BLADE RUNNER and FIREFOX miniature effects

Gregg gene basically handed me Blade Runner and Doug wanted Gregg to it Doug had worked with Gregg you know since the Close Encounters days and looked to Gregg to do some of this major work know after he was available on Star Trek and Gregg and I I got to know Gregg on Star Trek and then Gregg hired me to do some work on Firefox and we're working in Bob Schwartz garage making the first Firefox prototype which Gregg had designed Doug Trumbull was going to do Firefox and then Ridley Scott came in with Blade Runner in and Doug walked off a Firefox to do Blade Runner so a great gene had been introduced to Clint Eastwood for that was actually doing storyboards and design work for Clint Eastwood on that and and so Gregg finished up the Firefox prototype and then handed that all that work over to Apogee and Apogee just took it from there but I did in fact work a little bit on the Firefox prototype for Gregg and during that time Gregg was working himself on one from the heart and that job was going on forever and he couldn't get off of that job to start Blade Runner so he asked me to start it first of all to start up Blade Runner I actually started Blade Runner in my garage I had a rental house in Westchester and was building prototypes of the spinor interiors in my garage and AEG didn't have a model shop didn't have any equipment or anything and so when it became obvious that Gregg couldn't do it and Gregg asked me to get it going first thing I do was meet with those guys and figure out how to how do we equip the shop and and I ended up buying a bunch of tools and and renting them to EEG and EEG re-rented the building that they had given up that they did Close Encounters in Glencoe so in the back half of Glencoe the Glencoe address we rebuilt a model shop built our own work benches and whatnot and I brought in a table saw on a bandsaw sander and all sort of grew out of that so your year-over-year I'd charge rent for this equipment and buy more equipment I found this vacuum former in pieces in the Attic over max elephant and put it back together again and got it working and then bought the old vacuum former from magic ham because they weren't using it eventually mark Stetson opened his own company making models for Doug Trumbull for Blade Runner and he he asked me well les you know you're not digging what you're doing now when she can make models with us because he knew I could build you know I've always been a skilled builder just because I'm I can do it just sort of a talent I guess and so I thought about it for about ten seconds and said sure so my job at the design studio was wrapping up anyway and I just jumped right into model making on Blade Runner was pretty much my first model making job I've done a couple of things for a friend of mine making really low buck props for a low-budget movie he was working on but not really model making so they just basically told me what they needed and I jumped in on the cruise and started making tiny little spinners and doing a lot of tinting of fiber optics and running fibre optics and lensing fibre optics and gluing fibre optics and it was a lot of work on that hades miniature we had over seven miles of fiber-optic cable it's crazy but it was really fun it was terribly creative and demanding because you're making design decisions at every moment so it was high design and again you know benefits decent pay rate cool people to work with I could wear shorts and a tank top to work nobody cared and it was just a really interesting group of people one of the things I love most about that industry and that way of working was the people involved all the people on these teams were so eclectic and had such interesting and varied ways of living and things that they are into and skills and you know origins it was just fascinating and really fun and so that was just a great environment very create a very stimulating environment and I think that's a big part of the reason why all that work is so excellent because it's a very creative and stimulating thing to do I wasn't the originator of the acid etch model detailing approach but we really I thought expanded it and took it to new places on on Blade Runner and we used a lot of acid etch on every show after that until laser cutting sort of took that technique acid etch was pretty nasty fortunately we didn't have to do that in the shop but but the places that we're doing acid etched metals around LA all faced Air Quality Management District issues and you know it was pretty toxic stuff so it was basically sulfur it's sulfuric acid carwash if you imagine what that would be like running these sheets of brass down or steel or whatever metal and these acid car washes until they until they were perforated and there's some guy with rubber gloves holding it up and saying oh that's not ready yet run it through again and and so we learned to work with that technique pretty well I thought and got a lot of youth out of it I got a call from from Greg from Greg gene and he asked me if I could come and work on Firefox and at some point Trumbull was doing Firefox so it actually had started out at eg and the building where we they had done close encounters and they have think they were there on Star Trek I'm not sure you know eg but they had rented this this sublet half of the back of this building is another company had the whole building for the model shop for Blade Runner and then we were in like the back room for Firefox that room probably not much bigger than the room were sitting in and it was Bill Short and Dave Heilmann and that we were sanding parts of the Firefox I don't remember exactly I came here if it had been molded or whatever but Greg had helped design it and so I worked on that for a while and Greg said it's good the Firefox is going somewhere else or something so then he said you're gonna work for you know mark was like it's in the same building right next door he says go work on Blade Runner so I worked on Blade Runner for stetsom and that was before 2010 and Ghostbusters is that's how I knew mark and so I worked on that for a few months and did some in a lot of odds and ends and what have you on Blade Runner and it was they wanted to stay there but I had you know grant had asked me to come back if they got another project I promised I would go back and they got Firefox so I told my I told mark this since why really wanted to stay I'm blighter on her but I couldn't I didn't met Bill George and you know Chris Chris Ross and Tom POC and although you know and obviously mark and I don't think Ron was there at that point on grass if they can met him later because the model were just being built at that point and what they what they did is they built miniature you know buildings from LA and then just retrofitted all this stuff on top but that was the the really Scott looked for that movie and it was like as if people put air conditioning and electronic stuff you know on the outside of the buildings later I think most of us the projects that we worked on at that the production side of it they were all fairly high budget shows but of course by the time the budget gets down to the model shop it's pretty low budget so but I never really had to worry about that issue you know I just had a job and I was told what to do and I tried to do it within the time frame and and I think that was one of the things we were really successful at Stetson visual was and also the boss film model shop and stuff I was more involved with the time this has to be done by Monday morning this has to be done by tomorrow night so and and we were young and scrappy so you know we didn't think twice about it working until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning or all night into the next day did that a lot but you know everybody where we were really proud of the work we were doing and it was exciting miniature neon is something is its own little art form and there is there are several people that do it the greatest was Larry Albright and Larry Albright did most of the work for me and Blade Runner and I met him because magic am contracted him to the work on Star Trek and to me the big the big decision between miniatures and digital now besides you know the cost of creating an int and the quality of the finish on them which is getting to the point of equivalency and most types of work is how they're to be shot and you know this is sort of surcharge in miniature work of the camera the shooting time and the camera work and sometimes you just can't get a camera move in sort of modern filmmaking style that you would want to on a miniature and have it fit into the film right in sort of the language of visual effects Photography is moved closer to the language of production photography and so it's harder to get these crazy match moves to work on on miniatures and keep the director happy so Blade Runner really sort of gave me a lot of international recognition and it gave me direct work Bob Abel called me after Blade Runner came out and pitched some of the processes that we developed or extended on Blade Runner for commercial bids that he wanted so I did some jobs for him and I always liked Bob people sort of run hot and called him Bob a little but I always liked him I thought he was always good to me and and fair with me and and you really helped my career too it was the first job that I supervised the model shop on and really since Blade Runner I never really was a hands-on model maker so I was just sort of a model shop leader and I always tried to do little bits and things around the shop but usually the real model makers had just pushed me out of the way and get back to work you know but I do have this wonderful picture that a friend sent me Renea rubbish used to work with us as a painter and it was a protege of Ron's and she grabbed a picture of me hosing down and aging some parts of the shadow which is one of the later jobs we did it stats in visual and I always liked that picture just I really did work [Laughter]

Channel: piercefilm productions

Views: 147,937

Keywords: Science Fiction, miniature model, special effects, visual effects, making of, behind the scenes, spinner

Id: AZgk4v4147o

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020