FIFTH ELEMENT miniature effects

luke had spent a year in pre-production on that thing with illustrators and had a bible of illustrations that were the you know the look of the film and then dan vale the production designer his job was to sort of articulate that bible in the you know full-size sets and my job was to articulate in into the visual effects and um and we both worked really well together and he wanted to do the miniatures in england and i said no that's not going to work we're going to do that manager is a digital domain and and he just said okay and that was that you know and there are other shows with other signature shots as i called them but i just you know try to do that on a number of the shows that we did on fifth element i had this treasure trove of illustrations and and uh so we you know went for that over and over again one of the key ones being the thai ship scene uh those big red buildings and we shot in london for about six months but when i got back you know the model work was well underway already if we wanted to start shooting the model work when i got back and so some of the stuff just wasn't quite right and i remember begging for ron to take off his art director cap and put his model painter cap back on one more time for me and paint that uh mandashaw and ship and save the mandashawin ship basically we called it the big potato came out with this rough slug and did a fiberglass shell out of that then um that shell became a uh it started just sculpting that building up on top of that coming up with the little arms uh that planted on is a lot of plant on at that point the fiber optics we did got the light i think we had like 14 1500 fiber optic points in the whole thing and with the illuminators inside trying not to catch on fire they wanted really bright lights to be able to shine down these four little pods that were on the side so those had to be housed in aluminum in a way that wouldn't melt things there's a lot of you know fire prevention going on uh the uh the fiber optics we were putting those in and a funny story with that with mark stetson because you know mark worked on uh the first star trek movie with veger and they had a big disaster happen with uh they were putting fiber optics in the v on on the weekend and uh using super glue to glue them on and they came back at the end of the at the next monday and all the fibers had come off and were down on the ground and what had happened was they were using super glue and the kicker and it was crazing and breaking the fiber optic it'll just break off and fall and so uh anyway mark comes walking through one day and we're super gluing fiber optics and the mondeshaun ship and he's and he tells us this story and as long as the fiber was dangling out you glued it here then you come back and you snip it once it's all dried and that was the key is to to let a lot of it hang out glue it then snip it and uh so anyway he had a little bet going with me that i won that uh it would be okay the next when we came back monday and it was mark uh hired me as uh at first to do some astronomical artwork but it kind of grew into visual effects our director job at digital domain and where we both stayed for a few movies and i eventually ended up managing the art department there for about a year worked on i think fifth element supernova might have been the red planet how quickly they passed from your mind and then and that was obviously when i moved into digital work but for fifth element we still built models and uh they had a model shop there that sort of was you know the end of my working on miniature models and mind you i did a little bit of model making but i was primarily a painter i built a bunch of a lot of secondary cars there was an ambulance and i had worked on the cop cars and i worked on the train the vertical train i did all the building work and the tracks and and parts of the train for the verti when you first see the vertical train and uh a lot of buildings too many buildings clark was on that clark was actually in charge of the city if i'm not mistaken clark in the city but uh that was a that was a fun set i mean it was supposed to look like it was just like thousands of feet down or whatever you know so basically we had a set of buildings from baby's day out hudsucker the shadow and i couldn't get any of those for fifth element because godzilla was in town and gobbling everything up and they wanted them so we ended up building a whole new set of miniatures for fifth element and then renting them to godzilla too because they're still going by the time we were done so what we did get was a chance to build buildings purpose built to the shots you know so that was good at first everybody was because it was it was mobius you know everybody knew it was mobius and i i was never that big of a comic book fan because i didn't i didn't really have access to a lot of comic books when i was younger when the designs first came in for for fifth element maybe we're just like there's some crazy looking stuff you know this is i want to build a cool looking spaceship you know well it ended up i guess time had has shown that those mobius designs are really you know very impressive you know and it kind of grew on you there was a lot of kids that came in during that time period i mean starship troopers fifth element titanic it was a really big hot time for the industry it was almost like the death the final death throws of the industry and a lot of kids joined the union because they figured well if i joined a union it'll get me more work most of those kids never worked another job you know they worked on fifth element that was it you know because there was there was no more work for them because it it wasn't about the union it was about networking it's about your contacts you know if you had the contacts you could keep working and working and working you know way with fifth element you know we built the middle and in real scale the middle 300 feet of a building but there was still building below and there's building above and that was all being added digitally and it was done beautiful it looked beautiful it it all fit together you cannot see the seam of uh of where the where it begins and ends and in the background you know we built down the street only so far and then you know beyond that was all digital the sky was digital working with mark stetson was a lot of fun you know he he really embraced the evolution the evolutionary process that we had to go through to develop for instance in the miniature lighting you know well the concept is that there's these cars flying at all these different levels they have to have some sort of uh traffic control so how would you have traffic control for flying cars well uh you would have more than just three lights then you'd have to have like left right forward up and down maybe so we came with this idea of using uh not only the stop lights but on the level that the stop lights are at there would be a a red and a green light well this little half round thing that out one side shine shown red and the other side is shown green and we can flip it around one way or the other and just drill a little hole through the building punch a light through and put this cap over it because you never knew where the camera was going to be until the last minute they'd have to line up the shot look at the digital previews look what they're doing look at the building see what looks pretty then they've decided where the shot will be now we got to put in lights along that row real fast there was a crew of i don't know eight or ten of us that would then uh just scramble and start drilling holes putting these lights in and putting the caps on and uh getting to the right level so it's just it was fun to get to get creative with that kind of level of it you know to to start to invent the future a little bit you know so a lot of times they say here's a picture build it and other times they say figure this out for us you know and so it's fun to figure things out it was it was a great film to start on as a visual effects supervisor luke obviously had a very strong vision for it and he could never articulate for me because i don't think he really knew yet whether it was going to be a kid's fantasy or a comedy and so until it became a comedy i had no idea how the film was going to work and then once it was a comedy it all made perfect sense you know it was just so much fun

Channel: piercefilm productions

Views: 22,639

Keywords: making of, behind the scenes, special effects, visual effects, miniature model, Luc Besson, science fiction

Id: WAi7N-3pyCo

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 04 2022