Awesome, first one reminds me of the original Appetite For Destruction sleeve
The Great Wall of Vagina by Jamie McCartney. The Great Wall of Vagina is a 9 metre long sculpture made of 400 plaster casts of vulvas, all of them unique, arranged into ten large panels. The age range of the women is from 18 to 76. Included are mothers and daughters, identical twins, transgendered men and women as well as a woman pre- and post- natal and another one pre- and post- labiaplasty.
Minge
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
A dog guarding his masters bike….So cute. You guys have to watch it. OMG and the ending.
LOL awwh.
“whenever you’re ready.” ….”Bark!” …. ok here we go
![lotophage:
adsertoris:
‘I took one look at it, and I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.’ Ridley Scott on HR Giger’s Necronom IV, the source of the Alien form.
THE HEAD
Giger originally designed the Alien to have a indented, ridged head, with a row of spikes along the top. This was then covered by a dome, completing the Alien’s Necronom IV, smooth head look. The ridged design cannot be seen in the film, but is easily spied in promo shots of the creature.
The Alien head, with and without dome. The ridges and spikes can be seen through the translucent dome.
—
TOP: Aliens stunt head with Alien heads.BOTTOM: Alien head on left, Aliens head on right.
—
For Alien 3, the Xenomorph was, as in Alien, a newly born creature, and couldn’t be depicted with the mature ridged head, so the dome was back. However, the ridges that lie under the dome were re-designed also, with the translucent dome sitting over it. Though Giger’s dome was back, his ridges were not:
—
BIOMECHANICS & BODY
In addition to changing the ridges, ADI stripped the Alien of its biomechanical texture, replacing it with a controversial fleshy, muscled look. This major change seems to stem from ADI’s misunderstanding of Giger’s signature.
—
Aliens stunt suits.
The stunt Alien performers were to be hidden in shadows, as Cameron was more concerned with motion than design (since the Aliens were meant to be hidden in shadow anyway) therefore the only glances we get of them are fleeting, and are mostly upper body or head shots, with only a couple of full body shots flashing onscreen (there are several Alien shots that last only frames at a time).
‘Cameron’s whole approach to the Aliens was they were shot in such low-light, contrasty situations that it really was important to have contrast in forms showing through. The “old skeleton costume on the body” thing where you have painted bones, the costume’s black and it works. That was Cameron’s approach.’Tom Woodruff.
Animatronic Aliens were also built for rigorous stunts such as inhuman poses and destruction. These suits were fully detailed, unlike the stuntmen suits, where the gaps between biomechanoid applications reveal the spandex suit. In contrast, the full animatronic and pose-able suits betrays no human element and stood at 8 feet tall.
—
Bolaji Badejo as the Alien. Tall. The 8 foot tall Aliens puppets.
Tom Woodruff did not stand tall as the Alien, but like Eddie Powell and various other Alien stuntmen, camera trickery created the illusion of the 8 foot tall beast.
—
Strange Shapes; the Alien form. For the head, the oblong, penis shape of Necronom IV was kept, though the face was that of a human skull, the top of the head being lined with a row of spikes and ridges on the sides. The skull is a trait carried over from its human host, as the Alien is a nightmare child of man and monster. Giger decided to cover the ridges and spike with a dome, rendering the head smooth and the visage eyeless. ‘Never before was there a monster with such a long head, no? I always liked that the Alien was not just a horrible, ugly monstrosity. I liked that it has an elegant, nice, beautiful head. For me, it’s not ugly.’ HR Giger. The Alien head with the dome intact. The ridges, spike and skull can still be seen, but not in the movie, as the creature is hidden in the shadows, only glimpsed briefly through strobe. The ridges returned in Aliens, the creatures having supposedly shed their dome. ‘Ridley wanted you to see things moving inside the head, so we filled up the head with maggots between the transparent shell outside and the skull inside. But it didn’t work because the maggots fell asleep, and there was no more movement!’ HR Giger. The back is adorned by four tubes and a spiked headrest, added mainly for functionality to allow the upright Alien to balance. Giger removed these himself for Alien 3. The biomechanical body is skeletal, the Alien’s skin apparently comprised of silicon, the suit made from metal and bone. The ribcage came under fire from Giger in his Alien 3 designs, described as being too short on the original Alien. James Cameron and Stan Winston added two ribs to the Alien for their sequel. For the hands, an extra thumb was added next to each pinky. The fore and middle fingers of each hand were bound together, webbed, as were the ring and pinky fingers: For the feet, a toe was lost on each foot. The biomechanical nature of the Alien allows it to seamlessly blend into metallic, machine environments, making it perfectly stealthy amid the consoles and clutter on the Nostromo, and in the innards of the escape ship, the Narcissus, as seen in the finale. The teeth of the creature were metallic, keeping with the biomech aesthetic. ‘They were chrome-plated, so asto give them a metallic shine. I imaginedthem that way because for me the monster isboth human and mechanical - more humanthan mechanical, though. So giving him steelteeth was a way to convey this two-foldnature.’ HR Giger.
