The screenwriter who wrote the first Alien movie died this week after a 30-year battle with Crohn’s disease (after looking it up on the NIH’s site, he really suffered). Besides creating a very iconic monster through HR Giger and Ridley Scott, he co-wrote Total Recall, Screamers, Invaders from Mars and Lifeforce. Oddly, I’ve seen all these. He’s also famous for writing and directing The Return of the Living Dead which was supposed to be a parody of Romero’s zombie flicks, I will leave that judgment to Somara, I have little interest in Horror flicks.
What I found surprising was that he did the “computer graphics” for Star Wars. I use quotes because when I dug around, Hollywood didn’t have the means do what has become rather ubiquitous since Pixar’s work. Some of the displays in the movie were rendered on a computer screen one frame at a time and then photographed, much like stop-motion films. Others were hand-drawn illustrations animated on to television screens. This was a technique also used in 2001. It’s still impressive because Mr. O’Bannon’s art direction on the how the future would look paved the way for what followed in reality and successive Science Fiction/Fantasy.