Robocop - 05 Special Effects - Then and Now

[Music] if I had enough money to buy the materials that's as much as I needed I thought I was doing a cartoon till I saw that first really rough rough rough cut I was like oh my God it's great I would get the the studio would consider to be the Oddball project something that didn't really fit into the traditional kind of generic frame and RoboCop was certainly one of those pictures I'm the production designer and my job was to sort of um give a look to the picture and keep what I always feel is to keep a cohesive look to the picture there was a constant in design very brutal cold architecture you'll see there's a constant line of concrete wherever we go that's just boring but linear and kind of visually interesting and structural to me it's clean so there's no information that you don't want to see let's say you're shooting um people at the base of a hill and you want to put a castle on the on that Hill well you could build one right and get a prop and put a lot of money into it or you could hire a very good mat painter a man who could take a piece of glass and then paint at the top of the glass that castle and then you would actually put the frame of glass in front of the camera and shoot your live action Roco geofrey who did the mat paintings for RoboCop uh had a different technique uh he didn't like to use glass and he used Masonite masonry boards and he would paint right on those mainly because he was always dropping the glass and breaking the glass mats so a mat shot in the traditional sense the oldest way to do it is a controlled Double Exposure where you shoot the live action you're blacking out part of the frame and black represents a lack of exposure you go back in the dark room rewind that film and reload that on a pedestal mounted locked off camera that's pointing at an artwork easel and that artwork easel contains your mat painting which is black now in the complimentary portion of the frame and it fits together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and it takes a certain number of tests usually about four to six camera tests before you get your painting to blend properly with the live action in a situation with an architectural mat painting you usually try and find um areas that you will be able to hide your blend in and you go along with the architecture lines as best as possible I'd rather cut into the set and paint a portion of that back in because more often people are looking for a mat line on the outside perimeters of the set piece not within the set itself they were going to be shooting in Dallas Texas and they wanted it to look like um Detroit in the near future Bill sandel the production designer and John Davidson at Paul verhoven had singled out the city hall in Dallas and they wanted that to be the base of an 80-story skyscraper for their ocp building and so together we came up with an idea of the thing looking kind of like a big arrow that was stabbed into the ground the there's a wide shot of Delta City when RoboCop's car is driving away from camera and we actually shot across the bridge to Crossing an area there and we mted into the existing cityscape the ocp building and other futuristic structures John Davidson specifically singled out his favorite shots in Forbidden Planet he wanted the thing especially the down angles to just plunge infinitely you know and just have this incredible depth I believe there are only two matte paintings in Robocop that aren't done completely in camera on the original negative and those are the elevator shots because we needed to reduce the interior of the plaza Americas to make it smaller and fit within that gigantic 8 story interior look um so those were Optical reductions Optical reduction is when you take something of previously shot footage and actually reduce it in size to usually put it into something like a mat painting I'm responsible for um the fall at the end of the film where dick Jones is falling toward the street dick Jones is an animation puppet a two foot tall human animation stop motion puppet in that shot with a human being you don't want to have him standing at attention with his arms at his sides you want something that's going to be more um in keeping with what he's actually going to be doing in the scene um and in the case of Ronnie Cox falling he was falling spread eagle and kicking on the way down so I had his arms out to the side and a slight crouch on him is how the sculpture was done over the top of the Armature with plasticine clay and that finished clay sculpture you'll make a plaster mold the clay is thrown away and the Armature is taken back down to Bare Bones metal again that empty Armature is placed inside this mold that's been cleaned out and scrubbed and those two halves are again put back together the foam will be injected into the mold when the the two halves are joined together with the Armature inside of that and that in turn is baked like a cake in an oven at 350 degrees for a number of hours until the moisture is evacuated from the foam rubber mixture and um the thing is allowed to cool down you pull the two mold halves apart you end up with a rubber puppet a very nice soft foam rubber puppet that's a likeness from the um clay sculpture that you did and then it's up to you to clean that up paint the thing put in some eyeballs and dress it up in the in the three-piece