Neville Page, Lead Creature Designer on Star Trek.

J.J. Abrams enjoyed Neville Page's creature design for http://vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=3524 ">Cloverfield so much that he invited him to beam aboard his Star Trek reboot. Page tells VFXWorld what it was like designing the two creatures from Delta Vega, along with providing a sneak peek at two other projects: Tron and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Unfortunately, he's still under a vow of secrecy concerning James Cameron's Avatar.

Bill Desowitz: So did you know from the start that you would be designing these two creatures on the Delta Vega Ice Planet?

Neville Page: No, when I read the script and it was originally a desert scene. I think they thought it was too similar to Tatooine.

BD: Anything you did would evoke Star Wars.

NP: Of course. So instead of working for various designs for that scene and there was another one cut from the original script, it eventually came down to an ice planet, which changed everything. And J.J. conceived this notion of this creature that's under the ice. And you see a glimpse of it. Unfortunately, they didn't do that scene. I think that would've been a good tease. But the idea was to come up with a red herring creature. My idea was the Polarilla, which was really a throwaway kind of creature. The point of that was to do something quick to chase Kirk as a decoy: something like the Abominable Snowman but different. And it was a very quick sketch that looked pedestrian: it was more like a bat head and a polar bear. But as it evolved, I took it down the road of being more like a gorilla and polar bear. It just ended up like it was the cart leading the horse with that one. I just ran with it. But it got pretty detailed in the end. You never see it in the film, which is pretty unfortunate. With it moving so quickly and the snow and the mist, it's more of a visceral moment.

Big Red was a highlight of the production. All images © Paramount Pictures. Courtesy of Neville Page.

BD: What about Big Red?

NP: So developing the real threat was kind of interesting. J.J. had a [few] things that he was very specific about: he wanted it to be red in contrast to the snow, which I think was purely an aesthetic thing, he wanted hands that could reach out and grab Kirk. And he also wanted to have hundreds of eyes all over its head and body.

BD: And where did you go from there?

NP: The red part was the only thing I agreed with. The hundreds of eyes I struggled with from a biological standpoint and the hands I struggled with from the notion of there not being much of a struggle -- Kirk is just going to get pulled in. So I designed alternatively a tongue that could allow Kirk to put up resistance and in the end J.J. used that. And he never did use the eyes that much.

So the design went down many paths that J.J. didn't like. I was trying to explore something that would be awkward on the ice, sort of like a walrus/seal. My main concern was that it couldn't run too quickly, so, like a walrus, if it could be really agile underwater and could keep popping up above the ice where Kirk is running toward. So the chase scene was a bit more mysterious. But we kept it on the ice and J.J. wanted it to have legs, so I basically came up with some rough sketches that felt different enough from what I've done before and from what we've seen in other films. I think the breakthrough for the character is [the combination] of the front end looking like a bat and the backend looking like a tree frog. So the next thing was trying to combine the motion of both vampire bats and tree frogs. I gave them to a friend you might know, Alex Alvarez [of Gnomon]. We worked together on Avatar in the same capacity where I brought him on board to approve concepts of the animation and rendered images. He did such a great job with animating a rough walk cycle assisted by Sofia Vale Cruz. We showed J.J. and it was so spot-on between the bat and the frog that our animation test became the baseline for ILM to riff off of.