The Storyboard Art of Alien 3 : Martin Asbury Article Starlog 1992

"If you want to sum up a Storyboard," Martin Asbury says, "It's a visual script." Storyboards are also one of the most under-appreciated elements in the film making process. They act as an aid for the creative talents comprising the crew. They are shown to potential backers before a movie goes into production, and distribution deals can be cut on the strength of them. [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a221.jpg[/img] Asbury, who Begin his career as a comic book artist and draws the popular Garth strip for British national newspaper The Daily Mirror, was responsible for the Alien 3 Storyboards. His other credits include Greystroke, Legend, Labyrinth, Half Moon Street, Superman IV, Air America and Sir Richard Attenbourgh's upcoming Charlie Chaplin biography, Charlie. "I also did some sequences for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," Asbury adds. "I did the chase on the train at the beginning, and the final sequence, which had to be re-shot. Bust usually Steve Spielberg had his own bullpen of storyboard artists in Los Angeles. He's very keen on storyboards and tends to have them before anything else." Asbury got into the business by sheer luck. "When i was a strip cartoonist, I occasionally did TV commercial storyboards. A friend of mine had an agency dealing with design and graphics, and one day a man literally walked in off the street looking for a storyboard artist. I met this guy, production designer Stuart Craig, and he was about to start work on Greystroke with director Hugh Hudson. It was that simple." "For Greystroke, i did nearly 3,500 huge drawings, many of them full colour. I didn't know they were going to be fed through a copying machine and come out as grey blotches. I learned my lesson on that." "At roughly the same time, Ridley Scott was looking for storyboard artists, because he was going to do Dune at that point, and he contacted me. I got on with Ridley very well, and he had me do a trial sequence for the film. So, he was sort of waiting in the wings, and later rang to ask me to work on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which of course, turned out to be Blade Runner. I had just started on Garth by then and couldn't see how to do the two together, so i declined. But he obviously bore me in mind and invited me to storyboard Legend when i finished Greystroke." [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a222.jpg[/img] [b]Designing the Action[/b] The stage that the the storyboard artist enters the picture can vary. "Sometimes I'm approached long before the films is made, which is the ideal situation, or in pre-production, say, about three months before shooting. I work primarily for the director, although occasionally I'm asked for by the production designer." [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a223.jpg[/img] "Whether the entire film is storyboard depends on the director. Some get offended if you start directing the film for them, and like to keep sequences back for themselves which they have already plotted in their heads." Films employing extensive special FX tend to be completely storyboarded. "In those cases, you must bring together many elements," he explains, "and everyone has to know what they're going to be contributing to the scene. If it's an aerial sequence, for example, the pilots have to know where to fly, and the effects people have to know where things like explosions are going to appear in the sky." Scripts are by no means set in concrete, and one of the reasons that Asbury the work so much is because it allows him a degree of artistic interpretation. "In fact, you're sometimes afforded quite a big creative input and suggest ways of shooting a sequence. Ideally, you are hand-in-glove with the director. You get into his head and know the sort of thing he's looking for. Whether he likes wide-angle shots or very tight shots. You take these preferences into account and try to embroider on his ideas." "Often, you must speculate about things like costume design and characterization when you illustrate a screenplay. The costume designer isn't on the film when you're storyboarding, and sometimes the film hasn't been cast anyways, so you visualize what you think the characters will look like and what they would wear roughly. Obviously, you can't do too much, otherwise you'll be spending your time drawing costumes, not the action." There is no dialogue on a storyboard, but there will be eventually technical notes. "There are a lot of camera directions, and possibly you should know which lens is being used. If the camera is going to be a certain position on set, you need to know whats feasible, and the way to tell a story for a camera rather than the pages of a comic book." "It's a case of thinking logistically about how a sequence can be cut with another sequence, and how a shot can be cut with another shot. You bring a certain frame of mind to it; you have to realize you are part of a team and not the sole creator, as you are in a strip cartoon, where you are the director." Designing Aliens If anything, Alien 3, reportedly a somewhat troubled production, had a surfeit of directors, "Yes," Asbury laughs, "and there were umpteen scripts. I worked with the third and final director [David Fincher] for eight months. The first director [Renny Harlin] couldn't dot it for some reason, and the second was taken off the film." She is rescued by the prisoners, who use an OX to pull the craft up onto the shore, this being a basically low-tech environment. "Ripley is taken underground," Asbury continues, "and has to have all her hair shaved off because there are termites and lice everywhere." [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a224.jpg[/img] [img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v234/LT.HIGHTIMES/1a1a225.jpg[/img] Note: Whats interesting about the above storyboards inside the lead mold is that according to the technical notes at the side it's Clemens and not Dillon or Aaron as featured in early drafts. I haven't seen or heard of any Alien 3 draft written by Hill or Giler where Clemens survives as long as the lead mold during the Bait and Chase sequence so this is a new one to me. These same Storyboards are featured on the Alien 3 Quadrilogy special features disc but without the technical notes. "We cut back to one of the Oxen and we see it go down. You don't see what strikes it, but it's the Alien of course, which enters the animals body. While a corpse is being fed into a furnace inside a vast foundry the prisoners work in, you cross cut with the abattoir, where the dead OX suddenly jerks open, and this foul thing falls out of it. We're up and running then, with the Alien the size of a cow. It has four legs, can run at 40 miles an hour, and is capable of walking across ceilings." The movies payoff is a surprise of sorts and an Alien IV shouldn't be ruled out. "I believe the basic plot for a further film has already been accepted and a first draft script commissioned," Asbury says, "An early scripted Alien 3 proved impractical, we cobbled together a fantastic ending, and then we were told it was very similar to [another movie, Terminator 2]and wasn't going to be allowed. I don't know whether it will or not. [There has been changes.] "Working on the film wasn't an unhappy experience for me, because I love drawing and i liked the people i worked with. But the constant changes were slightly aggravating. I hesitate to say it, but i think that money men now seem to be in control of the studios, rather than filmmakers, the emphasis is much more on making profits" "These people know that if they release a film called Alien 3 they're going to make Millions of dollars, providing they don't exceed the initial budget. So, they don't actually care what the picture's like. That sounds very cynical, but that's the way things work in the industry at the moment." Nevertheless, Martin Asbury thinks the movie will be pretty good. "There were very talented people on Alien 3. I saw some of the prosthetics and special FX being developed for it. It's really wonderful stuff. "Note: Theres a sequence of Storyboards I've not included in this write up. I'm adding them to the Part Three Alien 3 Cut Scenes article. I've spoken to Martin Asbury about this sequence via e-mail. Thank you Martin for the reply. You can view this sequence over on AMR: Clicky Scroll to the bottom of the page. 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