By Brent McKnight | 8 years ago

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus has some great special effects, especially in the creature design department. When the Blu-ray drops in October there are going to be a mess of deleted scenes, and at least a few of them will feature even more monsters that were cut from the final film.

Twentieth Century Fox has released a couple of horrific photos of unused work from the Weta workshop. The pictures are of punk-rock geologist Fifield (Sean Harris) after he’s undergone a massive and grotesque transformation. His face is all bulgy and messed up, his teeth are all janky, and it looks like he’s mad about the changes because he’s screaming a lot.

Apparently these images are from a scene right before the Mohawk-wearing mutant goes into a violent rage outside the Prometheus hangar. Here’s some information about how they went about making a monster:

To mutate Fifield beyond what was possible using practical makeup effects, Weta Digital generated a digital character with elongated limbs and an engorged, translucent head, incorporating a semblance of Harris’ face. Scott filmed the sequence both with the actor in makeup and without, providing clean plates that would allow for the insertion of the digital character. The final cut featured mostly makeup effects, which Weta enhanced with digital wire removal, bullet hits, and one shot of the digital creature’s body blended to the actor.

It’s nice to hear that, even in a day and age where so many films go nuts with the computer-generated special effects, Scott and company still went the practical route when they could. Weta, who worked on The Host and Lord of the Rings, usually strikes a solid balance between the two approaches, and they synthesize the two well.