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