Remaking ALIEN (1979)

For my first year of university, we had to remake a a film in 5 minutes for our final project. With Liv Hextall, we went with Ridley Scott's "ALIEN" as it is Liv's favourite film but also because we thought it would fun to experiment wirth practical effects and very specific lighting. We were given about 2 months to do pre-poduction, the filming and all of post production.

We started by agreeing what scenes were essential for the story to still have meaning and which ones we could cut immedietly. This became quite a task cause we both loved the film so much (I say we, Liv in particular) it felt like Ripping of pieces of the Mona Lisa. After agreeeing on a 15 page script (which was still too long but we thought this was the shortest we were going to get for this stage), we started finding actors and thinking of the practical effects. We bought miniatrues of the Xenomorph and found some Xeno eggs and a Facehugger and Chestburster toy. Liv also rebuilt her Lego® Millenium Falcon into the Nostromo which we used for establishing shots and the Exterior scene around the derelict ship. We used Old clothes for the mountainous background and some of the forground, and used a mix of flour, dirt and small rocks for the rocky surface of the planet, and to enhance the cold, dark atmosphere of the planet we used a smoke machine to make the fog. The smoke machine also helped bring movement in the static shots.

Filming was rather straight forward having done quite alot of pre-production work. That being said, one of our main actors hurt themselves the day before the first day of shooting and had to go to hospital. We had to find a new actor that very evening for the next day. Liv did some calls and we managed to rearange the cast. We had two scheduled filming days, first one we filmed all the group scenes as that was the soul day all our actors were available. and the second day was for any scenes we missed the first day. We had to schedule in a 3rd shoot day as we hadn't managed to get everything in on the second day due to some experimentation and adding in a shot that was rather necessary.

This project was very insightful, mainly learning how not everything can be planned and managing to find creative ways to solve those unexpected hicups. i would say i learned how to react nd stay calm.