The terrifying mimics in "Edge of Tomorrow" are unique in sci-fi, and their memorable design took a lot of drafts and tinkering to perfect. In a parallel universe, the movie would have looked completely different.
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00The terrifying mimics in Edge of Tomorrow are unique in sci-fi, and their memorable
00:04design took a lot of drafts and tinkering to perfect.
00:07In a parallel universe, the movie would have looked completely different.
00:12Thanks to some concept art designs made available by the artists who worked on Edge of Tomorrow,
00:16we know what the aliens might have looked like.
00:18The tentative designs were amazingly varied, and there were easily a few dozen completely
00:22different directions that the film could have gone.
00:24I don't think I've ever really tackled something where there were no limitations at all.
00:28You know, it's an alien.
00:29Early in the process, the designs started out fairly normal, by alien standards anyway.
00:34Concept art from Christopher Brandstrom featured designs that were strikingly humanoid.
00:38They were much taller than a person and covered in crystalline skin, but they still looked
00:42more or less human.
00:44Two legs, two arms, a torso, opposable thumbs, all the bells and whistles of fleshy earthlings.
00:49Different design iterations had varying levels of crystalline embellishments.
00:53While the timeline of the designs is unclear, we know that the move towards glass bodies
00:57was a very deliberate choice on the filmmakers' part, and one of the elements that carried
01:01over to the final design.
01:03Visual effects supervisor Daniel Kramer told FX Guide in 2014 that director Doug Liman
01:07wanted the aliens to have sharp bodies that didn't look too terrestrial, saying,
01:11"...so we came up with obsidian as the material that it would look like, basically a glass
01:15that could cut."
01:16Interestingly, despite the human similarity of their general frame, these would-be mimics
01:20didn't have eyes or a mouth or facial features of any sort, which is pretty much the only
01:25way in which the finished film's aliens are more human-like than them.
01:35A major aspect of the aliens in Edge of Tomorrow, naturally, is that they had to be extremely
01:39intimidating, foes formidable enough to keep humanity in a state of near-defeat, requiring
01:44some sort of workaround, like, say, a time loop.
01:47Here they come, mean as hell and thick as grass.
01:51Some of the earlier designs from sculptor and creature designer Ivan Manzella focused
01:55on the mimics' sheer physical presence, envisioning them as hulking beasts that dwarfed the soldiers.
02:00The drafts of that idea certainly make a strong impression.
02:04Compared to the humanoid concepts, these designs veer more alien, introducing an amorphous
02:08quality in addition to the size.
02:10Yet the idea to make the mimics conventionally big and solid was ultimately abandoned, because
02:14the war effort against such creatures would ultimately have come down to brawn, which
02:18didn't really fit the concept of opponents too unpredictable to defeat with standard
02:22military firepower.
02:24If you squint, you can see the nucleus for what the mimics would become in Manzella's
02:28concepts, but there was such a wide variation even within those that it would still take
02:32a while to crystallize the final form.
02:34Another design concept Manzella showcased on his website was such a radical departure
02:38not only from the version we see in the movie, but from any other version, that it bears
02:43a mention for its sheer uniqueness.
02:45It is unclear at what point Manzella came up with this particular design, but to look
02:49at it now is to see an open window into a completely different Edge of Tomorrow.
02:53Part squid and part magnified bacteriophage, it's arguably Manzella's most out-there
02:58design, but it's a testament to how different the mimics could have looked while still fulfilling
03:02Doug Liman's core vision of terrifying eldritch horrors.
03:06Edge of Tomorrow has plenty of science fiction elements, but it's mainly an action thriller.
03:11There's tension, sure, and some eerie moments, but nobody would call it a horror movie.
03:15Well, that might have been different if Aaron Simms' creative had a say in the creature
03:18design.
03:19In 2016, the company released some concept art for the film on Instagram, and it's safe
03:24to say that these concepts would have taken the movie in a completely different direction.
03:28The mimic design is a terrifying bipedal mass of flesh with one arm shaped into a blade
03:33and the other widening into a massive, blunt object.
03:36Artwork showcasing a battle scene, meanwhile, introduced massive, metallic spider-like designs
03:41towering over the soldiers.
03:43It's difficult to tell if these are vehicles or the creatures themselves, but they would
03:47have been terrifying when realized on the big screen either way.
03:51Throughout the production process, there were a lot of ideas that ultimately led to the
03:55mimic's final design, and we mean a lot.
03:58We had 4,700 concept illustrations.
04:02Artist Kelton Cram worked with Liman early in the production and provided multiple reference
04:06illustrations.
04:08One particular piece of art rendered the mimics as an almost aquatic creature with translucent
04:12skin and a thinned upper body.
04:14Another piece leaned into abstract forms with a molten exterior on a vaguely humanoid frame.
04:19Digital artist Darren Horley also offered several more humanoid designs.
04:23One element that carried over from that iteration was the shiny obsidian exterior.
