Antarctica Facehugger (Alien vs Predator)

The Facehugger appeared in the 2004 film Alien vs Predator, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. The Facehuggers attack members of the security team in the Sacrificial Chamber and later the cocooned members in the hive.

Characteristics

The Facehuggers in Antarctica are very similar to previous creatures.  They are beige in colour consisting of an abdomen, long digits to wrap around their victim and a tail allowing it to leap over large distances. They can subdue their victims by inserting a long retractable tube down their victims’ throats. Like all other stages of the Alien life cycle, the Facehugger possesses acidic blood.

Story

For hundreds of years, Predators have been using Antarctica as a hunting ground for young Predators to prove their worth. In 2004, the Predators burned a hole in the ice to an underground pyramid which caught the attention of Peter Weyland. He organises an expedition to investigate it. As they explore the pyramid, a chained Queen is forced to lay eggs. The eggs are transported to the Sacrificial Chamber and as the pyramid moves, some of the team are trapped. The eggs unleash the Facehuggers.

During this time, the Xenomorphs emerge and create a hive. Some members of the team are killed while others are dragged back to the hive which now contains numerous eggs. Later, the Scar Predator leaves his self-destruct device in the hive as he and Lex escape. The subsequent blast destroys all the Xenomorphs and Alien eggs.

Behind-The-Scenes

Amalgamated Dynamics, led by Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff, was hired to do the creature effects and John Bruno handled the visual effects.

A.D.I. knew from reading the script, the film would require the use of lots of floppy stunt Facehuggers and hand-puppeted Facehuggers. They also wanted to improve on the style of the mechanical creatures we saw in previous films. For the ‘hero’ Facehugger, A.D.I. built a combination cable and a radio-controlled mechanism. The body of the Facehugger was too small to fit motors in so they built an external motor pack that actuated the cables running to the mechanism inside the puppet’s body. This allowed the puppeteers to have careful fluid control of the creatures.

Director Paul Anderson particularly wanted to show the moment when the Facehugger leaps onto a victim’s face. In the first Alien, it’s a few frames long but in AvP, they slowed it right down. In the Sacrificial Chamber, they had four or five Facehuggers leaping in slow motion. That effect could only be done using CGI. John Bruno began storyboarding the scene seeing where the cameras should be. Then they did a three-dimension pre-viz. A pre-viz is a low-res animation with low-res geometry, so they can see what’s happening in the shot. By the time, they started shooting, they were fairly clear about what story they would be telling.

On the set, they used one of A.D.I.’s practical Facehuggers to walk through the scene to get a feel for how the colour and lighting are affecting the models. Once the live-action had been shot, they began production on the CG Facehuggers. They have to first build a CG model. This is done by scanning the animatronic Facehugger which has been used on the set. Then they refine and remodel it to make it usable for CG work. The practical Facehuggers had quite a lot of slime on them so they had to create a shader that would give the alien a wet, slimy look.

What the visual effects crew can bring to the creature is more choreographed action that is difficult to achieve with an animatronic. They took their lead from the A.D.I. because they established the look for the creature and the visual effects crew had to match it.

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