Hunting the Mimics

I got interested in the Mimics from Edge of Tomorrow because the moved in a way unlike anything I had seen before on film and begause they had a really good design, the endlessly-screaming 'faces' burning with some strange inner fire were especially good.

They remind me a lot of the Sentinal face rom X Men comics. Probably the only time tha pink has been scary.

The first stop is this interview with Bill Desowitz asking questions of Dan Kramer.







Desowittz has his own interesting site under the link.
 
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/talking-alien-mimics-from-edge-of-darkness-with-sony-imageworks

This is the best interview from my point of view as it talks about how the thing was actually done. I will try and quote to a minimal extent so I don't rob his pageviews.

As Sony saw concept artwork, the Mimics got darker and darker and it occurred to Kramer that the material they were leaning toward was obsidian

"We built all these sharp, angular segments and shaded them to look like obsidian; we also mixed in the color amber toward the body to make it look softer and less dangerous. The ends of the limbs were slashing weapons. There's no deforming of geometry going on in the limbs: it's deforming spine with rigidly placed segments of obsidian down the line, so it's almost like a rope of crystal segments bound together. In that way, it could use them as weapons."

There is actually a minor design controversy about this interview, and by minor, I mean there is one comment by Cody Childress and it disagrees with the origin of the CAD programme used to make the mimic in an interesting way.

From there we move to Estaban Diacono.

The originating point for the Mimics seems to be when the Director Doug Liman saw this video by Esteban Diacono. As you can read in the above interview it seems to have been the effect of aggressive mathematics and lack of conservation of mass.
 
http://vimeo.com/25168137



(Which you can't embed in blogger either because googlyoutube denies it or because Vimeo is too snotty to allow it but take a look.)

This was part of a collaberative project, you can find more details in the link.

You can tell Esteban is cool becasue there is a picture on his tumblr of him on a Y shaped electric scooter, in which he still manages to look very suave. Thereby demonstrating the contempt of the wise for the fears and troubles of lesser men. 

(And who turns up in the comments? Cody Childress, my dark shadow.)


From there we go to the blog of Kev Jenkins, who talks about his involvement here.

Nick Davis was the visual effects supervisor. He mentions 'Ivan' who 'did some incredible clay sculpts'

I think Ivan is Ivan Manzella.

I have not got any closer to finding the origin of the alien face, I suspect Jenkins as he worked on Thor 2 and they remind me of the masks. Probably Codly Childress is there ahead of me like Belloq.