“Oh hi, Mark.”
HR Giger’s concept hieroglyphic of the Alien life cycle.
O’Bannon envisioned the alien as a leftover of a bygone race, a creature that, despite having two sexes of its own, required a third organism to reproduce. Birth would require sacrifice, the act undertaken at a pyramid structure. The newborn creature is overcome by blood lust, but eventually becomes cultured and intelligent. Thousands of years after the extinction of this race (likely due to their own self-destruction and reaping of their home world) a team of astronauts land on the desolate planetoid after responding to a distress call.
Adaptive Organism.
‘The first [Alien] concept was done by Dan O’Bannon. He made some sketches and he also sent me some sketches by Ron Cobb. At that moment Ridley wasn’t involved. Later on when Ridley became the director we worked very closely together.’HR Giger.
Dan O’Bannon’s Alien idea. Ron Cobb’s Alien.
Giger sketches of the Alien form Ridley Scott’s storyboarded Alien, taken from Giger’s designs. ‘When we started, Ridley said, “I haven’t seen any good monsters lately in films.” I mean, to do a horror or monster movie nowadays we didn’t have many good examples. The biggest problem was that there were a lot of bad examples around. To design something effective without film experience was very difficult for me … [W]e looked hard at my work to see what we could do realistically. Normally it’s boring to feel that you’re watching a man in a suit with a mask, so we experimented. We started with a tall man and we fixed 2 children onto each of his sides. So the monster had a lot of arms at first but I always felt that looked more ridiculous than frightening. After that we decided to choose something from my Necronomicon book. Quite similar in fact. It wound up being similar to a human being, only much bigger. Ridley contributed a photo of a Nubian, those black, tall people. He said it might be good to use their physical look covered with sort of “transparent clothes” so you could see the skin. But then we had trouble with transferring that concept into reality. It turned out to be a … how you say … a night dream … uh, a nightmare. Sometimes I couldn’t even sleep because I was afraid I wouldn’t be ready with the design by the deadline. I mean, the Alien had to be the star of the film, and if the star is no good the film is lost.’HR Giger, FamousMonsters interview.
With Giger, the alien, aesthetically, truly became the Alien; O’Bannon’s adaptive organism, a parasitical, sexual being which kills at birth and takes traits such as anthropomorphism (or quadrupedalism) from its host. This, combined with Giger’s sexual aesthetics, resulted in an eight foot tall beast in the shape of a man with a blood lust straight from the Id.
‘If it came out the size of a cat, it could keep changing and growing – and avoid the one bad feature of most great monsters movies: they eventually become repetitive. With this built-in device, it could keep changing shapes and sizes.’Ron Shusset.
Giger’s Alien took form from his Necronomicon painting, Necronom IV. Copyright HR Giger.
‘[The facehugger was] kind of like a crab sitting in the egg. Dan O’Bannon had an insect-like design for that at first. But I always look for a function. These creatures should be able to jump out. I used the tail as a spring, a spring would be good. And I liked the crab fingers very much. Kind of a spider with a tail.’HR Giger.
Giger’s initial egg featured vagina-like seals, which were then modified to look like organic petals.
‘The original egg had two lips on it … Ridley seen it, and we were sitting there having this meeting and somebody said, “what do you think of the egg?” and Ridley’s exact words were “I think it’s fucking obscene,” and there was this deathly hush and everybody looked around at each other, and Gordon Caroll said, “Ridley, what do you mean by the, uh, the egg looks obscene?” He [Ridley] said, “Well, it looks like some great fanny [vagina],” so then Gordon turned around and said, “Ridley, you have this Alien running around with a three foot penis on its head, the alien spaceship has three fifteen foot tall vaginas that the space-people walk through, and you call the egg obscene?” And that just cracked everybody up.’Nick Allder, Alien SFX Supervisor.
