by Dai » Wed Aug 01, 2007 4:26 pm
There's certainly something to be said for visual consistency. John Carpenter made a similar call to this when he was in post production for The Thing. The reveal of the alien's final form at the end of the movie was originally done as stop-motion (the footage is on the film's DVD). It was a great piece of scale work (especially the miniature set), but Carpenter ditched it in favour of a physical effect. While the revised sequence didn't quite match the outstanding quality of some of the practical gags that Rob Bottin and Stan Winston created earlier in the movie, it retained the atmosphere of the film better than stop-motion would have.