I visited the new “Alien” set — here’s what to expect from the TV series

The blood trail led out of the room and into the hallway With half trepidation half glee I tiptoed over the wide red smear following it to its source a crime scene in space I d arrived on the set of Alien Earth In April I joined a group of international journalists in Thailand for a sneak peek of Noah Hawley s TV series set in the world of Alien While the Fargo creator had already had success in taking a film and building it out for episodic storytelling tackling such a beloved sci-fi franchise for this rehabilitation still felt like a huge danger After all here be xenomorphs and a devoted fandom It remains to be seen which would be more vicious You can see that a chestbursters came out Set in Alien Earth examines what happens when the USCSS Maginot spacecraft crash-lands onto our planet Clearly particular mishap befell this crew which was foolish enough to sign up for a Weyland-Yutani mission in the first place Going to sleep in the cryochamber with its pods radiating outward like the petals of a suspended animation daisy was their second mistake In Ridley Scott s film Alien the crew of the Nostromo rouses from slumber to answer a distress call that spells their doom The James Cameron-directed sequel brings Sigourney Weaver s Ripley out of stasis after years to face off with the critters once again This setting was where my fellow reporters and I discovered ourselves tittering and peering into the various cubicles afraid of what we might find The entire cryochamber was surprisingly spacious the better to lull you into a false sense of prevention about your means of escape It s three times the size of the Nostromo s production designer Jason Knox-Johnston explained us This is post-crash obviously otherwise it s bad housekeeping And we ve basically got the crew here and they ve died in horrendously gruesome approaches We ve got one here You can see that a chestburster came out he jumped out and ran out sort of similar things to the original film Related All the Alien movies ranked from worst to best A sparse of the glass doors of the sleep capsules had been shattered and dark blood stains stood out starkly against the white beds and walls One poor crewman s pod looked as if Sweeney Todd had not yet cleaned up his workspace This artful carnage felt even more disturbing because of its familiar trappings standing on the Maginot set looked and felt as if we were aboard the Nostromo The series takes place approximately two years before the original film s events and therefore heavily draws from that aesthetic for the Maginot FX The art and science of applying fake blood in the Maginot cryochamber set for Alien Earth Hawley pointed out None of us have ever been in space I think what Ridley managed to do in that first film was to create a workplace that we could identify with because it might as well have been a factory for all that we knew on the inside So that made it recognizable and very different than the Star Trek Apple store aesthetic or even the Star Wars ripping yarn adventure tale It felt real Everything was dripping It was rusty It just felt real to us here on Earth The series American and local Thai crew worked together to go through Alien frame by frame to recreate that specific retro-futuristic look for the Maginot complete with tactile hulls and cathode-ray tube screens It is heavily aged it s worn disclosed Knox-Johnston It s that aesthetic which they pioneered really between Star Wars and Alien They pioneered that beaten-up sci-fi look And interestingly enough Roger Christian was the set decorator of Star Wars He was then hired by Ridley because I think Ridley announced I want the Millennium Falcon look for Nostromo So they hired him which is why there s a similar detailing going on in Star Wars aesthetically and this one Eventually the crew was able to get their hands the original concept art for the Nostromo through Marjorie Chodorov at Scott Free who sourced the -year-old drawings from Disney But by the time we got those the only set we had left to build was the mess hall that you walked into which was part of the zoo lab reported production designer Andy Nicholson But the rest of it was all made from studiously looking at the original film frame by frame FX Light filters through the pallets used on the walls of the Maginot on the set of Alien Earth While the cryochamber mess hall and winding hallways mirrored the white colors we associate with Alien the cargo bay and other darker areas posed a unique challenge to recreate The shipping pallets were the key to everything One of the bulk demanding things about studying Alien as a movie was that no digital pictures were taken noted Nicholson The set pictures are very limited online everywhere even on enthusiasts pages The film s so dark trying to figure out what stuff took a long time I started doing research into really nerdy stuff and the perforated walls you see in the dark corridors are shipping pallets While these pallets had been used on other films before such as on Star Wars for flooring the use of them for the walls created a different feel in Alien Unfortunately largest part of the pallets from the s had been sold off which led the production to make their own The shipping pallets were the key to everything because once you figured out you see them everywhere Nicholson added We had to recreate all of that stuff but it made such a difference to the texture of the show Huge respect for the design choices that they made on that just by doing something that you re able to backlight like that Earth and the question of humanity FX s Alien Earth Pictured l-r Jonathan Ajayi