Before Your 'Alien: Covenant' Journey, Meet Walter

In accelerate of the May xix release of Conflicting: Covenant, the sequel to 2022's Prometheus, the usual moving-picture show trailers will exist accompanied past a high-quality online short, the two.5-minute Come across Walter, which details the origin story of the android successor to Prometheus's David, both played past Michael Fassbender.

See Walter is a futuristic fusion of molecular bioengineering, artificial intelligence, and mechanics. It'south directed past Luke Scott (son of Alien: Covenant director Ridley), in partnership with scrap maker AMD, creative agency 3 AM, and RSA Films. Yes, it's product placement, simply it's artfully executed.

PCMag dropped by RSA Films in Los Angeles last week to discuss all things Walter. Deceptively unobtrusive from the outside—there's no sign out front—the building actually stretches dorsum over 6,000 square feet. It resembles an architectural firm more than a film studio, with a vintage Triumph motorcycle parked outside and a Gilded labrador napping within the reception area. Big Indonesian-fashion ceiling fans sweep silently beyond the inner sanctum, and natural light filters in from a gravel-based atrium that provides shade fom the harsh Southern California midday lord's day when needed.

Inside, we were joined by Chris Eyerman, Creative Managing director at iii AM, the newish joint venture betwixt RSA Films and ad agency Wild Card. Eyerman recently moved to three AM later on working on movie campaigns for Prometheus and The Hunger Games, and served as creative lead on Meet Walter. Luke Scott was also patched in on speakerphone from RSA Films's London function, while Robert Hallock, AMD's technology evangelist, dialed in from Austin, Texas.

Luke, let's start with you lot. Describe how Meet Walter came about.
[LS] I was given a really beautiful treatment that was a event of a give-and-take between Ridley, three AM, and 20th Century Fox. It was a highly evolved view of what it might take to create a robot/humanoid-like Walter, with a very high-tech focus. But I wanted to dorsum it up a bit kickoff. I knew we needed to think the past androids, also.

Meet Walter

Referring back to Ash, the get-go android in the original Alien movie?
[LS] Right. I wanted to go back, in some way, to the initial shock of Ash's appearance and especially when he has his head ripped off and all that white liquid came out.

Chris, you worked on the last Alien movie, Prometheus. How does Meet Walter build on what, following Ash in the original, we so learned nearly David?
[CE] Our starting point was to essentially juxtapose Walter with David, and the other androids we know from the Alien universe. Walter is the opposite of David, they've taken out some of the idiosyncrasies from David, who was much more human-like; in contrast, Walter is built to serve.

Luke, did Michael Fassbender have any input into this in-world short? Or did you tell him to 'hit the marker, lie down and we'll make you into an android (again)'?
[LS] (laughs). This project was somewhat dropped on him as an additional procedure he had to go through for Alien: Covenant. But he'due south a very gracious actor. Walter, and David, are both unique to him, as characters he'southward brought to life. Merely, yep, in the end, it was 'Delight get in that plastic pocketbook and nosotros're going to smear you lot with muck' sort of direction from me.

Meet Walter

Let's cut to the production shot of the AMD bit being inserted into Walter. Robert, is that an actual bit you made in the AMD lab and shipped to Sydney where they shot Alien: Covenant and Run into Walter?
[RH] Ah no, sadly it's not.

[CE] (interrupts) Our production design team fabricated that chip later we had many discussions on what a chip from 100 years or so hence might look like.

[LS] In fact, nosotros fired a few questions at AMD about how chips might evolve and they came dorsum and said: 'It probably won't look a lot dissimilar, but the processing enabled by that chip is going to be extraordinary' so we started there.

It's always a scrap of a disappointment to realize how little some things will modify. Simply bated from the class factor, let's extrapolate on what it will practise. Robert, explain how AMD's fries of the future will be powering A.I.

[RH] It'due south non inconceivable that AI algorithms could one twenty-four hour period fit into a uncomplicated microprocessor. It's a way off, but not inconceivable. As a technology company, we are already starting to brand products that accelerate artificial intelligence. Nosotros have a software stack and a hardware stack that tin be bought off the shelf by companies investing in the AI space today. It's very delicate work for a machine to make associations that humans practise, easily, all the time, for instance, the divergence betwixt a tree and a rose. We're really interested in speeding up the inference training and categorization part.

Reducing visual recognition and cognitive comprehension (rose or tree?) to a math problem to make it solvable past AMD tech?
[RH] Exactly. Our GPUs are highly programmable devices that tin deal with whatsoever math trouble. And, in the cease, AI is really a very avant-garde, and elegant, math problem, and then we're using that programmable math potential for AI. Equally an example, our forthcoming product line, Radeon Instinct, can be installed inside a massive server setup to create a very complicated neural network.

That might, one day, power a new superintelligent line of androids. But we can't put AMD on the spot and enquire when the company will be powering embodied AI. Outside of the Meet Walter in-world brusque, of grade. So let's hear from all three of yous when y'all first saw the original Alien movie.
[RH] I wasn't born then [1979]. Simply my dad showed it to me when I was 10. Information technology'south a masterpiece.

[CE] I wasn't either. But it was the first R-rated movie I saw, and inspired my dearest of cinema.

Luke?
[LS] Are yous kidding? I was in it. (laughs)

You were?
[LS] Yes! I was 8 viii years old, or and so. My blood brother, Jake Scott, now also a managing director at RSA Films, and I, together with some other boy, we walk across the planet's surface in small space suits.

Wow, okay. Dorsum to Meet Walter for the concluding question. On the official site, at that place'south a spec page and [false] 'pre-club' grade for your own constructed companion, and Fassbender quotes 'how dangerous is the revenue of knowledge' from Frankenstein. Luke, delight elaborate.
[LS] We used that quote to illustrate the self-reflexive nature of Walter. Mary Shelley was inspired by her female parent, the writer and reformist Mary Wollenscraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men where she talks about grasping what lies beyond the boundaries of your own existence as true understanding.

Then when, in Come across Walter, Fassbender says "he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow," he might be hinting at something of a Frankenstein theme in the Alien: Covenant. Guess we'll have to wait for May xix to find out.