Animating the Xenomorph in Alien: Isolation.

Key Takeaways

For the alien like, I I mean, Simon's amazing in what he did was just crazy. It it was awesome to work with him on this stuff as well because I think we both just felt like we kind of got it and the stuff he was creating was ace. The kind of opportunity I had to just, you know, muck around with kind of crazy tech to get it in there. But like Simon was the alien basically. To me, it still is, right? A bunch of us there, we used to go skateboarding at lunch, and I used to sit with the rest of the AI gameplay guys and and the animators. You come in, you go to the back, you go down a stairwell, and there's a shower down there, right? And so so often I would turn up and go down that stairwell [laughter] for the shower and Simon would be down there just walking around. Like, I remember the first time I was like What? What's going on, man? You kind of like, have you have you lost your mind? And he was he was acting out. So a lot of that's that I mean, I think that's pretty much hand-keyed all the way through, but but Simon had meticulously acted it out. That that is wild. I mean, hopefully we can get Simon in to corroborate that. >> Several months later >> I need to ask Simon this. Can you corroborate the story that Tobias told me? I used to go down there with the the reference camera and just film out things. Uh, and this was not me sort of like, you know, method acting the alien. It was more I mean, it's not uncommon for an animator to to act out animations, but yeah, I guess to corroborate his yeah, his story without I mean, without getting uh, sort of like more advanced over the years. But no, it was just purely to um, I guess act out the timing and the beats because I was um, always trying to reference back to what I felt made it made it feel the way it did in the film. And then looking at the reference points was was the eeriness and the oddness of it. And then trying to make sure that was in the animations. A lot of that was to do with the pacing and the little kind of movements. And so yeah, I would act things out just to try and um, put the beats into the animation because of the animation was was all key framed. So it's all from scratch.