Invasion VFX Supervisor Erik Henry On Season 2 & Surprises In Store

Erik Henry: Yes, Simon Kinberg, the creator of the show, had asked me to come aboard because he was good friends with someone I had worked with before, and he said ‘Hey, my friend tells me you’re the guy to do this sort of work’, which is interesting, because I hadn’t been doing shows in space or science fiction in a long time. I had been doing really a lot of reality-based shows, but I have it in my history, so I was delighted to hear that I could go back to it.

Both in season 1 and season 2, Simon gave me the ability to make up things and be super collaborative. He is a really unique guy and his track record speaks for itself, and he gave me a lot of responsibility. I love that kind of thing, and I really ran with it and came up with the alien world and universe, and tried to make it all makes sense. That’s the kind of show I like to watch, one where you say “Okay, someone thought about these aliens and the ships and how they could make it here to Earth, and what are their abilities.” You build an ecosystem, if you will, that makes sense. That’s kind of how I enjoy watching shows and science fiction I think is super important that way, so hopefully, when people see the show, whether it be season one or season two – and the aliens are really amped up in season two – people see that it was well thought-out and intelligently set forth, because that’s super important to both Simon and myself.

Erik Henry: You know, my early career and most of my career, I could say, it was features. The different thing about this long form and multiple episodes is the ability to build on certain ideas. In season 2, we have an alien lifeform that doesn’t have eyes, it doesn’t have a mouth, and it’s hard to emote. But we took the challenge on and said ‘Okay, how can we make people understand that it’s feeling pain, or is happy, or in an intimate moment, what do you do? Do you change the shape, or the color, or the texture?’, and we did all of those things. That, to me, is wonderful, in that you have multiple episodes to build on that. It doesn’t have to all happen right away.

In a film, you have scenes to build on that, and anything that takes more time gives you an ability to explore other aspects. And so, I think that’s what this show helps you with. You’re able to see the evolution of this alien, and understand what its motivation is. I think if you watch the scenes with that alien, there’s a big arc that happens, but it is a bit of a thing that you have to explore over time. It’ really great watching television shows that can do that well, and I think this one does. It pays off if you stay with it.

Erik Henry: Well certainly, that one has to rank as the biggest challenge for the reasons I talked about. It’s hard if you don’t have eyes and a mouth and dialogue to express emotions. The other challenge that I think was really rewarding was the fact that in season 1, we had a single alien, and it was there for a purpose that was not necessarily to kill people, it was there terraforming. And in season 2, Simon said ‘Okay, we’ve got to take it up a notch, you’re gonna create a warrior class”, but as I like to say, in building an ecosystem, you need to be able to say that the same people built these two things. I don’t like filmmaking that deviates from that, I like to think that it’s all built by the same person, and that makes me like a show. So, the challenge with that sort of warrior class alien, they don’t have mouths and such, they are kind of like drones, but it had to adapt. I had to be more aggressive, and have the ability to run faster and be able to maneuver in a way that a pack of wolves would, and we know how they work.

We definitely took on those aspects, and for those of your audience who say ‘Yeah, but how does an alien lifeform move like a pack of wolves? That’s our planet.’, and I would say that’s one of the things we thought was super important was adapting to the location that you arrive at and finding that because of gravity or atmosphere or whatever it is, you do develop. I mean, things developed here, and it just happened faster with him, and certainly, this new life form that you’ll see in season 2, is one that has appendages that, unlike the first alien are deadly and designed for the purpose of killing at a human scale. That whole pack mentality goes into the fact that Simon had always said that they communicate through a hive mind, so it made a lot of sense.

So, those are two challenging aliens that we have on the show, and I think that that’s overall the most rewarding work, though we have some amazing shots of ships, and those environments, both in the Amazon rainforest and then up in the air, there’s all kinds of great spaceship stuff that you’ll see on the show. It’s hard to get those right, the scale and such wonderful work done by all the different visual effects companies on the show, I owe them a great debt.

Erik Henry: Well, I can’t give anything away, but we are in talks with Simon, and he has a great idea to evolve into a lifeform that is going to be quite interesting for us, and while a great challenge, I think also his ideas are forming into something that narratively, people will really, really connect with. I really can’t say anything more than that, but stay tuned. I think season 3 has some really epic ideas.