The penile head from Necronom IV was an obvious feature to be kept, though Giger modified it, rounding off the penis shape at the back and ridding it of eyes.
There was also the question of whether the Alien should have a pair of eyes, as it did in the paintings. While producer Gordon Carroll felt there had to be eyes, Giger disagreed, having changed his mind from his original design. “I said, ‘No, no eyes,’” recalls Giger. If the creature lacked eyes, he argued, “You can’t see where the monster is looking. It’s much more dangerous. You don’t know what the creature is doing.”Sci-Fi Invasion! article. ‘All these beasts are blind. I think it is very frightening to have beasts with no eyes. At first they wanted it to have eyes with lamps behind them. Other people always wanted that but I decided no, no eyes.’HR Giger.
‘Since the paintings never showed the mouth, for instance, Scott came up with the notion that the “tongue” could have its own set of teeth. Other ideas, such as placing live maggots inside the translucent skull in order to give the illusion of a “moving brain,” proved unworkable.’Sci-Fi Invasion! article.
Having encountered difficulties with portraying the Alien physically, having tried contortionists and binding people together, a crew member came across Bolaji Badejo in a student pub and informed Ridley Scott of the 7 foot tall, wafer thin giant.
Bolaji Badejo, head trials.
LEFT: Badejo’s body cast.RIGHT: The resulting Alien mold. ‘Giger then came in, and Giger has a feel for grace, but a different kind of grace. So Giger started building up around this graceful figure, his pipes and tubes and running, rotting sores and joints and pustules and strange shapes and building it up and came up with something most bizarre. The plaster shop took a full cast of the actor, full body cast and mounted it standing up on it’s toes on a wooden base and Giger put it into his studio and he began to build up on it with clay and bones, an air conditioning duct, screws, and human skulls - the face of the thing is a real human skull. He took the skull and jammed it right on the front, riveted it in place, and then started modifying it.’Dan O’Bannon, Fantastic Films, 1979.
Badejo in the Alien suit.‘That image burrned itself into Ridley’s brain, he liked that power of unearthliness and grace and strength. He wanted Giger to see if he could do something around that kind of a shape of person. Then they found their actor who is this seven-foot-African … [The Alien form was based] along these pictures out of this book, more of this Nubian black racial type. The thing we liked so much was the grace of these black people.’ Dan O’Bannon.
‘[Giger] had expert help because there’s some crafts involved that I don’t think that Giger had done, like casting it in rubber materials. But he’s quite a craftsman, actually. It was an amazing sight … He wanted clay, and basic sculpting materials and he also wanted bones as many bones as they could lay their hands on. They ended up buying all this stuff, veterinary supplies, medical supplies, and the little sculpting studio turned into a bone yard … He had snake skeletons in perfect preservation, they looked like lace. And junk too, just old smelly bones out of a slaughterhouse and he just started sculpting‘ Dan O’Bannon, Fantastic Films, 1979.
‘They got him [Giger] a rhinoceros skull, [and] three of the most perfect human skulls I’ve ever seen in my life. They were beauties, they must have borrowed them off a living person top get them, that perfect, every tooth was intact, not a filling. I think they cost something like $700 each, they were so prim … It was such a beautiful human skull, you know, it had been a real person, not like one of those plastic model kits - and he takes out his hack saw and he saws the jawbone off and extends the jawbone, like six inches, puts and extension on in it, and creates this distorted jawbone! Then he starts attaching other fixtures to it and building a new extension on the back of it. He’s doing this to a real human skull! When he finally got all done they took a cast of it, it was a craftsman who actually cast the rubber costume of Giger’s sculpture. When they were finished casting in rubber he used his airbrush and painted the costume the same way he paints his paintings.’Dan O’Bannon, Fantastic Film, 1979.
Eddie Powell played stunt-Alien, notably in the Brett and Dallas death scenes.
