Picturing: Filming Aliens in their Limbo Lair

Yours truly, behind the Arriflex BL III 35 mm camera, shoots a scene of aliens doing their evil thing. Hyper-Reality is the name of the uncompleted film. I co-wrote (with the talented Tim A. Cook and Michelle Berry), directed, and designed the short ― of a planned 22-minute duration.

We shot these sequences in Studio 1 at the then 23FPS Studios here in Toronto. At the time I was working as an "optical camera/printer operator" (film compositor) at Film Opticals of Canada Ltd.

My initial designs for the "Alien Lair" had a rocky wall background, as in a cave. This approach would have been yet another expense, and it forced me to rethink the idea:

Go "Full Irwin Allen"!

Redesigning the abode with a black limbo background was the cost-saving key, and one method of many that the always frugal Mr Allen impressed upon his crew during production of the (horrible) television series Lost in Space (1965 - 1968).