ALIEN Nostromo Maquette Model

A cool CG rendering has just hit the web:

CG_Nostromo_by_YannSouetre.jpg
 
I think this awesome pic comes from jtparker WEYLAN YUTANI site...

Fred

Yeah, if I could only get time to finish the site..I will probably need to hire people to do it!:lol:lol:lol:lol:lol

Actually its Solomon Shipyards, complete with sandy beaches, fully serviced repair platforms, and convenient reactor-waste disposal facility
 
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Yeah, if I could only get time to finish the site..I will probably need to hire people to do it!:lol:lol:lol:lol:lol

Actually its Solomon Shipyards, complete with sandy beaches, fully serviced repair platforms, and convenient reactor-waste disposal facility

Oh, sweet...out of the Solomons. What's the URL?
 
Oh, sweet...out of the Solomons. What's the URL?

Actually it is a site I registered a few months back, I started it, and got really busy doing these nostromo kits, I plan to do coffee mugs, beer cans anything Weylan-yutani that anyone wants to link or sell their props...kind of a community deal, Nostromo models of different sizes, its kind of a parody site regarding the original Alien, but it will be like a shopping cart deal. I will end up probably hiring out somebody to actually finish it for me..I just dont have the time for html coding :unsure:unsure I worked with this guy to do the Nostromo boxes, The pic of the Platform is another guys digital art

www.weyland-yutani-inc.com
 
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A piece of cyberspace related to the genesis of the Nostromo and again the words 'Foss' and 'Chris' are nowhere to be seen!

Someone above mentioned the gap between Cobb's concepts and the utilitarian look of the final Nostromo. Well, the missing element is Chris Foss, co-designer of spacecraft on the film along with Cobb.

Cobb so often gets all the credit for this design. But the basic configuration of this thing - especially the hull core - comes from an early pen sketch Chris Foss did for the movie (see 1st pic), while the top module with the big intakes seen on the finished model was taken verbatim from another early Foss ink sketch (see 2nd pic). Also, the huge rectiform box engines with flaps are a Foss trademark and are to be seen all over his designs for Alien - actually, one of the closest of these forms to the final Nostromo engines is to be seen in a sketch of an alien structure (dropped from the script) on the planet (pic 3).

The Cobb sketches shown above are the first I've ever seen that bear any resemblance to the final Nostromo, and appear to be an attempt to absorb the above Foss elements into one of his own earlier concepts, probably at the behest of Scott. Yet Scott rejected the top section seen in the 2nd sketch above and the maquette, and just went back to Foss and added that upper module wholesale.

And as for the yellow and black... the guy spent the whole 70s painting ships in yellow and black checks and stripes... (Scott must surely have seen the potential to emphasize the industrial character of the Nostromo by having the livery evoke the warning/hazard markings of some bleak piece of contemporary industrial machinery, but seems to have been compelled to go Gothic instead.)

Ok, Foss rant over.

But just to get properly on topic - that maquette is wonderful. Tempted to do one myself. Good luck with it.
 
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A piece of cyberspace related to the genesis of the Nostromo and again the words 'Foss' and 'Chris' are nowhere to be seen!

Someone above mentioned the gap between Cobb's concepts and the utilitarian look of the final Nostromo. Well, the missing element is Chris Foss, co-designer of spacecraft on the film along with Cobb.

I don't entirely agree. Not whether Foss elements made it into the final designs, but more the utilitarian look deriving from his work - I recall hearing or reading that the models initially did resemble the smoother Cobb look very closely and the 'yellow' pics do bear that out. So I think Scott and the modelmakers get most of the credit for the final hyper-detailed widgety look.

I'm a huge Foss fan though. It's really a damn shame that with several bites at the cherry (Jodorowsky's Dune, Superman, Alien), nothing overtly Fossian ever made it onto the big screen. I have a half-finished sculpt of his Dune pirate ship around here somewhere...
 
I don't entirely agree. Not whether Foss elements made it into the final designs, but more the utilitarian look deriving from his work - I recall hearing or reading that the models initially did resemble the smoother Cobb look very closely and the 'yellow' pics do bear that out. So I think Scott and the modelmakers get most of the credit for the final hyper-detailed widgety look.

I'm a huge Foss fan though. It's really a damn shame that with several bites at the cherry (Jodorowsky's Dune, Superman, Alien), nothing overtly Fossian ever made it onto the big screen. I have a half-finished sculpt of his Dune pirate ship around here somewhere...

Always nice to meet a Foss fan. I was taking 'utilitarian' to mean not so much the greeblie crustification, of which there's never very much on a Foss ship, but rather the box forms, 'intakes', flaps etc. I'd agree that the final model surface is all Scott, Bower, Pearson et al. But I would say the yellow Nostromo surface looks more Foss than Cobb, since there seems to have been some vague attempt even to recreate the Foss 'dotting' as well as bits of check paint scheme...

Please... finish the sculpt of that Dune ship! Guess it's out of the bounds of the whole forum, but I'd love to see it. Any chance of pm-ing a photo over?
 
