Vitaly Bulgarov, the talented conceptual artist who previously worked on Transformers: Age of Extinction and RoboCop, was brought on board Terminator Genisys and asked to update the T-800 endoskeleton design.
That’s a daunting task in and of itself, but especially so when you consider that renowned special effects make-up and animatronics wizard Stan Winston — who passed away in 2008 while working on Terminator Salvation (2009) — originally brought to life Skynet’s most proficient and chillingly scary killing machine for James Cameron’s 1984 classic.
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“Needless to say, it is hard to update or improve what is already perfect,” Bulgarov wrote on his site. “The biggest challenge was to respectfully preserve the key areas of the iconic [look of] Stan Winston’s design while updating the mechanical design to make it more in-line with today’s manufacturing technologies as well as more according to the industrial design continuity of the endoskeleton as a whole. The original skull became sort of an anchor point and reference for the visual language and I didn’t allow myself to retouch its design. One of the aspects I tried to refine was to how internal skeleton’s parts would affect the outer fleshy shapes seen at the skin layer. That thinking suggested a slightly more round bone-like reshaping of the forms that were previously a bit too pointy or too harshly mechanical at the areas that were in direct contact with muscles or close to outer skin layer. That pass was done in a more subtle way in order to preserve the powerful scary feeling that a raw mechanical skeleton originally suggested.
“Another task I was given was to make the proportions of the skeleton slightly more exaggerated than of an average human making it easier to see Arnold’s Mr. Olympia body around it,” he added. “Lastly I did an overall detail pass to make sure the design would hold up on extreme close-ups. Legacy Effects did a fantastic job bringing this design to reality and I was very pleased with how it turned out on the big screen.”
Click on “START SLIDESHOW” to check out Bulgarov’s T-800 endoskeleton designs.
When John Connor (Jason Clarke), leader of the human resistance against Skynet, sends Kyle Reese back to 1984 to protect his mother, Sarah (Emilia Clarke), from a Terminator assassin, an unexpected turn of events creates an altered timeline. Instead of a scared waitress, Sarah is a skilled fighter and has a Terminator guardian (Arnold Schwarzenegger) by her side. Faced with unlikely allies and dangerous new enemies, Reese sets out on an unexpected new mission: reset the future.
Paramount Pictures and Skydance Productions present Terminator Genisys. Executive producers Bill Carraro, Laeta Kalogridis, Patrick Lussier, Megan Ellison, and Robert Cort. Produced by David Ellison, p.g.a. and Dana Goldberg, p.g.a. Written by Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier. Directed by Alan Taylor.
On a $155M production budget, Terminator Genisys grossed $440.6 million at the worldwide box office in 2015.
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