APOLLO 13 miniature effects

you know i was doing apollo 13 and uh that was one where i really wasn't out there very much because i had to do the original the initial bit bidding and budgeting and then i had to track i tracked all my costs with all all the guys you know because i did all the time cards and the petty cash and all that kind of stuff so i was really getting further from construction i didn't do anything on apollo and las sacra was my crew chief and les was doing the day-to-day dealing with the guys i go and look and see what's going on but i got to get back and do paperwork and so that was not as fun certainly that was that was more administrative i was really excited about apollo 13 because it was a dream job for me i i've always been passionate about the space program and especially the apollo program and i lived through that whole period you know fully aware of what was going on and really excited about it so for me it was a dream job because here i got to actually build no-nonsense duplicates replicas of that stuff and and i wanted it to be right so i did a lot of research and it turns out that the curator of the historical archives in houston of nasa's apollo program is a model nut so when he when i talked to him i told him well we're making miniatures for this movie called apollo 13 which he was aware of he was so excited and he was so kind he sent me a huge package of information stuff that had never left houston before there were copies but it was still amazing information and i read every word of it and just knew it all you know by wrote because it was just so cool so i was very careful with all the detail in that and there were a couple of mistakes mostly because i wasn't i didn't catch them in time but it was pretty accurate we had to figure out how to shoot them and how to rig the these miniatures for motion control and a lot of the shots were very challenging rigging and this is all the kind of sort of ephemera that really doesn't live beyond the project but we really achieved some amazing motion control shots with that film that that were major engineering debacles to to actually pull off with cleanliness in motion control if your model deviates a fraction of an inch from take to take or position to position or different lightings which means different temperatures your elements won't line up with each other and they can't be used so your miniatures have to be very stiff very stable through temperature changes and get lit properly in a number of different conditions sometimes even with black light fluorescent paint usually invisible paint it's really exotic stuff and and so that's what makes that kind of model making so challenging motion control model making is a whole other category of challenging in terms of the craft so we uh we completed all the work finally and it was very challenging the shoot schedules were just brutal so we finally finished it up and and that was uh a really satisfying experience because of the historical importance of the film telling a story that people really didn't know all that well and telling it very well i thought i came in sort of toward the tail end because they had let a bunch of people go and then a bunch of shots came back they needed more shots and so they had to beef up the crew again and so i came in on that second wave joining with joe viscosel he did the pyrotechnics on that let's see one of the projects i worked on was uh the re-entry sequence with the capsule we had a real nice quarter scale capsule that they had already built but we had to build a second one for the the pyro element and with motion control you know we're able to marry various elements together so we built the same shape and size just out of sheet steel we hung it up in the air so the camera could look up at it you know there's a black behind it because everything shot on black in this case and we shot i think it was two second frames which is really long for a shot and uh to get that motion blur of the flames and brought them up very slowly over about a 16 minute shot so it was a very slow process and burned the heck out of that heat shield every time we'd have to pull it it'd come out really warped and we'd have to pull it back off and put another one on and had a smell that uh terrible smell that was all over digital domain for the next year or two you know uh couldn't walk through that without smelling it and it looked beautiful and then we had another element that we used for that i had to airbrush the bottom of another heat shield with fluorescent paint so it would glow kind of an orange fluorescent paint ramping up the light on that so that you know in digital they could sit there and pulsate it and give it some some variation but uh we gave them the range of brightnesses and there's a lot of just feeding elements into the digital pipeline at that point oh yeah and the shot of the uh the saturn v lifting off a lot of effects were going into this and les ecker was really involved in coming up with some of the uh the uh specific trickery uh such as the ice that the sheets of ice that come off as as the saturn v's lifting off um by frosting up a piece of sheet metal and just hitting it with a little hammer and causing the sheets to come off and photographing that um the uh uh let's see there's that one impossible shot i guess where the the you see the camera going down through the gantry and the little arms are swinging away as the rocket's