Case Study: Prometheus

“It’s very difficult to design a truly scary creature that is real, and by being real automatically becomes frightening.”

-               -      Ridley Scott

I’ve always been a massive fan of the Alien films and Ridley Scott films in general, so when I first heard that Prometheus was in production I was incredibly excited! I watched Alien for the first time at a very young age with my older brother; I was about 10 years old. I was instantly hooked; it was a film I’ve never seen anything like before as well as there being a strong female lead giving my younger self a character I could relate to; as well as Newt (Rebecca) in Aliens who was a similar age to me and same name too! 10 year old me was very invested. 

The Xenomorph was such a fascinating creature to me, I was utterly terrified but still wanted to learn more about it. The entire creature was nothing I had ever seen or heard of before and yet so plausible, the different life cycles also gave it a sense of purpose, it wasn’t this big scary alien that only wanted to kill your favorite characters, it was just a creature whose main purpose was to survive just like every other creature that ever lived.

While reading through Prometheus: The Art of the Film, I was very impressed at how much of the film was physically made. A lot of the sets and creatures were painstakingly created in huge scales to make the film more physical, very little green screen was used to make this film. Doing this also works to the actors benefit as they have a physical environment and creatures to interact with rather than a green room and a sign that will later be CGI into a creature.

I admire Ridley’s persistence at using a lot of traditional methods of filmmaking, craftsmanship and design. This is something I want to incorporate into my project, I would like to use as many traditional methods of painting and sketching and anything else that would be appropriate to my project. I believe that it would create a greater connection to the creatures that I am making and improve my overall ability of design and creation.

While I was reading the book I found that there were some interesting references while they were designing the Engineer. They looked into culture and how to creature a character that seemed beyond us, almost God like.

“I kept referring to them as like Titans in Greek mythology, something between that and God.”

      -    Arthur Max

This was a key focus during the design of the Engineer and the inspiration of Greek mythology can clearly been seen in its design. This is all to give the audience the impression of something bigger than us, our creator; it had to have a design that made you think you were inferior to it.

“They all had foreheads which flowed almost directly into their noses, as classical Greek 4^th century BC statues did.”

      -    Arthur Max

(On Michelangelo’s David, Statue of Liberty and Elvis Presley)

The creature that I want to focus on is the Hammerpede. This is a cobra like alien that two lost characters come across. What irritates me during this scene is that not only are the two characters tensions are high because of them being lost inside an alien structure, but a biologist approaches the alien. Surely as a biologist their first act of protocol is to stay at a safe distance away from this alien creature that no one has ever seen before, but instead the biologist decides to approach it and talk to it like you would a dog or any other domestic earth creature. For the audience, and me we have enough life experience and knowledge that this alien resembles a cobra, which is very dangerous to humans. Therefore we should have a basic instinct to stay away from something like this. This creates a problem where the audiences are a couple of steps ahead of the scene, which I believe should be avoided to the best of our ability. Granted this is a horror sci-fi and the audience is expecting all creatures to be dangerous, but I believe you can play with the audiences’ minds. For example how about we take the audiences life experience and make that a weakness to them and the characters. Instead of a creature that resembled a dangerous cobra, a creature that was deliberately designed to slightly resemble a safe, domestic creature on earth, such as a rabbit would cause the audience to be confused on the creature and situation.

I want to use this theory onto my own designs when needed to create a more diverse collection of creatures that work with their environment where you can see their prehistoric elements in their design as well as testing the audience’s knowledge and instinct.       

Below are short videos to behind the scenes and interviews with Ridley and the cast.

Alien Anatomy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dc_zsM2p34

Prometheus Feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6taYMsXJGDQ

The images in this blog post I have scanned myself from the referenced book below:

Salisbury M, foreword by Scott R. 2012. Prometheus: The Art of the Film. London. Titan Books.