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Weta Workshop’s designers began exploring the world of District 9 in late 2006. At the time, little was known about the film, which was simply referred to as Project X among the Weta crew, but the earliest direction made it clear that it would be similar in setting and tone to Neill Blomkamp’s short film, Alive in Joburg, featuring tentacle-faced, humanoid aliens in a grim South African slum.

“To hide the form of a human puppeteer, I looked at hunching the shoulders and dropping the head into a stoop. I also thought it’d be interesting to deprive the aliens of fully developed legs, maybe suggesting a semi-aquatic origin and giving them industrial-looking robotic stilts that would disguise the actor’s legs (above).”

Daniel Falconer – designer

The stigmatized aliens themselves would be the first design task tackled by the artists, with a large team contributing ideas in an initial frenzy of conceptualization. The guidelines at the time were that the creatures should have tentacled faces and hands, and be designed with practical creature-suit wearing human performers in mind, distorting the recognizable human form wherever possible.

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“I had one idea that the aliens might have very sensitive skin or eyes, so they’d cover themselves with whatever they could find, like garbage bags, newspapers, clothing, signs, hats… I thought it’d be funny if they all try to wear sunglasses, but of course they don’t fit, so they break them and then maybe tape them on.”

Christian Pearce – designer

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“In the harsh slums we were referencing for the aliens’ Earth environment we saw that sometimes the kids there would have these bizarre elements in their get-ups. It was explained that sometimes seemingly random items or pieces of clothing could take on meanings – perhaps a guy who is wearing a particular hat gets in a fight and ends up killing someone; that hat might suddenly become special. We thought the aliens might adopt similar habits, so seeing a guy with all this stuff on him tells you that he’s been through things and the items he carries with him somehow have mana or good juju. It made for really interesting, eclectic visuals.”

Christian Pearce – designer

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As seen in the finished film, in the slums bets are made on cockfights involving alien creatures that presumably came on the ship with the Prawns. Designers David Meng and Christian Pearce offered options that were intended to be clearly from the same home

world, with crustacean anatomy. Early ideas about them perhaps wearing blades or other improvised weapons were dropped in favor of a nasty tail barb. The final design maquette (facing page) was sculpted by Weta sculptor Don Brooker.

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“People had to look at these guns and know they’re looking at firearms. They could be exotic and a little mysterious in function, but they are clearly guns with an obvious dangerous end, a stock and a trigger.”

Greg Broadmore – lead conceptual designer

“Greg did an awesome job with these. I wrote out five different types of guns and what they were used for when I was sitting in a hotel in LA. They actually started off not as guns, but as tools, but then the geekiness took over and they just became

guns. Besides the very well machined, well designed look I wanted, the other thing was that they have bright colors, like much of the alien technology. I wanted to give it a Chris Foss sci-fi feel.”

Neill Blomkamp – director

Above: Propmakers Callum Lingard and John

Harvey working on the District 9 gun props.

Around a quarter of the way into the production there was a coalescing of the alien design aesthetic. Around this time the graphic design work being done by Leri Greer and the technology (including ships, props and weapons) being designed by Greg Broadmore, all converged. Common features began emerging across the film. These included a certain flat-sided squareness, the strong use of forty-five degree angles, bevel-ended cylinders and the bold use of a stark black, white and orange color scheme. This quickly became the design bible for the film.

The effect of this strong new design lead was most keenly seen in the alien weapons. It was something of a reset. Previously approved weapon and tool designs, some of which had been built as prototypes, did not conform to the new aesthetic.

The first of the new weapons to be approved was the assault rifle, designed by Greg Broadmore, who then steered the designing and building of the other new weapons requested by the director.

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Along with the arc gun, the assault rifle was the first of the District 9 guns to be resolved and approved for manufacture. The design itself evolved and was refined very quickly, but there was a to-ing and fro-ing between designer Greg Broadmore and director Neill Blomkamp while they found the color scheme, eventually settling on the orange that then permeated all the alien technology design.

All the functionality of real weapons were built into the District 9 guns, so that the distances between barrel and handle, trigger and stock, and the like, were all correct and comfortable to hold. These were checked against real guns to be sure they conformed to those standards. This was done for two reasons – firstly because it meant that the props would look and handle like real weapons, but also because for a time at least, the aliens themselves were going to be realized as suited performers, so they too would match human proportions, justifying weapons built to suit that anatomy.

This affected the trigger and grip design as well. Even though the aliens had tentacled hands, they were going to be achieved as creature-gloved human hands and even after

the decision to utilize fully digital aliens was made, their hands still conformed closely to human physiology, with two large fingers aligned closely and a divergent thumb.

Some of the practical guns were scratch-built, but most were digitally modeled from designer Greg Broadmore’s drawings by the Weta Workshop miniatures department’s digital team using Rhino [a CAD modeling program]. The finished models were milled on Weta’s CNC router [a computer-driven milling tool], and those milled components were then assembled and detailed as a more traditional, physical model-making exercise. Alien graphic symbols designed by Leri Greer were cut out by laser and applied to the props.

The assault rifle prop also included a special firing mechanism which created real recoil, developed by propmaker Callum Lingard. This was housed inside a cavity designed into the digital model of the gun so that it could be comfortably inserted once the prototype was milled.

“The gas projector was going to fire a corrosive gas out of the end. We rigged the prop with a tube coming out the side so that on set they could pump something through it. In the end it wasn’t used that way on film, but that was the intention. It would have worked like a flame-thrower, but instead of firing an ignited jet of liquid or gel, it dispensed this very dense gas that would have an immediate and fiercely corrosive effect.”

Greg Broadmore – lead conceptual designer

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The alien fuel cell Wikus uncovered was originally going to be much larger. In the earliest designs it was an arm-sized battery that powered the exo suit. The full-sized exo suit stand-in was built with a port in the back of its jet pack into which a physical prototype of the cell plugged (see concept on page 89 and photograph on page 91). As the story changed, the cell shrank to become concealable.

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“The alien fuel cell was always going to be a really essential item required to enable Wikus to reverse his transformation, or at least according to CJ. They needed it to fuel the drop ship to fly back up and power up the mothership and that’s where CJ was going to lay it on him that it had been a ruse to get his help. That whole plot morphed, but the fuel cell was still needed to power the drop ship.

“When it was redesigned there were a couple of design iterations – one of the last tweaks being that it would have transparent sections so you can see the ferro-fluid inside. It had an iris in the back that was digitally animated to open in the final film. It was made very quickly and shipped out to set.”

Greg Broadmore – lead conceptual designer

“We needed a small prop that Wikus could carry in his pocket. The fuel cell prop you see in the final film was made in just two days using pipes and laser cut detailing. We made two of them.”

Ed Denton – miniatures technician

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“Obviously one of the biggest design jobs of the movie would be conceiving the alien mothership. I had a meeting with Richard Taylor at Weta at the start of this process and he mentioned the idea of a “vertical” ship, like a floating skyscraper. I really liked this as a concept and couldn’t think of ever having seen that realized before. I spent a bit of time on my computer, and came up with a vertical ship design idea (left and above).

“Ultimately though, I thought it was the wrong direction. There needed to be a certain basic sci-fi familiarity in some of the designs. I thought the strange setting of South Africa was already weird enough, and therefore having a certain level of familiarity to some of the science fiction elements would actually be a good thing.

“Because of that I went back to the pure saucer (facing page), a shape that has defined alien arrivals since the nineteen-thirties.”

Neill Blomkamp – director

Having designed and built content for his own short films, director Neill Blomkamp had both the tools and skills to tackle the design of the mothership himself and was an active participant in the process, as well as offering feedback on the Weta concepts.

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