suit this is you know just a typical example of an oldfashioned stop motion puppet it's either hinge joints in some places or ball and socket joints I'm just going to crank this open so you can get a look at typically what a a ball joint looks like here for stop motion please put down your weapon you have 20 seconds to comply since RoboCop was effectively a man in a suit Ed 209 could not be in any way a man in a suit so that's one of the reasons we chose to offset the hips or do things that would be clearly impossible for a person to fit in that that's why his hips are so far apart it's one of the reasons there's rails the joints don't have a standard you know knee joint they've actually got a linear rail kind of a system that's again one step further away from a person in a suit I felt that they knew so much more about it and they came with the proposal then when they came with proposals I could easily say okay but then do this you know if we do it this way then let's make this this this this strange thing that had built this is the gray area let's make that the I the whole eyes these are the eyes there's hundreds of eyes basically what ever it is he can see through that not by a little camera on the top of his head you know for the inspiration for Ed 209 we drew upon kind of a number of different areas you know tried to Dy something in a natural in the natural world so uh killer whales were something that had a pretty menacing kind of a countenance everything is kind of an excuse you know there's a big air intake and it looks a lot like a mouth and there's this big dome that you can't really see where the eyes are the idea there was that this would be maybe like an anti- laser surface this is kind of the mikette stage and really is pretty instrumental the last kind of last round round of design until you blow this thing up to full scale this is like basically it's blue foam it's house insulation foam you know you take that it's cheap and stuff um and can mix with my favorite toothpicks and soda straws you kind of build a little version of the robot that you can talk about the leg you know upper leg would be here it could pivot and then also in order to take a step the guy could actually shoot his leg forward and then kind of as he's walking forward to do this so that was pretty critical you could see through it there were lots of moving Parts there was a big screw that would be responsible for moving the leg up and down and then like on the back here a little bit of a a plate at the screw access and we figured since we're going to have a screw that's in there turning we might as well put a detail on there so I modeled the uh end of the screw to look like one of the axles you see on a railroad car so as the guy's actually moving you see these little things spinning the full scale Ed 209 was a design that Craig had come up with working with Paul verhoven and myself and trying to get something that that Paul was happy with as as a character a nemesis for RoboCop the crew that we were building at this time with Pete ronzani Neil Breitbart and Paulo lezzi my girlfriend at the time we pretty much built that thing together and uh it was hell but it was one of those experiences you come through and at the end of the day something we always remember later on we married and so I guess it didn't really split us apart all the forms were built up out of wood you know we used a lot of plywood Masonite and just fur and actually kind of built up patterns and stuff bit by bit we used a lot of plastic forming techniques and fiberglass techniques and seeing how it was basically the middle of summer in San Rafel we were pretty much in hell up to our ears and fiberglass and and wearing these suits because you have to wear these protective suits and respirators and everything else while it's just blistering hot it's pretty tough uh pretty tough portion there one of the keys with movie props is they've got to be pretty um pretty flexible you have to be able to put this thing together and take it apart in relatively short order and actually that's one of the things I'm pretty proud about was the model was held together with bungee cords um snaps and different techniques so basically two people could take the thing apart we were pretty much left alone in fact for the the full scale prop you know I don't think Paul Paul saw it at all until it was delivered you know in Dallas that was pretty cool I felt pretty trusted Phil tippet would check in on us on a periodic basis come over and see what we're doing and just kind of roll his eyes at the mess we were making and stuff you know our hearts were in it so much that you know compensation even wasn't necessarily important just you know contributing to this whole kind of process was really really the motivation the full scale prop was essentially just that a prop you know it was capable of being posed the head could be swiveled you know from side to side the arms were able to be pivoted we could rotate them down or rotate him up but it was really the kind of thing that had limited very very limited motion because of the size of the big guy his head was so big that even though we made this pretty reinforced fiberglass mold it's still sagged a little bit so when you see the big one compared to the miniature version the miniature version is built exactly off the pattern for the big one but when we molded