starting to lift off and uh just uh we had to rig up all these little motors on there little stepper motors so and it was it was all shot on the side so the camera could easily get through there in that path so all these motors had to pull up these arms one at a time and it was all again controlled by the cooper system apollo 13 had a lot of challenges uh because we had fire with the miniatures we were doing a launch sequence how to achieve that effect of the the launch with the fire coming out and kind of appearing to be sucked back in that's it's quite a challenge to make a miniature it can hold up we actually shot that thing about 14 times so you had a it basically had to be a fireproof model that you couldn't you couldn't light up no matter what you did to it because we made a pretty big fireball around it the thing with with digital's uh models and and there are some pretty amazing ones and some that quite fool you is that they are illustrations so they're really only as good as the illustrator and uh with the model it is it does become a three-dimensional object so yes i mean you know skill level on how to produce that and make it look realistic is one thing and then also how to film it but it just tends to have uh what they call that uncanny valley thing you know where where your your mind knows that that's a real object versus an illustration and that's why i mean i think that the best films today are the ones that combine miniatures and digital to combine them with both because you can do things in the digital world that you cannot do physically no matter what you do they'll never really work right and you can kind of you can kind of massage them or or work them out so they will work and for me it was a real blessing it was a huge gift and again my gratitude comes out full force because i i was nominated i was put on the list for nomination for the oscar and we were nominated and that was really thanks to pat mcclung you know thanks to pat because pat told me he said well i don't i don't actually agree with pat but he said you did all the work and it's not true of course it's not true but that's pat he's a very generous human being and in fact he'd just been nominated this season before for true lies which is pretty cool so he said i've been nominated it's your turn you know go ahead so they put me on the list i couldn't believe it because really i i saw myself as just a model maker you know it wasn't really a key on the project but what actually happened that project evolved into an interesting challenge for me in another way and that is that because of my research i knew every detail about that rocket the whole rocket the mission the way things look i'm i'm pretty knowledgeable in terms of physics and so i knew a lot about astrophysics so when they had they had us coming to dailies and they wanted us to just come up with stuff we saw you know if we had any notes and so i would often comment that well it doesn't really look that way you know that rocket is a hypergolic rocket and the engine the the exhaust plume is this color in this size and just doesn't look like that well what they did was they decided to make me the the accuracy cop and the space physics authority on the job so i would literally write textbook pages i remember i wrote a textbook page for the artists because they needed to know what urine would look like and how it would be behave when it was ejected from a spacecraft in the vacuum of space when lit by the sun because that makes a difference in space and so i did and it was it's interesting because it doesn't do what you think it's going to do and so it won't look like you think it's going to look and it's always more interesting to see the fact of it in these exotic situations because it's so unexpected so i guess partly because of that influence on the project they decided to put me on the list and so we were nominated we ended up losing to the movie babe which was a really interesting situation but that's a whole other story because it's about the process of nomination and award in the academy in britain the process is reversed in the us the educated body of the academy nominates and the whole body votes on the award in england it's the opposite the whole body votes on nomination which i think is good because everybody knows when stuff looks good but only the educated people in the visual effects branch vote on who actually wins the award which i think makes a lot of sense because um those are people who really know what it took to do the work and they understand what's being what's being described uh and so in england we actually won the academy award for apollo 13. and i couldn't be there to accept the award because i was working on something else i think it was titanic or something but mark stetson was working on fifth element i guess it was fifth element i was working on but mark was in london supervising the visual effects for fifth element for digital domain and so he went to the ceremony and accepted the oscar in in lieu of our being able to go i don't think anybody else could go that's so cool it's so perfect because you know i owe so much gratitude to mark and i was so happy that he could do that it's really fun

Channel: piercefilm productions

Views: 30,326

Keywords: making of, behind the scenes, special effects, visual effects, miniature model, rocket, NASA, spacecraft

Id: ZN8Da3_Yxms

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2022