Last Updated on August 26, 2025 by Angel Melanson
Warning: Major spoilers for the Revival season finale below. All episodes are now streaming on SyFy and Peacock.
Designing creatures for film and TV is a long and thorough process, with ongoing conversations, brainstorming and edits between a wide list of talent. The creators have a vision, and a team of artists in various mediums builds the pipeline to actualize it. It was no different behind the scenes for SyFy's new series, Revival.
In the live-action adaptation of Tim Seeley and Mike Norton's Image Comics series, the recently deceased of Wausau, Washington are simultaneously revived by an unknown phenomenon. Alongside the subsequent population boom that Revival Day creates, it also introduces alien beings dubbed “Creeps” or “Passengers”. In order to bring these unusual creatures from four colours to tangible physicality, showrunner Luke Boyce enlisted Ken Barthelmey (The Empty Man, Godzilla Vs. Kong, The Tomorrow War ), one of Hollywood's top concept artists/creature designers into the mix in 2017, when Revival was still being developed as a feature film.
“Before I came on board, Luke had already begun working with another 2D concept artist and was just about to start on the pre-vis. He shared a ‘Look Book' he had created, which was very helpful. It included detailed descriptions of the characters and the story, which allowed me to quickly understand the world of Revival and dive right in.
“I love working on ethereal designs because they offer a designer much more creative freedom, not being bound by anatomy or strict logic. This allowed us to experiment with a range of different ideas.”
The premise of adapting a character or creature design from one medium to another can be a special kind of challenge, as the conceptual artist straddles the line between fidelity for the fans and adaptation for their new environment. Barthelmey felt fortunate, though, that this foundation was already in place. “The comic was a great starting point, and we began exploring how this creature might appear in a photorealistic style. How would it glow in daylight? Would it be translucent or opaque? What kind of texture would its skin have? From there, we moved on to explore its overall shape.” Developing fetuses and jellyfish were used as points of reference to develop The Passengers' semi-corporeal appearance. “My first designs felt a bit too organic, even alien-like. Luke loved those initial concepts but wondered how we could shift more toward ‘ghost' than ‘alien.' He liked the idea of creating something that functions as both.”
Barthelmey begins with sketches and illustrations, before bringing the designs into ZBrush for 3D sculpting and anatomical layout. “I like working in both 2D and 3D. Every director wants to see different options in the early stages and coming up with those ideas is the hardest part of the job. But once a direction is chosen, the rest is about refining the design until it gets the director's approval.
“To create a strong design, I believe it's important to strike a balance between realism and imagination. If a creature is too outlandish or abstract, it can feel unbelievable or even silly. On the other hand, if it's too realistic, it might come across as boring.”
With the blueprint completed and approved, the next step was construction. With Koontz and Boyce's preference for practical effects, Toronto-based FX artist/director Steven Kostanski (The Void, Psycho Goreman, Manborg ) was enlisted to create The Passengers' physical form.
“When I first came in, there was talk of ‘oh, we could make a suit for this'. I looked at (Barthelmey's) art and thought, ‘I don't think you can make a suit of that.' I have a pretty good eye for how you could fit a guy into a thing, and the thing that I saw, I definitely felt ‘you can't fit a guy into that thing.'
“The whole issue was budget, of course, it always is, was never not that at the end of the day. The showrunners really wanted something interesting and cool, and the producers wanted something that fit the budget of the show… it was a big ask. It's not a humanoid thing, which makes it difficult to just kind of like cheat.
“I applaud Aaron and Luke for their commitment to having a practical component to it, while also fully understanding that it can't be entirely executed practically – the nature of the creature is that it's this ethereal thing, and practical can only take it so far.”
Kostanksi had back-and-forth conversations to figue out whether this would be a suit, practical effects, or even a puppet. “Eventually, we landed on puppets and scaled it down significantly. We built a rod puppet that had a few ancillary emotions to it – arms, legs, head movement – but then it also had a bit of jaw movement and breathing in the chest, with a bladder in the chest so it could pulse. It was a little smaller than 1/3 scale, out of necessity and space. Fairly simple on paper, but puppets can be quite complicated once you start building them. It certainly poses certain challenges to get the right movement, especially on something inhuman with thin, spindly legs, but we worked through it.”
Once Kostanksi mapped out the technical aspects of bringing Boyce and Barthelmey's work into play, it became a matter of making it work and looking believable on camera. Kostanski and team jumped into action by doing a test run in his private basement studio. “I kind of self-funded my own little test shoot with some people. With this type of thing, you have these production meetings, everyone's sitting around talking about what this thing's going to be. I decided to shoot a scene from the show with this thing, take a day to shoot it, then see if this is working or not. It was a nerve-racking week, waiting to hear back.”
In the end, Kostanski and the showrunners were all delighted with the end result. “From what I've seen of the finished stuff, I'm very happy with it. It's a very cool, interesting way to execute that type of creature. That was a very gratifying moment to realize this hairbrained scheme actually paid off.”
All episodes of Revival are now streaming on SyFy and Peacock.
