Species
Clockwise from left - FX supervisor Richard Edlund,
puppeteers Craig Talmy, Trey Stokes, Andre Bustanoby.
(Photo from Entertainment Weekly - Feb. 24, 1995)
So what are those other guys and I doing? Well, that thing we're all holding is a computer input device which we puppeteered to create the movements of SIL, the alien she-beastie.
In the film's finale, where SIL displays all her wall-crawling, gravity-defying charms, she's entirely computer-generated. Richard Edlund of Boss Film decided nothing simulates real motion like... well, like real motion, so Boss used real-time motion capture to animate the character.
I was hired as one of the puppeteers. For me, it was a return to a
technique I'd been involved with years before (see real-time
character animation). Ahh, these kids today, thinking motion
capture is a new idea...
For the scenes in which SIL wasn't computer-generated, she was portrayed by a full-scale puppet or a person in a SIL suit - both of which were created by Steve Johnson's XFX... some folks I know pretty well from The Abyss and other projects.
A few months after Species was finished, I and the other puppeteers demonstrated the Sil input device at SIGGRAPH '95 in Los Angeles. Craig Hayes, visual FX supervisor at Tippett Studio, came up to me - he recognized me from our work together on Robocop 2. He said he was glad to see I was still working with motion capture (actually, I hadn't done it at all since Robo 2, five years earlier) and invited me to come to Berkeley and talk about a new project they were planning.
Next stop, Starship Troopers.
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