By Fred Topel | Image property of 20th Century Fox.
Alien vs Predator: Requiem
The more talkative Strause brother was Colin Strause. The directing team runs the Hydraulx visual effects house together, and directed Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem as a team, but Colin did most of the spokesman duties.
Colin Strause on AVP Requiem
"We met on the first one so we met all the executives over there and our effects company, we’d been doing a lot of work for Fox," said Colin. "We got the backdrop for Day After Tomorrow and we did all the Fan Four movies, X-Men 3, just a ton of stuff over the years and we pitched on Wolfenstein and got really close to selling it at Fox. Then when this thing came around it was all the same executives and everyone. We got our hands on it. We had about a week or so to put together a visual presentation and our ideas of how to take what script they had and where we kind of wanted to put the movie and yeah, we had one really good meeting with them and then we had like two other meetings after that and then we basically had the job booked."
The Strause boys came up with so many different alien and predator creatures, their biggest challenge was making sure the audience could tell them apart. "One of the trickier things too was it’s one thing when you’ve got like all the geeky fans who know everything watch the movie. They go, 'Oh, I know that’s obviously a warrior alien, I know that’s the Pred-Alien' but the biggest issue we had with the design is because we’re going so dark with the movie and there’s a lot of rain and atmosphere and everything is a normal person watching the movie going to be able to tell the difference? That was like one of our biggest tricks, because we knew that hardcore fans would get it instantly but good design also has to appeal to people who don’t give a sh*t about the franchises, just want to go see a movie and they go and actually like it. We had to make sure we included all those people in it as well. We cheated the pigmentation a little bit more yellow on her and just things so that if you just see flashes of her at least a general audience member would be able to track it but at the same time not watering down the design or anything to make it kind of generic."
The Strauses think they have included enough fanboy treats to please them, but still made a movie anyone can watch. "The big thing we did with the movie is just try to make a good scary film. I mean, we tried to treat it not as like a versus movie because I think sometimes people see a vs. movies as being kind of cheesy. Freddy vs. Jason is entertaining, but there’s a little kind of funny cheese to it. We tried to keep it as serious as we could with the creatures and just make a good, scary, dark movie. Basically the idea was to do a kind of like a Texas Chainsaw Massacre with creatures. That’s kind of the tone."
Among the treats for fans is the sound effect for an alien death. "They call that the peacock elephant I guess. It was a weird one off recording in a zoo where they happened to be recording a peacock and in the background a baby elephant squealed at that exact time and that was the exact noise and they literally used that same sound effect over and over again, so we did the same thing."
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