Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/765720
would be strange, yet simply shaped and aesthetically attractive. Sometimes, though, beauty is deceiving and can hide great danger. This is the zone in which I wanted to play. The proposal for the exterior appearance of the spacecraft was a mysterious slim concave oval, dark charcoal color and made of an ancient and somewhat polished stone-like surface. The twelve identical ships would stand tall, vertically over random locations around the globe, all of them hovering twenty-eight feet above the ground in a delicate state of equilibrium. The ships traveled across the universe, but restrained themselves from actually landing. They had come to us, but we would need to make the last effort to get in touch with them—so close but yet so far. Is humanity ready and willing to make the necessary effort? I wanted to contrast an alien technology with our modest effort to access them. The military and scientific teams would approach the alien shell sitting in the beds of white pickup trucks, and they would then need a scissor lift in order to access the portal and go up into the ominous dark shaft. This matter-of-fact approach grounds the story in reality. The decision to have the ship vertical created a conceptual challenge that was resolved when we imagined that there could be a change of gravity once inside the Top: A concept illustration by Meinert Hansen of the science and military team driving to the shell on the back of white pickup trucks. Above: Another illustration by Mr. Hansen that demonstrates the white pickup trucks and scissor lift ascension idea, since the spacecraft don't really land, but rather hover 28 feet above the ground. Below, left and right: The exterior set of the underside of the alien "shell" spacecraft, built at the ADF warehouse facility in Montréal. This set was used for the entrance of the scissor lift through the portal of the ship. The U-shaped set, also built at ADF, was for the ascension of the scissor lift in the shaft of the ship after it goes through the portal, the scenes transitioning to the gravity shift.