During pre-production of the Alien Earth series shown on Disney Hulu, I had the great opportunity to develop the look of the Eye Midge and Plant Alien creatures with my asset team at Tippett US and Canada. We received some rough concept of the creatures from Weta Workshop and were tasked with developing the creatures to a production ready standard and work out the how the creatures moved and attacked victims. This was before the project had been through filming on location in Thailand and the client was keen to have these two particular creatures developed as they were the two new creatures introduced in the series, which also had updated versions of Xenomorphs we have seen before in the Alien saga.
I did full textures and lookdev of the whole creature as well as and general 3d animated concept including a rig to figure out how the irises would morph between the different states for the Eye Midge head. The final design and look is very close to what I developed in Pre-Production. Ultimately there were multiple VFX vendors involved in post production and I am not sure how the sequences were distributed but I assume the asset was shared around as the Eye Midge has a lot of screentime spread over multiple episodes. It is a key character and looks like it will be involved in new seasons too from how the cliffhanger ending is set up.
I got to attend video call meetings and speak and present direct with client VFX supervisor and producer on this project so I it was nice to have the closer collaboration and be trusted by Tippett to represent the company along with Randy Link who did the animation tests in parallel to my work developing the look.
Sheep attack! The parasite Eye Midge has some gruesome scenes where it takes over and controls it's host after ripping one of the eyes out and connecting with the brain.
Back from the dead.
There were some tense scenes with the main cast members interacting with the Eye Midge.
The extra extendable toothed tentacles help the Midge grapple with the victim.
The first major introduction of the Eye Midge was through a cat, with some nice close up shots.
Some interesting lab shots where we see the split Midge vision.