Wētā FX Team Details Creative Process Behind Season 2’s Aliens (Exclusive)

Liam Crowley

10/19/2023 06:44 pm EDT

Apple TV+’s gold standard of sci-fi programming is actively being redefined by Invasion. Coming from the minds of critically-acclaimed producers Simon Kinberg (The Martian, X-Men: Days of Future Past) and David Weil (Hunters, Citadel), Invasion is a hyper-realistic take on an alien attack story. The series chronicles the titular takeover through the perspectives of everyday people. A family of four going through a marital hardship. A soldier displaced from his unit. A group of schoolchildren stranded following a bus crash. These rotating POVs give Invasion the visceral authenticity that helps set it apart from premises in a similar family, but it’s the aliens themselves that truly make this show one of a kind.

Invasion’s Wētā FX Team Detail Creating Season 2’s Aliens

The invading species has upped their game.

As showcased in Invasion Season 2, the “worker” aliens were just the tip of the iceberg, as more vicious “hunter-killer” aliens are now roaming Earth’s surface.

“We started looking at animals for reference,” Wētā FX animation supervisor Paul Ramsden told ComicBook.com. “We knew we wanted them to be powerful and heavy. You’re looking at things in nature that you can draw from. We’re looking at bears, big cats like lions and tigers and things like that.”

“There was definitely a continuity in how we wanted the new creature to look and feel with the old creature,” Wētā FX visual effects supervisor Thrain Shadbolt, who joined Invasion in Season 2, added. “There was definitely an intention to keep a similar kind of design language and style between the two creatures across the different seasons.”

The Wētā FX team leaned on the bodies and movements to give these different aliens their own distinct feel, as none of the aliens shown thus far have faces.

“They’re meant to be kind of biomechanical, almost like machines in a way, alien technology,” Shadbolt explained. “That’s why the hunter-killer doesn’t have a mouth. It doesn’t need to feed and it senses the world around it through some other weird mechanism that we don’t quite understand. How do you make it look scary when it doesn’t have a mouth or eyes? I think there’s a lot of body motion and that going on, which helps portray that.”

“Something we developed this season specifically was the ability to present the ferro-fluid effects in animation,” Ramsden added. “That really helped our artists to be able to sell the entire performance this time around. Season 1, we would do the performance and then their ferro-fluid would get added on top. It was like another layer of performance getting added down the line. This season we were able to present the entire performance in one go. I think that was extremely useful for the artists when they’re trying to develop these performances out because they have more to use. More to make these things scary.”

Regarding selling that fear within the aliens’ movements alone, Shadbolt pointed back to animal reference points.

“We were then able to use that ferro-fluid surface on certain parts of the body to help cell, it’s kind of aggression and so on. It is almost like there’s a bit of a mane around its neck, almost like a kind when a cat puffs it’s fur up and makes itself look bigger and more aggressive,” Shadbolt mentioned. “It can do it a similar kind of thing there. I think we’ve found ways to work around what would otherwise potentially be limitations in getting the mood or the aggression of the creature across.”

Introducing the hunter-killers was what first gave the Invasion Season 1 creatures the classification as “workers,” as before the hunter-killers came along it was assumed that the entire invading species looked and moved like workers. Now that Invasion Season 2 has opened up this alien race to being full of surprises, Ramsden noted he enjoys the challenge of working with new creatures each season.

“That’s the thing that drew me to the project in the first place: doing this thing that no one’s ever seen before. Coming back for Season 2 and being told there’s a new creature to work with again, it got me excited,” Ramsden said. “As soon as I saw it, I was like, this is great. We’re going to have a lot of fun with this thing. I’m just really excited if they go for further seasons, what we might see.”

Invasion Season 2’s finale streams next Wednesday, October 25th on Apple TV+.

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