as Smee Adarsh Gourav as Slightly Sydney Chandler as Wendy Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh Kit Young as Tootles Erana James as Curly Lily Newmark as Nibs CR FX Removing space from the Alien equation meant that Hawley had to envision what Earth looked like and apparently part of it looked like Thailand Who knew that by eating at the Bangkok night markets and whizzing through traffic on the back of scooters on this trip I was already living in the future And even though Ridley Scott directed both the futuristic Alien and Blade Runner that latter which drew on a Japanese imagery for its cyberpunk world Hawley didn t want his show to be compared to the latter despite both having Asian countries that influenced the backdrops I have declared more than once to my design crew If we re making Blade Runner we re making the wrong Ridley Scott movie ' he announced You re never on Earth in any of the Alien movies and so it s left to me to figure out what Earth would be like I certainly think if it s the Earth of our future it s going to be a hotter wetter place It s part of the reason that we re in Bangkok right now Blade Runner as a rain-soaked context I chose not to do that per se but there is selected overlap If the Xenomorphs didn t get us the temperature and humidity surely would Before our arrival we were given careful instructions to pack light clothing heavy sunscreen and lots of electrolytes lest we liability heat stroke or dehydration Our group embarked on the set visits early in the morning in order to be finished before the worst of the day s heat The humidity even worked itself into the storytelling In this particular future this part of the world is very much much hotter and much much wetter noted Knox-Johnston So the architecture suffers from mold and damp and it s a constant battle to fight that So that s why we have you ll see down in here we have these little fittings everywhere and we have the hulking guys that scrape mold off the walls It s a constant battle to try and fight this encroaching damage If we re making Blade Runner we re making the wrong Ridley Scott movie In this future five major corporations govern the planet and this means that Weyland-Yutani has competition Besides Dynamic Lynch and Threshold the young and wealthy genius known as Boy Kavalier Samuel Blenkin runs Prodigy out of Prodigy City in the region of New Siam Siam was the name of Thailand before Hawley stated that the idea of a corporatocracy was invariably baked into the franchise I don t think that in the s and the s they could have envisioned the Elon Musks of the world at that point he explained But we re in a different era and I felt like in order to make it feel contemporary we needed to address that idea that this whole thing is sort of the whim of this prodigy and that what you get in a corporation is a diffused decision system where nobody indeed decides It s nobody s fault and therefore it doesn t have to be a human decision I think what we ve reached now is something worse in a way Since the beginning the Alien franchise has probed the bounds of what we considered humanity With the TV series we see three procedures that these corporations have offered answers to the race for immortality We are already familiar with cyborgs and the use of artificial intelligence androids or synths which we ve seen time and time again in each movie In this series Timothy Olyphant plays a synth named Kirsh who sports a shock of white hair I sought to make it up to Tim for casting him as a U S Marshal in Fargo the same way that everyone else has cast him so I decided to make him a utterly different character declared Hawley Boy Kavalier however pioneers a new type of being a hybrid created from a human consciousness transplanted into a synthetic body We see this with the young girl Wendy who s been transferred into the body of a synthetic adult woman Sydney Chandler with superhuman abilities Check out her introduction in the trailer below Wendy is the first of Prodigy s hybrids all children who are thrust into manufactured adulthood They re being raised and studied on Neverland Research Island a name that doesn t give off creepy Dr Moreau vibes at all Beyond that of subject are the references to J M Barrie s Peter Pan which interrogates the idea of holding onto youthful innocence Wendy s fellow hybrids are named after plenty of of the Lost Boys Peter Pan s friends not the s film about delinquent vampires Fortunately the animated film adaptation of Peter Pan happens to comes from Disney which also owns FX It s just the evolution of a creative idea this conflict between biology and the synthetic which is what humanity is trapped between and does humanity deserve to survive mentioned Hawley Then there s the thought Well who s more human than a child They don t know how to pretend they re not scared They re bad liars Then you think James Cameron s movie has a literal child in it but she s so much more mature than Bill Paxton who s like a child in an adult s body ' FX Production designer Jason Knox-Johnston in the hybrid dorm room on the set of Alien Earth Despite Newt the introduction of children as regular characters feels almost audacious for this horror franchise And even though I will have seen a range of fake gore and alien creatures on this three-day set visit I revealed stepping into the hybrid dorm rooms was the most of unsettling experience overall Contrasted with the concrete walls are a single bed plushies Is that a squishmallow and simple arts and crafts projects a child than someone who can easily jump off a cliff unscathed This is our standard room for our hybrids announced Knox-Johnston The first thing