{alltv} ABC gets under the skin of the Visitors to give them new look

Monday, January 3, 2011

{alltv} ABC gets under the skin of the Visitors to give them new look

Even evil Visitors deserve a makeover.

The green wasp-waisted creature, pictured here in a rendering by the production design team, is a Visitor in ABC's alien-invasion series V underneath its human-looking skin. It's a far cry from what the extraterrestrials looked like in the '80s cult classic.

The depiction, seen exclusively in USA TODAY, "is really cool," says Morena Baccarin, who plays Anna, the queen of the visually deceptive Visitors. "What I like about it is it doesn't look like any particularly recognizable species. It's like a conglomeration of all these different lizard types. It even looks prehistoric. There's something like a T. rex about it, with a lizard mixed with a Komodo dragon."

Bits of the Visitors' physical appearance will be revealed over the 10-episode second season, which begins tonight (9 ET/PT), with the full creature appearing in the season finale. Executive producer Scott Rosenbaum first needed to develop the back story of the Visitors before coming up with a visual look. One helps explain the other.

"There is a reason the creature I ended up wanting to design looks familiar in many ways and unfamiliar in many ways," Rosenbaum says. "Throughout the season, you'll be seeing exactly what the Visitors look like underneath, and while some of it will be explained as to why they look the way they do ... if you look close enough and study it, you can sort of figure out what the Visitors have been doing throughout the course of history in the universe. Answers to that are revealed literally in (their) physical nature."

The earlier series' look, including the lizardlike alien also pictured here, may seem dated, but it was "revolutionary" for its time, says Jane Badler, a popular star of the '80s version who joins the current series tonight.

"In its time, it was great," she says of an era when shows depended more on prosthetics and makeup than computer-generated effects. "But looking at it now, there's no comparison in techniques, in digital special effects. It's incredible what they do now."