04:27At some point during the design process, however, a decision was made to push the mimics towards
04:31a more radical level of bodily abstraction, and the designs began to resemble something
04:35closer to what showed up in the final film.
04:41One of the clear elements that carried through several iterations of the final form was the
04:44tentacles.
04:45In the finished film, their design is so anatomically complex that it's impossible to take in all
04:50the details at first blush.
04:52They move so fast and with such unbound, chaotic energy that it's sometimes hard to tell what
04:56part of them is moving.
04:58You've got to have a big imagination so you can say, oh, camera pans up with the tentacles
05:02and then crashes down as it spears someone.
05:06Concept pieces posted by Kevin Jenkins, who worked extensively on the production design,
05:10show the tentacles coming into their own on several iterations.
05:14The stockier build of this concept may well have informed the design of the larger alphas.
05:18These still aren't quite a one-to-one match to what we ended up seeing in the film, but
05:22it almost gets there.
05:23More than any other artwork, it combines the sense of total freedom with the size and proportions
05:27that make the aliens in the film so menacing.
05:30In the end, after numerous concepts, a finalized design started to coalesce.
05:35VFX house Framestore shared some of the nearly finished concept art, and it's easy to see
05:39pieces of everything that came before.
05:42The obsidian skin, the sinuous build, and the flowing tentacles all owe their existence
05:47to previous iterations.
05:49Taken as a whole, the wide variety of concept art pieces show that the mission of designing
05:53the Mimics was anything but simple.
05:55Every tiny element had multiple variations.
05:58It's still a little too feline, like this one at least feels a little more muscular.
06:03But settling on a picture is one thing, bringing it to life is something else entirely.
06:08The Mimics' animation demands flowed directly from their role in the narrative.
06:12To fit the concept of Cage understanding their behavior only by going up against them again
06:16and again and again, the Mimics needed to be, above all, unpredictable.
06:20That level of strangeness was achieved by making the Mimics big masses of tentacles
06:24that moved individually, but still in sync with each other, a movement unlike that of
06:29any known terrestrial Earth animal.
06:31It was the best way the filmmakers found to make the aliens plausibly incomprehensible,
06:35so that Cage's efforts to gradually figure out their physicality would seem convincingly
06:39arduous.
06:41The movement of the Mimics was largely inspired by a video from animation and visual design
06:45firm SR Partners, which Edge of Tomorrow VFX supervisor Jonathan Faulkner has identified
06:50as Resonance slash Deus Ex Machina.
06:53Faulkner said that the video, with its rapidly expanding and pulsating prisms, quote,
06:58came to embody the random and terrifying kinetics of the Mimics.
07:01As random and terrifying as the Mimics needed to be, however, they couldn't be so bizarre
07:06as to completely defy human comprehension.
07:08There had to be something in their design to ground them, something for the brains of
07:12viewers to grasp onto.
07:14This very specific nuance, the need for the aliens to be as weird as possible yet just
07:18familiar enough to mesh together with the film's realistic action, informed the decision
07:22to bundle all the tentacles together into some kind of coherent and tight-knit body.
07:27Even more crucially, it informed the decision to give the aliens recognizable facial features,
07:31including eyes and a mouth.
07:33The ultimate design of the Mimics was the result of a compromise between two narrative
07:37functions.
07:38Number one, they still needed to move in a realistic way that gave material weight to
07:42the battle sequences.
07:43It wouldn't work if they just looked like wads of spaghetti attacking everyone.
07:47And number two, they needed to be complex and alien enough to dumbfound Cage and the
07:51other soldiers.
07:57Landing on such a complex model led to new problems, namely, animating the things.
08:01One of the issues was the fact that it went against one of the basic tenets of CGI character
08:05animation, the central rigs, or articulated skeletons to which all of the character's
08:10body parts and corresponding movements are tethered.
08:13A body made up of countless noodle-like limbs moving separately would require the creation
08:17of an exponentially large number of rigs replacing each other for every movement of
08:21every tentacle, a near-impossible animation challenge.
08:25To bundle the tentacles into a more cohesive bodily unit while also making them easier
08:29and less unruly to animate, VFX supervisor Daniel Kramer instructed a technical animator
08:34to devise a plugin.
08:35The idea was to position all the tentacles around a center curve.
08:39The plugin would link the tentacles' movement to the curve, thereby allowing it to guide
08:43all the tentacles' movement simultaneously.
08:46We developed a procedural tentacle system to generate bundles of tentacles on the fly.
08:50Kramer told Below the Line,
08:52I wanted 20 tentacles intertwined, twisted, contracted together, to writhe against each
08:57other.
08:58The plugin knew the radius of every tentacle.
09:00If one on the inside grew or slipped, the tentacles above it moved in reaction.
09:04The plugin gave the animators fine control over the mimics' movement, giving them the
09:08freakish range and unpredictability you see in the film.
09:11And thus, the mimics we know were born.
09:14This is a perfectly evolved, world-conquering organism.