Translucent Alien suit. ‘Ridley also wanted the Alien’s body to be translucent, so you could see the black actor, Bolaji Badejo, moving like a thing-spider inside of this half transparent suit. They built special ovens for this plastic material, like hot-melt vinyl, but it was not transparent enough to see through to the person behind it and it didn’t work.’ HR Giger, TotalMovie Interview, 2001.
Sources (1, 2)
Perfect article!](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l9cpajS7Sb1qbp5jho1_500.jpg)
‘I took one look at it, and I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.’
THE HEAD
Ridley Scott on HR Giger’s Necronom IV, the source of the Alien form.Giger originally designed the Alien to have a indented, ridged head, with a row of spikes along the top. This was then covered by a dome, completing the Alien’s Necronom IV, smooth head look. The ridged design cannot be seen in the film, but is easily spied in promo shots of the creature.
The Alien head, with and without dome. The ridges and spikes can be seen through the translucent dome.
—
TOP: Aliens stunt head with Alien heads.
BOTTOM: Alien head on left, Aliens head on right.—
For Alien 3, the Xenomorph was, as in Alien, a newly born creature, and couldn’t be depicted with the mature ridged head, so the dome was back. However, the ridges that lie under the dome were re-designed also, with the translucent dome sitting over it. Though Giger’s dome was back, his ridges were not:
—
BIOMECHANICS & BODY
In addition to changing the ridges, ADI stripped the Alien of its biomechanical texture, replacing it with a controversial fleshy, muscled look. This major change seems to stem from ADI’s misunderstanding of Giger’s signature.
—
Aliens stunt suits.
The stunt Alien performers were to be hidden in shadows, as Cameron was more concerned with motion than design (since the Aliens were meant to be hidden in shadow anyway) therefore the only glances we get of them are fleeting, and are mostly upper body or head shots, with only a couple of full body shots flashing onscreen (there are several Alien shots that last only frames at a time).
‘Cameron’s whole approach to the Aliens was they were shot in such low-light, contrasty situations that it really was important to have contrast in forms showing through. The “old skeleton costume on the body” thing where you have painted bones, the costume’s black and it works. That was Cameron’s approach.’
Tom Woodruff.Animatronic Aliens were also built for rigorous stunts such as inhuman poses and destruction. These suits were fully detailed, unlike the stuntmen suits, where the gaps between biomechanoid applications reveal the spandex suit. In contrast, the full animatronic and pose-able suits betrays no human element and stood at 8 feet tall.
—
Bolaji Badejo as the Alien. Tall.
The 8 foot tall Aliens puppets.
Tom Woodruff did not stand tall as the Alien, but like Eddie Powell and various other Alien stuntmen, camera trickery created the illusion of the 8 foot tall beast.
—
Strange Shapes; the Alien form.For the head, the oblong, penis shape of Necronom IV was kept, though the face was that of a human skull, the top of the head being lined with a row of spikes and ridges on the sides. The skull is a trait carried over from its human host, as the Alien is a nightmare child of man and monster. Giger decided to cover the ridges and spike with a dome, rendering the head smooth and the visage eyeless.
‘Never before was there a monster with such a long
head, no? I always liked that the Alien was not just a
horrible, ugly monstrosity. I liked that it has an
elegant, nice, beautiful head. For me, it’s not ugly.’
HR Giger.The Alien head with the dome intact. The ridges, spike and skull can still be seen, but not in the movie, as the creature is hidden in the shadows, only glimpsed briefly through strobe. The ridges returned in Aliens, the creatures having supposedly shed their dome.
‘Ridley wanted you to see things moving
inside the head, so we filled up the head with
maggots between the transparent shell outside and
the skull inside. But it didn’t work because the
maggots fell asleep, and there was no more
movement!’
HR Giger.The back is adorned by four tubes and a spiked headrest, added mainly for functionality to allow the upright Alien to balance. Giger removed these himself for Alien 3.
The biomechanical body is skeletal, the Alien’s skin apparently comprised of silicon, the suit made from metal and bone. The ribcage came under fire from Giger in his Alien 3 designs, described as being too short on the original Alien. James Cameron and Stan Winston added two ribs to the Alien for their sequel.
For the hands, an extra thumb was added next to each pinky. The fore and middle fingers of each hand were bound together, webbed, as were the ring and pinky fingers:
For the feet, a toe was lost on each foot.
