched on how tough it was for the suits to wear. 'Performing inside a creature suit really isn't easy, and our girls did a spectacular job. In particular the fight sequence (...) the girls spent something like 15 hours straight inside the suits. It was just a marathon!'

(The other alien suit, seen in the last of the images below, as far as I know never appears in the film and is not touched on in the behind the scenes featurette I used as reference. Was it a suit rejected for the film, or was it loaned from another production?)

Prosthetics were applied on Helena Mattsson and Marlene Favela for the shots of their alien roles transforming. Logan recalled, 'We designed a series of prosthetics for both Marlene and Helena that we would apply over almost their entire body. It was difficult, but thankfully both ladies were extremely patient and helpful with what was an arduous task.'

A grisly prosthetic was made for Marco Bacuzzi for his role as the mutant Rinaldo. Logan explained, 'We achieved that with a puppet mouth that would strap on to Marco like a reverse backpack. Then we would use a prosthetic appliance, that would go over that and cover half of Marco's face, to give the impression that his head was ripping open.'

JML also were tasked with the alien cocoons, which were a complex effect according to Logan. 'At the same time that the suits were being fabricated, we began sculpting the alien cocoon, which was the single biggest effect we had to create for the film. The idea with the cocoon was that we wanted to see an actor inside it. We wanted to fit an actual actor inside it. So we began the sculpture by using a bodyform, as our sculpting armature.

We had to make a heavy duty steel frame for the cocoon, which wouldn't only support the weight of the cocoon which weighed about 300 pounds, but also the actor inside it.

We ended up casting the cocoon's skin out of a water-clear urethane, so that the actresses could be seen from outside the cocoons. Tom Killeen painted the cocoon's skins in three days.'

Sources:

• Special Effects Makeup of SPECIES: THE AWAKENING

Species III (2004)

Despite the critical and commercial failure of Species II, Frank Mancuso felt there was still life in the franchise yet. Mancuso stated in Fangoria how Species III was a return to form.

'The first one was definitely set up that if it was successful, we would go on. I wasn't as happy with the narrative of II. I didnt feel it accomplished everything it should have. That's nobody's fault, but this movie is back on track.'

Mancuso also welcomed that III would be a television film for the Sci Fi Channel, rather than a theatrical release. Mancuso continued in the same Fangoria interview;

'The nice thing about (going direct to video) is, you're not sitting there worried about people saying, 'Well, if it doesn't play to this quadrant (of the audience), we're in trouble', or some guy asking, 'Well, gee, what about PG-13?' It's like making an independent movie, where you just decide on the story you want and run with it, and you're not concerned about all those things you have to worry about if you're making a $30-40-million movie.'

Various Sara maquettes.

The Species III job went to Harlow FX, whose founders Joel Harlow and Rob Hinderstein had worked in Steve Johnson's XFX crew on Species I & II. Hinderstein said about the gig, 'A lot of the guys like myself and my partner Joel had worked on the other films. We knew what worked and what didn't work, and with that in mind we were able to do new things.'

Two Yosef maquettes.

HR Giger had long cut ties with Mancuso, so there was no chance he would return for Species III. Instead, the creature designing duties fell on Hinderstein. 'This is the first film we (Harlow FX) have really had carte blanche to design. I handled a lot of that myself, coming up with new looks for all of the creatures. We created three monsters on this one, not to mention all the ancillary effects, chrysalises, cocoons and babies. They wanted to depart from the original concepts, because this story takes place generations apart from the first Species'.

Harlow FX came up with three aliens; the females Sara and Amelia, and the male Yosef. The low budget presented problems for the crew as Hinderstein explained. 'We were given one suit per effect. The suit for the primary female character was the stunt suit, and also the hero suit and also the closeup suit. It was also a requirement that two separate people had to wear the same suit. A taller stuntwoman for a lot of the running scenes, and a shorter stuntwoman who was trained for all the physical effects. So one suit had to capacitate all three of these needs.'

The Sara suit.

Hinderstein explained about the design of Sara, the film's main alien. 'We wanted to go with something that was more of a departure from the first two films, but still stay within the realm of being both metallic and organic. (...) We wanted something that could be, in silhouette, just a female form. Something that looks beautiful and sleek. The design for the face and hair had to look like it was a female profile. So we designed something that kept her facial features very feminine, very small. Her body was designed around the stuntwoman, a very thin latex suit, because they wanted something that could move quickly and stealthily.'

The Sara puppet's understructure.

