Invasion season 2’s VFX supervisor on designing a ‘more pure’ alien entity

The world as we all know it’s on the brink of collapse in Invasion season 2 — however fortuitously for humanity, Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna) isn’t taking place with out a battle.

The Japanese area engineer has taken heart stage in Invasion’s second season, repeatedly going head-to-head with a hive-mind creature aboard the spaceship downed in season 1. These intense encounters between Mitsuki and the alien intelligence add a new, private dimension to Invasion’s invasion (sorry), whilst they dramatically broaden the Apple TV Plus sequence’ current lore.

With this in thoughts, Polygon caught up with director Alik Sakharov and VFX supervisor Erik Henry over Zoom to speak by how Mitsuki’s season 2 arc got here collectively — and the way the hive thoughts’s potential affect on Invasion’s wider narrative heading into season 3 would possibly result in beforehand unseen otherworldly life kinds cropping up sooner or later.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Invasion season 2.]

So why was now the best time in Mitsuki’s journey — to not point out the overarching Invasion story — to introduce an adversary able to speaking together with her by way of the voice and reminiscences of her useless girlfriend, Hinata (Rinko Kikuchi)? According to Sakharov and Henry, Mitsuki confronting such a foe (which the forged and the crew dubbed “the Entity”) was merely a logical extension of the place her story left off in season 1.

“We thought that Mitsuki was over her mourning for her partner, Hinata, but very early on in episode 1 we realize that she’s far from over [her],” Sakharov says. “She’s very much under the effect of that loss. And I think she’s carrying that personal agenda […] to find out what really happened. So, when she partially succeeds in getting into the ‘mind’ of the Entity, when she establishes communication in episode 5 when she utters the word ‘Hinata,’ and she’s stunned when she hears that and then she hears her voice, which evaporates from the little girl into this entity that’s just dancing all around her […] she reaches out towards that voice and when she hears Hinata telling her, ‘I wanna feel you. I want you to remove your glove.’ […] When she does, then she’s in trouble.”

Image: Apple TV Plus

Henry additionally notes that the thoughts video games between Mitsuki and the Entity had been all the time important to the subsequent stage of the invasion in co-creator and showrunner Simon Kinberg’s thoughts. “I believe that the arc of the seasons is something that Simon had always planned,” the VFX supervisor explains, noting that Kinberg’s roadmap for the Apple TV Plus present extends past the second season.

But no matter precisely how lengthy Kinberg was kicking across the Entity idea when he lastly pitched it to the crew, he was very particular about what the creature’s design wanted to convey. The showrunner insisted that the Entity ought to register as a “higher life form” than both season 1’s drones or their upgraded Hunter Killer incarnations, that are “essentially robots.” This meant shifting away from Invasion’s established alien aesthetic to one thing “more pure in its substance.” The dimension of the Entity enclosure set and the way Sakharov and Kutsuna would possibly conceivably block out the latter’s efficiency had been early design concerns, too.

“It came down to: Well, do you want the higher life form to be able to have […] an emotional arc? Then what do we do for that?” Henry says. “We cherished the concept of with the ability to have a colour palette that might assist an viewers member perceive ache or an emotion.

“It may seem too on the nose, but when you have something that [doesn’t] have a face, you have to kind of come up with the best that you can. The other thing we did is made sure that there were times when the shape would change and when it would reach out to her, when it would shiver in pain, and actually you’d see the kind of contortions that this otherwise shapeless mass takes on when it’s being hurt.”

Image: Apple TV Plus

Henry admits that the Invasion crew needed to mull over extra than simply season 2’s scripts when designing the Entity, although. Specifically, he acknowledges that he and Kinberg had been aware of potential overlap with James Cameron’s 1989 sci-fi basic The Abyss, whose most iconic scene revolves across the pseudopod: a shape-shifting extraterrestrial.

“I worked on The Abyss. It’s the first show I ever worked on […] and I did mention it to Simon [like], ‘Well, what do you think? I’m trying not to make it too much like The Abyss,’” Henry says. “And he [said] that, ‘You know what? I understand that there’s some nods to it there, unintentional or intentional. […] If that comparability is there, nice.’

“But none of that was intentional. […] You’re answering what’s on the script, and what Simon would like the general shape to be, and we come up with something that I like to call moving blown glass, and I think it’s quite beautiful.”

Once the Entity’s design was locked down, it was time to deliver the drones’ blobby boss to life on display. The completed pictures contain a mix of sensible lighting results and CGI, and Sakharov and Henry are fast to credit score one another’s departments for the largely seamless outcomes. Henry praised Sakharov and director of pictures Gavin Struthers for devising a particular mild rig that amounted to a moveable “box of light” stuffed with coloured bulbs. By shifting the rig towards and away from Kutsuna, the pair was in a position to choreograph on-set interactive lighting that synced up with the predetermined conduct of the VFX crew’s Entity character mannequin.

“We would vary the intensity of the light as needed so that when the Entity gets closer to Mitsuki, the intensity of the light and its color shift and its whole chromatic aberration would change its hue and shape and intensity,” Sakharov says. “And so we were able to sell it like that, and then special visual effects erased all that stuff and put the actual Entity in place.”

Of course, the technical facets of the Entity scenes solely symbolize one half of the equation. Kutsuna’s efficiency would finally play a main half in promoting the phantasm that she was actually sharing scenes together with her CGI co-star. Fortunately, Kutsuna proved greater than as much as the problem.

“She’s amazing in that she’s very, very subtle. She does not overdo anything,” Sakharov says. “She has a large capability to think about at what level throughout the timeline of the scene she ought to elicit a explicit response, though she’s principally simply reacting to an empty area as a result of then that vacant area was changed by the Entity, which the visible results will fantastically put in.

“And so, it was basically just finessing little bits here and there in the timeline and then she would address it in different takes. And then I would splice it all together and it would work nice.”

“Nice” is an understatement — the Mitsuki/Entity dynamic has arguably made for essentially the most compelling moments of Invasion season 2 aired so far. This is particularly true of the latest showdown between the pair in episode 8, “Cosmic Ocean,” which hints that we’ve solely scratched the floor of the present’s mythology. Not solely does Mitsuki seemingly deal a seemingly deadly blow to the Entity in “Cosmic Ocean,” however she additionally discovers that the creature doubles as a portal to the aliens’ lair — and no matter as-yet-unseen beings reside there.

So, does this imply Kinberg and co. produce other new, doubtlessly much more formidable cosmic critters lined-up for Invasion season 3, within the occasion Apple provides it the inexperienced mild?

“As a science fiction lover, I would say I would certainly hope so, but I couldn’t possibly tell you in any way, shape, or form what’s coming up,” Henry says. “I will say: Things get real interesting as [the show] moves on. You will not be disappointed.”