We had the good fortune of connecting with Alec Gillis and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Alec, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I had been in the film business for 7 years before I felt I had enough working knowledge of it to start my own company. I had been working under Stan Winston (ALIENS, PREDATOR) and had expanded my skill set under his guidance, but I knew I needed to strike out and become my own artist.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I create monsters for film and television. These creatures are not computer generated, they are hand crafted using techniques from the disparate fields of sculpture, moldmaking, hair and feather work, painting, makeup artistry and even dentistry. The artists I employ are experts in the arcane and eclectic and have backgrounds in engineering, costume design, plastics, illustration and puppeteering to name a few.
My 46 year career has been based on the notion that movie monsters are actually characters, and the artists who create them must infuse life into them at every step of the process. We are not in the business of creating robots, we create the on screen illusion of living, breathing, sometimes drooling emotive characters.
We live in a world of ever-changing technology. This technology either serves us or we serve it. I believe that for all the advances in film visual effects, audiences are still captured by art created by human beings, for human beings. This is why I still use techniques that reach back thousands of years. Practical makeup, animatronics and costumes have their roots in the ancient world and resonate in our most primitive brain. They are alive in us.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
No artist exists in a vacuum. Without mentors and allies we don’t often get much done. In my case my Creature Effects mentor was the great Stan Winston, who gave me more than tutorials on technique, he gave me opportunities and life experience. As for allies, I have none greater than my crew. Skilled artists and technicians who tenaciously solve the problems that every script thrusts upon us.

Website: https://studiogillis.com

Instagram: alec_gillis

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@studioADI

Image Credits
photos courtesy 20th Century, Sony Pictures, Studio Gillis

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