Topps ALIEN trading card, and one of the images used in the video linked below.
The Planetoid Project
Steve Nyland aka Squonkamatic, October 2018
So, a couple of years back I embarked on a mad-dash effort to pay homage to Ridley Scott's genre-defining 1979 masterwork "ALIEN", dredging up in part my fixation on the film since the age of twelve. Leave it as I was quite impressed & remain so, and credit it's influencing me to choose a career as a visual artist. And in the early spring of 2017 had put together a hair-brained idea worthy of "Gilligan's Island" to try and make a mockup Planetoid surface with Alien Art in the enormous studio space I have access to in Utica NY.
The vision I had -- which is still doable, someday -- involved having viewers don "space suits" in an "airlock" and then exit onto the "planetoid surface" and follow a path through forms similar to those in the image above to a "derelict". Upon entering they'd see this "Alien Art" I was intent commissioning, my efforts being oriented towards the environment as a whole. One would then follow a "passageway" festooned with elements of modern day industrial-mechanical-computerized junk which had been partly "infected" by the Alien's corruption. The amount of infested corruption would lesson as the viewer walked along until they came to another "airlock" door and exited the installation.
Still a crackerjack idea derailed by a need for a materials budget & workforce worthy of a small film production in itself, with the final derailing element being the need for insurance before one scrap of lumber had been brought in. Then the legal issue of using the ALIEN franchise for what would have been public usage that could have involved a modest entry fee to help keep the damn thing up for maybe two months of weekends when it could be open for viewing. Six to eight days, something feasible to staff, with an event-like promotion and possibly even timed to happen during the next reboot attempt.
I found my painting again in the disappointment of not being able to take action on the idea and spent the past year on a new creative bent. But one of the artifacts which remains from the marvelous two month brainstorm period is a video "mashup" fan edit culling all of the shots from ALIEN of the human crew walking across the Alien Planetoid and eventually entering the Derelict ship to encounter the Space Jockey. Others have reconstructed other scenes but my favorite part of the movie is when they are on the planet, suited up, and out looking for trouble.
The elements used were minuscule clips, sometimes two or three seconds, found on various "Making Of" or "History Of" the ALIEN franchise, cutscenes included as bonus features from authorized releases, and some of my own ALIEN related media forms like the Topps picture above. I re-arranged some of the audio and used a bit of artistic liberty to create a "story arc" which begins & ends at the airlock. And if I might say, working on and then viewing the results was one of the most fulfilling artistic experiences of the past decade. It is really something.
(can't seem to make the embed code work ... making coffee)
Just to be thorough, here s a prior build from my YT channel, though the picture clarity and sound editing is nowhere near as robust as what is on Vimeo: I learned shit while making this, how about that. Would also like to stress that neither edit utilized the "Virtual Workprint". They are digital collages made up of bits & pieces from different sources and samples of audio from the Theatrical cut.
The older version.
NO INFRINGEMENT INTENDED!
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