For the third Skyline film I was asked to create a Matriarch for the alien species, and redesign the legs for all of the original characters to reduce vfx.
The Matriarch as it appears in the film
Carapace design by Charles Wills
Carapace sculpt by Joey Orosco
Testing the fiberglass and vacuform pieces
Airbrushing the back, automotive black contour on the front.
Putting together the vacuform front shell
Abalone-inspired colors on the inside.
The new stilts we must design over
armature for the new leg sculpts
Ian Stevens and Shannon Pitts begin leg sculpts
Ernesto Cornejo and Saeko Yamazaki detailed the legs to match the originals
Kyle Marzigliano and Ian Stevens
Leg #1 shimmed and ready to mold
Tim Phoenix and Bill Fesh ran the foam skins
Iridescent paint job on the Matriarch's legs
foam latex detail layer brushed into the body mold and baked before it is closed over the body form and injected
The new foam latex skin
Amber begins seaming the suit
Allison Kellerman seams the crazy arms
Vanessa Lee works on the suit closures and armpit gussetts
The suit was painted by Rich Mayberry and myself
Rich Works on the head
The finished Matriarch head
This time, we made these mandibles flexible so they wouldn't break if hit.
Fred Manchento works on the new set of heads
We made them able to fit multiple performers
Prepping LED eye lights
Velcro and hooks so the removable face plates stay in place
A lot of work on a very tight schedule. I had a great team, often only for a few hours here and there but we shipped out this great complete character plus new heads and legs for all of them plus sick versions of the pilot heads.