The differences really aren't all that great and the smaller fiming miniature certainly did it's job. I'll need to look at the movie again, but some examples of scenes to look at for the miniature are when Ripley barrels through the Atmosphere Processor with the APC to rescue the marines; also when they leave the Atmosphere Processor and drive through the exterior door, and then across the LV426 landscape blowing the transaxel in the process.
The areas to look at on the APC I think off the top of my head are the area above the rear wheel arches (full size APC has a dented 'canister', filming model has something that looks like a wrench in it's place). Also the full-size APC has a curved cowling over the top-mounted searchlight / camera, I think the cowling is missing on the smaller miniature but would need to rewatch the movie and refresh my memory to check.
Quote from: SM on Jul 23, 2015, 10:12:00 PM
I think my sole contribution to the process was in regards to the storage of the sentry guns. I originally thought the crates that fell on Gorman were the sentry guns, before quickly realising they weren't. Which was absolutely pivotal to the entire project... 
From memory it was Graham's idea to store them behind Burke and Ripley's seats.
The cam images on the MTOB screens were a brilliant touch.
Actually you bringing that up was really helpful because after that we looked at the sentry gun cases more closely and realised just how frigging big those things are! Especially afer looking at the scene where Vasquez and Hudson bring the cases into Operations, and there are four of them, and John and I were thing 'where the heck do we put them!?' We were trying to figure out the size and what exactly these cases looked like, and one member of the braintrust had a photo of one plus they can actually be seen right at the beginning of the AVP (2010) videogame in the hanger where the player starts.
Finding a spot for them was more tricky. The only area where it seemed to work and for them to not be in the way was behind the seats Ripley and Burke sit during the drop. But to be sure I looked at the scene where Hudson is giving his speech during the drop, looking at the camera angles and comparing how elements within the APC are located compared to other elements, and at the same time cross-referencing that with a section through the APC I had drawn to line things up. I also looked at the behind the scenes clip of Simon Atherton when he's talking about the weaponry because you can see part of the APC set in the backgound. However, here the seats seemed further back and more flush with the door meaning there was no room for the guns, plus them being pushed further back in this particular clip didn't mesh with the camera angles scene in the movie. In the end I went with what made sense with what I saw on watching the movie by bringing the seats forward to match, and then there was enough room for the Sentry Gun cases.
It's kind of what it's like sometimes, at first it doesn't work, but you work on another area and by solving that it then opens the door to a solution to the problem you originally had.