Always nice to meet a Foss fan. I was taking 'utilitarian' to mean not so much the greeblie crustification, of which there's never very much on a Foss ship, but rather the box forms, 'intakes', flaps etc. I'd agree that the final model surface is all Scott, Bower, Pearson et al. But I would say the yellow Nostromo surface looks more Foss than Cobb, since there seems to have been some vague attempt even to recreate the Foss 'dotting' as well as bits of check paint scheme...

Likewise. :)

You could say the box forms etc bear some Foss stamps, but - to my eye - they've very much been 'packaged' by Cobb (of whom I'm also a giant raving nerdy fan.) I don't really mourn the yellow Nostromo; it needed to visibly dirty at a greater distance to really work, for me. Some big black checkerboards would have settled the Foss question nicely, and looked good to boot. ;)

Please... finish the sculpt of that Dune ship! Guess it's out of the bounds of the whole forum, but I'd love to see it. Any chance of pm-ing a photo over?

It could go in the General modelling section I guess. It's about 45cm long. Unfortunately it's not the 'good' cast. In fact it's barely a cast at all, it's more of a smashed eggshell. I did two casts out of raw plaster moulds, in Bondo - no glassing, no nothing. First one came out fine, but was given to a friend (who has lost it). Second one stuck to the plaster - as a result of overoptimism from the ease of demoulding the first one, I didn't grease it properly.

Lovely ship though, I will definitely have to give the project another go. I'll see if I can dig up the pieces and take a pic or two. One half of the hull is more or less useable, though rough as guts. The other may need a complete redo. The engine pods are still in the plaster jackets, it's going to take a palaeontologist's approach to get those out! :D
 
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I love Chris Foss' work a lot (at least, the paintings from his book 20TH CENTURY FOSS) but I can understand why Ron Cobb finalized the ship design...

Foss' visions of the ship were too fantastic, to weird, Scott needed something more believable, more "NASA / WW2 bomber" to oppose it to Giger's twisted creations...

Foss' designs for Jodorowsky's DUNE were just fine, they matched more the intentions of this project than Scott's ALIEN imho...

My 2 cents...

Fred
 
A little Foss from my files. :cool

I like Foss' stuff for its imaginative, totally unexpected design and coloration. Cobb's stuff is lots more "real world" and familiar, but Foss' wild colors and extreme shapes look like no craft man ever built.

These days when I see "The Fifth Element", I think some of his designs might have been at home there.

alienfossasteroidrefine.jpg


alienfossship.jpg


Nobody paints pink and yellow spaceships quite ilke Chris Foss. :lol

imageuploadimaged.jpg


As fanciful as some of his stuff is, a lot of his spaceships have an eerie plausibility to them. Covered with alien writing, outlined hatches, plating, hull markings, recessed windows, thruster engine bells and so on.

Foss fans should pick up his artbook 21st CENTURY FOSS, from Paper Tiger.

imageuploadimage.jpg


A lot of his ALIEN work is reprinted in THE BOOK OF ALIEN.

Earlier in the Seventies, Foss put his stamp on SPACE 1999 with a bit of preproduction concept art. I have only ever seen this tiny sample.

iichrisfoss.jpg



- k
 
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I love Chris Foss' work a lot (at least, the paintings from his book 20TH CENTURY FOSS) but I can understand why Ron Cobb finalized the ship design...

Foss' visions of the ship were too fantastic, to weird, Scott needed something more believable, more "NASA / WW2 bomber" to oppose it to Giger's twisted creations...


My 2 cents...

Fred

I dunno, though. There are a lot of very gritty workaday space-truck designs for Alien in the Scanlon and Gross book, many of them clearly deriving from Foss' love of real-world marine vessels, tankers and so on.

And as I said, if you stick the 3 elements together from the 3 sketches I posted above you've got a good 65% of the final Nostromo right there. Especially that upper module...
 
Here is some of Cobb's early concept work for Nostromo, then called Snark, Leviathan, Surveyor and probably other things as well.



cobbstromo.jpg


Snark was my favorite design, partly because I saw the sketch printed in Cinefantastique magazine, months before the film came out, and fell in love with that giant dish antenna. :lol :love

snark.jpg


aliencobbsnark2.jpg


aliencobbsnark3.jpg


Likely it was felt the large dish made the ship seem too small. :unsure

But the same overall scheme seems to be in use here.... these designs share a common theme.

surveyor215ag.jpg
 
Phase Pistol...Yeah, not only can no one paint pink and yellow ships like Foss, no one else can dream in quite such powerfully convincing architechtonics. In terms of hallucinagenic, hypnotic form, Giger is his only peer. It's no wonder that, like Giger, his vision has spilled out of the sphere of commercial fantasy illustration into contemporary art circle respectability.

Cobb's great too but he's something different, more of a real world engineer. But Foss, like Giger, touches some deeper nerve somewhere. Something in the unconscious. Somehow, he gives expression to man's primordial aspiration for limitless vertical ascendancy or something, heh, heh. Ask Jodorowosky, he'll explain it better...
 
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