MONSTER MASH

Inspired by the movie magic of monsters since a child, creature designer Ken Barthelmey’s biggest influences were Star Wars and Jurassic Park. With the White Spikes in The Tomorrow War, the worlds have collided… What creatures and films were inspirations growing up?

There are many famous creature designs that inspired me, from Giger’s Alien to Godzilla and everything in-between. When I saw Predator for the first time, the design blew me away and fired my imagination. I had never seen something like that before.

What elements do you look for when creating a hostile creature?

There are many different ways of how you can make a creature look hostile and scary, but I found there are three main elements; the teeth, cheekbones and the eyes. The teeth are probably the most important. Actually, “scary-looking teeth” is the most common note I get when I work on a design. I like well-designed teeth, therefore I try to spend a bit more time working on the mouth design. Cheekbones can make a character or creature appear more hostile as well. I think an extremely lean face is subconsciously reminding us of a skull and maybe death.

And lastly there’s the eyes. Sometimes little details like eyes can make or break a design. Often I try to find a way to “hide” the eyes. It’s strange and scary to look at something that doesn’t have eyes. I believe that’s one of the reasons why HR Giger’s Alien was so terrifying.

What was the brief you received for the White Spikes?

In our Skype meetings Chris mentioned HR Giger’s Alien and Hellraiser as reference points, but he also encouraged me to show him additional ideas. He liked the work he had seen on my website and wanted to see what I’d come up with.

The White Spikes attack and eat everything that they see. Chris asked for a compelling design that conveyed the hunger and intelligence of these creatures. Additionally the aliens needed to have different abilities such as fast swimming, flying and shooting spikes. It was important that they were very agile and be able to move extremely fast. It was my job to translate all this information into one design.

Were there many different versions of the creatures?

I did a few alien options that were bigger and had more body mass compared to the final design. One had a shorter body with long frog-like legs. I came up with the idea of spike-shooting tentacles and pitched the idea in a sketch. Chris and everyone else loved that idea and wanted me to develop that particular design further. I think it became one of the more memorable features of the design.

Based on notes I received from Chris and production designer Peter Wenham, I did 67 different alterations in total of that design until we found the final version. Those alterations consisted of different head shapes, eyes, spikes and legs.

Is there a legendary movie you’d love to reimagine if you were given the chance?

I’ve had the great pleasure to work on a few franchises that I’ve been a fan of since childhood, but I’ve never worked on a Star Wars film yet. Star Wars is definitely on my bucket list, and the same applies to Alien. Nevertheless I think the original is always the best; in that regard, you always end up having limitations when you try to reimagine something. Therefore as a designer I’m much more interested in designing new characters or creatures that haven’t been seen before.