Over at the IMDB Forums, they were talking about our recent interview with Jeff Habberstad. About the wire work and that some stunts will have CGI enhancement. Colin and Greg Strause posted a few interesting things in there:
Greg: “CG is only being used where ‘in camera’ techniques weren’t doable. Although I liked the orig Matrix, don’t expect anything in our film to resemble it.”
Colin: “Wire work is very tough. It’s hard wearing a 40 pound animatronic head in the rain while trying to perform on a wire at night. You also have to deal with the problem that the tails become water logged, or get tangled up with the wires. When ever we had Tom in the suit it was amazing, but there are situations that it’s impossible to do no matter how hard you try on set. Also time was an important issue. Do you try for 3 hours to get the shot in camera, or spend 30 minutes shooting a plate for a CG one so that you can get other extra cools shots that day.
Then there are limitations like you can’t do mouth strikes while a human is in the suit, so it’s either a CG mouth striker or a hydraulic ram mounted on a hand-held head that only works for extreme close-ups. Also, there are safety issues with squib hits (gun wounds, etc) being too close to the actors, so some of them are being done is CG for that reason.
That’s why there are going a be a few fully CG aliens, but most of the time it will be Tom with a CG tail and/or CG mouth striker. But with all of that said, I would love to do another movie with in camera monsters. It was fun as hell, and nothing beats the real reactions of an actor as an Alien is inches from them with the drool splattering on thier face. CG can’t do that.”