The biomechanical nature of the Alien allows it to seamlessly blend into metallic, machine environments, making it perfectly stealthy amid the consoles and clutter on the Nostromo, and in the innards of the escape ship, the Narcissus, as seen in the finale.
The teeth of the creature were metallic, keeping with the biomech aesthetic.
‘They were chrome-plated, so as
to give them a metallic shine. I imagined
them that way because for me the monster is
both human and mechanical - more human
than mechanical, though. So giving him steel
teeth was a way to convey this two-fold
nature.’
HR Giger.
“Oh hi, Mark.”
HR Giger’s concept hieroglyphic of the Alien life cycle.
O’Bannon envisioned the alien as a leftover of a bygone race, a creature that, despite having two sexes of its own, required a third organism to reproduce. Birth would require sacrifice, the act undertaken at a pyramid structure. The newborn creature is overcome by blood lust, but eventually becomes cultured and intelligent. Thousands of years after the extinction of this race (likely due to their own self-destruction and reaping of their home world) a team of astronauts land on the desolate planetoid after responding to a distress call.
Adaptive Organism.‘The first [Alien] concept was done by Dan O’Bannon. He made some sketches and he also sent me some sketches by Ron Cobb. At that moment Ridley wasn’t involved. Later on when Ridley became the director we worked very closely together.’
HR Giger.Dan O’Bannon’s Alien idea.
Ron Cobb’s Alien.
Giger sketches of the Alien form
Ridley Scott’s storyboarded Alien, taken from Giger’s designs. ‘When we started, Ridley said, “I haven’t seen any good monsters lately in films.” I mean, to do a horror or monster movie nowadays we didn’t have many good examples. The biggest problem was that there were a lot of bad examples around. To design something effective without film experience was very difficult for me … [W]e looked hard at my work to see what we could do realistically. Normally it’s boring to feel that you’re watching a man in a suit with a mask, so we experimented. We started with a tall man and we fixed 2 children onto each of his sides. So the monster had a lot of arms at first but I always felt that looked more ridiculous than frightening. After that we decided to choose something from my Necronomicon book. Quite similar in fact. It wound up being similar to a human being, only much bigger. Ridley contributed a photo of a Nubian, those black, tall people. He said it might be good to use their physical look covered with sort of “transparent clothes” so you could see the skin. But then we had trouble with transferring that concept into reality. It turned out to be a … how you say … a night dream … uh, a nightmare. Sometimes I couldn’t even sleep because I was afraid I wouldn’t be ready with the design by the deadline. I mean, the Alien had to be the star of the film, and if the star is no good the film is lost.’
HR Giger, FamousMonsters interview.With Giger, the alien, aesthetically, truly became the Alien; O’Bannon’s adaptive organism, a parasitical, sexual being which kills at birth and takes traits such as anthropomorphism (or quadrupedalism) from its host. This, combined with Giger’s sexual aesthetics, resulted in an eight foot tall beast in the shape of a man with a blood lust straight from the Id.
‘If it came out the size of a cat, it could keep changing and growing – and avoid the one bad feature of most great monsters movies: they eventually become repetitive. With this built-in device, it could keep changing shapes and sizes.’
Ron Shusset.
Giger’s Alien took form from his Necronomicon painting, Necronom IV. Copyright HR Giger.
‘[The facehugger was] kind of like a crab sitting in the egg. Dan O’Bannon had an insect-like design for that at first. But I always look for a function. These creatures should be able to jump out. I used the tail as a spring, a spring would be good. And I liked the crab fingers very much. Kind of a spider with a tail.’
HR Giger.Giger’s initial egg featured vagina-like seals, which were then modified to look like organic petals.
‘The original egg had two lips on it … Ridley seen it, and we were sitting there having this meeting and somebody said, “what do you think of the egg?” and Ridley’s exact words were “I think it’s fucking obscene,” and there was this deathly hush and everybody looked around at each other, and Gordon Caroll said, “Ridley, what do you mean by the, uh, the egg looks obscene?” He [Ridley] said, “Well, it looks like some great fanny [vagina],” so then Gordon turned around and said, “Ridley, you have this Alien running around with a three foot penis on its head, the alien spaceship has three fifteen foot tall vaginas that the space-people walk through, and you call the egg obscene?” And that just cracked everybody up.’
