It was interesting to work with an actor's director. 'Jon is extremely sensitive to performance, so they concentrated heavily on behavior. 'We used the Legacy design as a foundation and then Christian Alzmann and others developed it.
'We created an uber alien in evolutionary scale to make it more complicated in hierarchy,' says ILM visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett, who also oversaw onset vfx production.
While Legacy did the overall design of the alien, which is a bipedal reptilian-like creature nearly 10-feet-tall, in collaboration with production designer Scott Chambliss, ILM not only made the CG version but also created a more advanced version of the species. Speaking of aliens, ILM had quite the challenge in devising something new for this intriguing mash-up of the western and sci-fi directed by Jon Favreau ( Iron Man) and co-starring James Bond (Daniel Craig) and Indy Jones (Harrison Ford). But, like all large VFX studios, they're continually reaping the benefits of the proprietary technology: namely, energy conservation shaders and lighting models for greater photorealism, as well as the GPU-rendered Plume for large-scale explosions along with dust and dirt during interaction with the aliens. Check out the Cowboys & Aliens trailers at AWNtv!Īs usual, it's been a very busy summer for ILM, with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Super 8, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and now Cowboys & Aliens.
