Handling the tracking and compositing duties were Light Matters/Pixel Envy's Edson Williams, Colin Strause, Eric Liles and Jody Campanaro, who married the live-action setpieces to the wireframe CG models of the alien vessel's innards, which were then texture-mapped, lit and rendered. "We took a ton of photographs of the real set for reference, and we used some photographic elements to tie the set and CG together," Beck says. "But most of the textures were procedural and fractal textures that had their own complexity, which allowed us to more easily apply them to the wireframe surfaces."
Scully and Mulder eventually escape from the spaceship, emerging into a frozen Arctic landscape just as the UFO begins to blast off, cracking the ice beneath their feet. Once more, Bowman and Beck found themselves treading a fine line. "If we give the audience too much, then it's not The X-Files," affirms Bowman. But how do you keep a spaceship under wraps when it's the climax of your movie? "All you can really see of the spaceship is the underside," Beck says slyly. "Mulder and Scully are sliding off a really small part of it, which we built full size. We shot them on this 20' by 30' section of the spaceship against greenscreen, and getting all of that designed and worked out was an adventure. As the camera zooms around it's facing down, but eventually it spins around and faces up, and then backs off! We had a world of greenscreen up there and had to get the move tricked in so we could digitally extend the setpiece and add the background as needed."
VIFX shot the spaceship erupting out of the ice at high speed, using a 15' saucer model edge section, which the firm built in-house. "I called the 15' model the retaining wall," Beck says. "VIFX's modelers created a textured look by stacking a bunch of layers on top of one another, which gave the side wall of the spaceship some complexity."
When the spaceship finally becomes visible, it's revealed as an immense flying saucer measuring some 1,200' across. The trick for Beck and Bowman was to keep the saucer somewhat oblique, while adding a novel twist on something that audiences have seen countless times before. "Every time we see the ship, it's just enormous and over their heads," Beck says. "The design was a long time in evolution and had some commonality with previous spaceships that we've seen on The X-Files, like the one we did for the 'Paperclip' episode, which Rob directed. That particular vessel was just a very simple CG thing because it was for TV. For the film, I tried to apply the notion of multiple backlit layers, where you can't see what any of them are but you can see light sources behind the shifting patterns. That's a way to hint at complexity without revealing too much information."
With that concept in mind, Beck worked with Tim Flattery in the production art department to come up with the saucer's original design, and with Alison Yerxa, a digital artist at VIFX, to create some unusual textures. In Alias, they devised a craft that appears to be smooth from a distance, but which reveals interesting patterns and textures up close and under certain lighting conditions. "The trick was to make it smooth and sleek-looking, yet have enough texture to make it interesting to look at and to show scale," Beck says. "We also wanted to convey the sense of finer detail than your eye is actually capable of resolving layers behind layers that hint at this underlying structure. In that sense, the spaceship was a metaphor for The X-Files the impression that there are things going on behind the curtain in back of the curtain."
While formulating the spaceship's exterior design, Beck met with VIFX visual effects supervisor John Wash and modelmaker Scott Schneider at Yerxa's workstation, where they experimented with some bizarre textures. "We used a combination of graphic arts techniques and miniature building that allowed us to put really fine, interesting textures on the surface," Beck states. "People have been using etched brass for years to detail miniatures, but I wanted very fine detail within detail, like a city viewed from the air. We got examples of all kinds of aerial photography, such as Moroccan villages with endless repeated structures that look repetitive and structural but at the same time organic. Then I thought it would be cool to use the Quantel Henry's embossing function, so I asked Alison Yerxa if she had any cool fabrics. When I came in the next day, she had thrown her silk jacket on the scanner and created all of these cool textures.
"While Scott Schneider at VIFX was building this gorgeous six-foot spaceship miniature, we sent these various textures to be acid-etched. Instead of etching completely through the brass, we had them do a halftone process, as if they were making printing plates. Then Scott's modelers put the acid-etched brass on the model's surface in layers, so when we hit it with a hard raking light, we'd get these incredible shadows. For the spaceship's interior section, we also used etched brass with light behind it, with more etched brass with more light behind that to create lots of interference between one layer and the next, creating the sense of complexity unseen. Combined with some of John Wash's eloquent flowing mist and cloud elements, the ship looks pretty good."
Dreaming up effects with enough razzle-dazzle for the summer crowd and enough subtlety for The X-Files' core audience was a challenge that perhaps could only be met by seasoned pros steeped in the cult series' mythos. "Mat has known for years how I like to use the camera and my lighting sensibilities," Bowman says. "If I give him just enough time and sometimes that's a minute less than he needs he disappears and makes all of my dreams come true. I'm fortunate to have him around, because every day we're approving another shot that is just mind-boggling. Those things don't happen if you don't have a Mat Beck around."