Nick Allder, Alien SFX Supervisor.The penile head from Necronom IV was an obvious feature to be kept, though Giger modified it, rounding off the penis shape at the back and ridding it of eyes.
There was also the question of whether the Alien should have a pair of eyes, as it did in the paintings. While producer Gordon Carroll felt there had to be eyes, Giger disagreed, having changed his mind from his original design. “I said, ‘No, no eyes,’” recalls Giger. If the creature lacked eyes, he argued, “You can’t see where the monster is looking. It’s much more dangerous. You don’t know what the creature is doing.”
Sci-Fi Invasion! article.
‘All these beasts are blind. I think it is very frightening to have beasts with no eyes. At first they wanted it to have eyes with lamps behind them. Other people always wanted that but I decided no, no eyes.’
HR Giger.‘Since the paintings never showed the mouth, for instance, Scott came up with the notion that the “tongue” could have its own set of teeth. Other ideas, such as placing live maggots inside the translucent skull in order to give the illusion of a “moving brain,” proved unworkable.’
Sci-Fi Invasion! article.
Having encountered difficulties with portraying the Alien physically, having tried contortionists and binding people together, a crew member came across Bolaji Badejo in a student pub and informed Ridley Scott of the 7 foot tall, wafer thin giant.
Bolaji Badejo, head trials.
LEFT: Badejo’s body cast.
RIGHT: The resulting Alien mold.
‘Giger then came in, and Giger has a feel for grace, but a different kind of grace. So Giger started building up around this graceful figure, his pipes and tubes and running, rotting sores and joints and pustules and strange shapes and building it up and came up with something most bizarre. The plaster shop took a full cast of the actor, full body cast and mounted it standing up on it’s toes on a wooden base and Giger put it into his studio and he began to build up on it with clay and bones, an air conditioning duct, screws, and human skulls - the face of the thing is a real human skull. He took the skull and jammed it right on the front, riveted it in place, and then started modifying it.’
Dan O’Bannon, Fantastic Films, 1979.
Badejo in the Alien suit.
‘That image burrned itself into Ridley’s brain, he liked that power of unearthliness and grace and strength. He wanted Giger to see if he could do something around that kind of a shape of person. Then they found their actor who is this seven-foot-African … [The Alien form was based] along these pictures out of this book, more of this Nubian black racial type. The thing we liked so much was the grace of these black people.’
Dan O’Bannon.
‘[Giger] had expert help because there’s some crafts involved that I don’t think that Giger had done, like casting it in rubber materials. But he’s quite a craftsman, actually. It was an amazing sight … He wanted clay, and basic sculpting materials and he also wanted bones as many bones as they could lay their hands on. They ended up buying all this stuff, veterinary supplies, medical supplies, and the little sculpting studio turned into a bone yard … He had snake skeletons in perfect preservation, they looked like lace. And junk too, just old smelly bones out of a slaughterhouse and he just started sculpting‘
Dan O’Bannon, Fantastic Films, 1979.
‘They got him [Giger] a rhinoceros skull, [and] three of the most perfect human skulls I’ve ever seen in my life. They were beauties, they must have borrowed them off a living person top get them, that perfect, every tooth was intact, not a filling. I think they cost something like $700 each, they were so prim … It was such a beautiful human skull, you know, it had been a real person, not like one of those plastic model kits - and he takes out his hack saw and he saws the jawbone off and extends the jawbone, like six inches, puts and extension on in it, and creates this distorted jawbone! Then he starts attaching other fixtures to it and building a new extension on the back of it. He’s doing this to a real human skull! When he finally got all done they took a cast of it, it was a craftsman who actually cast the rubber costume of Giger’s sculpture. When they were finished casting in rubber he used his airbrush and painted the costume the same way he paints his paintings.’
Dan O’Bannon, Fantastic Film, 1979.
Eddie Powell played stunt-Alien, notably in the Brett and Dallas death scenes.
Translucent Alien suit.
‘Ridley also wanted the Alien’s body to be translucent, so you could see the black actor, Bolaji Badejo, moving like a thing-spider inside of this half transparent suit. They built special ovens for this plastic material, like hot-melt vinyl, but it was not transparent enough to see through to the person behind it and it didn’t work.’
HR Giger, TotalMovie Interview, 2001.Perfect article!