Each suit had a corresponding puppet made for close-up shots. According to Hinderstein, 'We built three suits and three puppets. We didn't actually use the Amelia suit in the film, as that was cut. So we had the Sara suit, and the Josef suit. We have a Josef puppet that's head and shoulders, a Sara puppet that goes down to the waist and an Amelia puppet.'

The Sara puppet.

Hinderstein recalled how the low budget affected the desiging of the three puppets as well. 'The first two movies dealt with a lot of tentacles, things shooting out and the quick fright element had been ingrained in our heads, we knew that whatever we designed to come out of her had to look like it was actually inside of her. When you design an effect like that, you usually have three or four (puppet) heads, and each head would do a separate function. We had to put all of these functions in one head, and that was the toughest thing.'

In another interview, Hinderstein explained, 'The creatures are made out of a combination of different materials. The suits are foam rubber with silicone faces, and then the aimatronic puppets are primarily silicones, urethanes and fiberglass.'

The Yosef puppet.

The Amelia puppet.

The suits were made to take quite a beating, as stunt coordinator Jim Vickers remembered. 'Rob Hinderstein, who created the suits, went out of his way to make them work for us stunt-wise. They were made so that the stunt performers could do the actual stunts in them.'

Hinderstein himself said, 'Every day we shot the suit, we would spend an hour after (shooting) to refurbish the suit as best as it could be refurbished. We only had three suits and three heads for the entire film, and those three suits and three heads had to take all of the abuse, in that month of shooting, that they could get away with. And once these suits ripped or broke, that was it. Aside from trying to patch it, you spraypaint it (the tear) black and hope the audience doesn't see it, and you keep going.'

The Yosef suit.

Naturally a Species film would have gore and body horror, and Harlow FX delivered. The shot where Natasha Henstridge's Eve gives birth to Sara was achieved via a prosthetic designed to resemble an amniotic sac. Inside the prosthetic was an alien fetus prop.

The Eve sac prosthetic.

Harlow FX also fabricated a gruesome 'human chrysalis' prop; camera trickery was used to make it seem that the prop was person-sized.

Another grisly setpiece was the demise of the hybrid Portus, portrayed by Joel Stoffer in a swollen facial prosthetic. The prosthetic was rigged with fluid tubes as he falls apart. (I do wish there was any behind the scenes images of this particular prosthetic...)

The next stage of Portus' demise was a dummy prop rigged with puppet tentacles. The same tentacles were also used for the various alien attack sequences.

A grisly dissected corpse prop was also made in the likeness of the Portus prosthetic.

Harlow FX made 'burned' prosthetic appliances for Amelia Cooke and James Leo Ryan as the aliens' human forms. Each prosthetic took three hours to be applied by two makeup artists.

A dummy head was made in Christopher Neame's likeness, for the scene where Sara stabs his pervy teacher in the head with her tentacles.

The scene where an unlucky security guard is sliced in half by Sara, was done as a favor by Hinderstein to the production crew. Hinderstein explained, 'They had an effect they wanted to do where a security guard is cut in half, but they didn't have the budget for it. The compromise was, since I had a lifecast of myself (...) I'll do the part and you get the makeup for free.

It was a full body puppet basically (...) we had puppeteers on either side that would pull the puppet apart on cue. The head had pins in it, so you could put the head back together again.'

Species III director Brad Turner was impressed with Harlow FX's work on the sequel, singling out Hinderstein for praise. 'He did a lot of things practically, that we were planning on doing CG (...) All of these things, we didn't know how well they were going to work on set, and we always had a back-up plan that we could CG anything we needed to, but a lot of the stuff was working, Rob was batting it out of the park.'

Hinderstein looked back on how working on a lower budget was a challenge. 'When you have a modest budget like we did on this show, you have to creatively figure your way out of a lot of effects that you just can't do. Effects that you want to give the producer and director, because they could be interesting effects, but they don't have the money for it.

I have to really give my crew the credit where credit is due, because we worked really long hours and lot of these guys came in and did the work, because they wanted to do it, knowing full well that they weren't going to make their rates, but that this was going to be a fun job and we were getting to do a lot of creative things, and it was part of a franchise.'

Hinderstein was ultimately thankful for the gig. 'It was a really positive atmosphere because Frank, (producer) David Dwiggins and Turner gave us carte blanche to create, and knew that we could solve a lot of problems with the budget. (...) They kind of let us just go forward and create, and that's what we did. It was a good experience, just being able to do that.'

Sources:

• Fangoria #238 'The Alien Offspring' by Abbie Bernstein
• Assorted bluray featurettes