you ll notice is there s a lot of childlike dressing in here because obviously they re just children in adult bodies Then also you ll notice the strange pillow which is a charging pillow when they rest on the bed they re recharging their powerbanks The making of the monsters FX Lead prosthetics supervisor Steve Painter shows off one unfortunate Alien Earth victim By the third day of the Bangkok set visit we d seen our fill of spaceships consoles props costumes and wigs But where was our Xenomorph Where were the literal aliens To ease us into that promised main event we first swung by the prosthetics department where we learned the secrets to fake blood and gazed upon a number of body parts Steve Painter the lead prosthetics supervisor designer was the the majority chipper cheerful person we had met all week Welcome to the Gory Boys This is where everyone dies Basically we kill everyone in this series enthused Painter Specific of it as you can see is pretty gory horrific deaths Specific caused by the Xeno various by other creatures specific by humans who are the real animals Having worked on Saving Private Ryan and a number of other war films this was a man who didn t shy away from gore and loved his job With very little context Painter launched into a story about his morning I walked on set and we have a corpse on set that s I m not going to give too much of the plot away but the body is bashed over a console and across the bridge by a Xeno he mentioned Within seconds he s in two halves one half s over there this half s here So we took on the bucket of giblets the blood the guts and we just created it there and then We left him to his gruesome toys and later located our way to the Second Skin Thailand s local creature effects company As the Alien Earth trailer revealed five specimens were picked up by the Maginot which Knox-Johnston compared to Charles Darwin s Beagle expedition Although the Xenomorph and its facehugger form were already familiar to viewers the trailer also revealed two more the creatures referred to as the Orchid and the Eye Midges which has strong tentacles Although I was able to see these new aliens which were crafted using practical effects alas details about those creatures will have to remain under wraps for now to be revealed after the series premieres Knox-Johnston substantiated that these are just particular of the creatures we would find on the set of the zoo lab which is a new addition to the Maginot that was not part of the Nostromo FX The Maginot zoo lab where specimens are kept on the set of Alien Earth This is the zoo lab This would be the botanist s room on the Beagle he declared Basically this is where they store the organic samples they ve reclaimed on their trip And they bring them in specifically to these containers here to the secure containers And they ll bring them out and this is where they do the autopsies the examinations Saving the best for last we ended the set visit getting up close and personal with certain Xenomorphs and its younger form the Facehugger Using animatronics and other tools a large number of of these practical critters moved and appeared to even breathe causing more than a sparse of us to scream in surprise As with the Orchids and Eye Midges photos for this portion of the set visit will be held until after the series premieres Not having ever met a Xenomorph before I was not entirely certain how these new ones were different from what came before Hawley claimed that even though he honored the original design he still needed to innovate a little for this series In the design phase with W t Workshop I didn t want to mess with the silhouette of the creature at all he mentioned I felt like the audience wants that classic but then within that I felt like I requested to experiment with a couple of ideas about the creature In procedures I invariably felt like it was the least effective when it looked like a guy in a suit In the classic there s just this big ribcage which feels very human to me so I requested to try to minimize that and play around with particular other ideas That was a very fun process to work on with W t And then what color is it he continued musing It s very black in the movie I needed to play into more of the bug-like quality of it so maybe it falls a little more in the roach coloration Those ideas You can get in trouble for keeping it the same and you can get in trouble for changing it so I figure I ll just be in trouble for whatever As a former Houstonian I can attest that the only thing more detestable than a roach is a flying roach I only bring this up because director cinematographer Dana Gonzales revealed the lengths to which the squad went to make the Xenomorph even more frightening I think we designed something that is very photographable and scary and detailed he stated I don t know if various of the older movies had selected of the stunt techniques that we have now the wire work and the fact that we can kind of fly the Xeno around and stuff like that So it s not so much just coming out and scaring you and having that kind of jump scare It s literally flying through the air It s chasing Ridley Scott s chestbursters scurried so that Noah Hawley s Xenomorphs could fly Perhaps it s best I didn t get to see that on set If I had I would be deceased and writing this dispatch from the other side Check back for more of Salon s reporting from the Alien Earth set FX s Alien Earth will premiere on Tuesday Aug with the first two episodes available to stream on Hulu at p m ET and on the FX linear channel at p m ET PT and on Disney internationally Read more about the Alien franchise 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