the big one it squished just a little bit so the big guy's head's just a little bit fatter than the miniature version version and actually it's one of those things that always bugged me when I saw in the film because I recognized they were a little different but what are you going to do Phil tippet is the man on RoboCop who actually animated the stop motion puppets for Ed 209 this is the the uh stop motion miniature of the Ed 209 puppet that has an articulated stop motion uh skeleton or Armature in it and this is actually part of it actually visible here and you can see this lead screw mechanism that was part of the design that Craig Hayes had come up with then they've made a number of miniature puppets uh that were articulated and had little skeletons inside of them of metal so you could pose them and then this was done through stop motion animation every little aspect of this particular character has got a um an an armatur a jointed part that allow and shooting one frame of film can depending upon the complexity of the shot take you know anywhere from can take anywhere from from 10 minutes to uh you know an hour and a half you know adjusting everything properly for one frame of film you get your camera you take one frame stop the camera you go onto the little stage move the arm infinitesimal inch go back behind the camera shoot another frame one frame at a time most of the work for Ed 209 was stop motion animation with the exception of the staircase scene and in particular when he falls down the staircase the staircase the ed9 fell down was a 4T Square miniature built of plywood and brass and you know the usual kind of model building materials reinforced so that when the guy fell down the stairs it didn't shake the set too much Phil did all the kind of masterminding of exactly how we're going to do that what angle the set would be at to get the best roll and everything and then we rigged up the puppet with a pin in his foot and when we said go camera was rolling at speed we'd pull the pin and the robot would tumble down the stairs and off the edge of the set I was the one catching the robot because I was the one had to fix it up for the next take so I wanted to make sure as little stuff broke you know so I'd be down there trying to make sure the little thing didn't hit the ground and break off and a important part and then I'd have more work to do I came up with this technique that uh that Craig Hayes helped me with where I thought you know I I don't want everything to go through like a a secondary Optical path I want everything to be on the original negative if that was possible for Ed 29's you know machine guns we rigged up photographic flashes and while I was animating the Ed 209 you animate one frame at a time one frame at a time one frame at a time getting ready to his guns or whatever it took some multa flashes apart and rigged up a system where we could put the actual flash tube into the tip of the barrel of Ed 29's gun and backwind the camera one frame and Turn All the Lights Off on the set and then we would take cotton take some uh you know colored plastic gel wrap some orange around the thing and then take some cotton and sculpt what would look like a muzzle flash and they go off so that you get this thing that look like a burned burned in kind of a muzzle flash I put like tons of Fusion on the camera too for for those particular frames not the rest of the stuff but just for the frames where the flashes were going off so it didn't look like cotton it looked like more of a diffused Flash and then I just like randomly put different shapes in the cotton so had the characteristic effect of of gunfire it was a pretty interesting technique but because of the high voltages you know involved and the sort of somewhat uh you know movish quality of the wiring occasionally they'd get a a few thousand volt um shock and I'd be like working away on the thing and he never insulated these things well enough I'd be like right in the middle of doing this thing and he hear the scream ah and just G to get like these no whatever like 10,000 volts going through me it was really wild I'd been through enough shocks myself that I kind of found it amusing but I I don't think they appreciated that at all everything very clear and you get electrocuted and this is a shot where we actually made a little miniature RoboCop so this was a stopmotion Robocop it grabs the gun and Ed to an i is firing as he gets his arm pointed over to his own arm and actually blows his arm off this was kind of an interesting shot to achieve because of the way the robot it's one of the things the limitations of the robot he actually technically couldn't shoot his own arm because his head was in the way so we ended up sort of cheating and you don't see it in the movie but we unhooked the arm and just kind of pulled it out to the point where he could do it and you know it's all a big phony thing so this shot of him launching his missiles he had this giant blown off arm which is a practical part built out in San Francisco I had to fly it out to Dallas and I remember as Phil and I were going out there I had this big giant blown-off robot arm wrapped in some paper and stuff and they asked me what it was at the airport and I didn't want to say it was a big giant blown-off robot arm so I said it was a planter and they said okay just put it in there it's hard to imagine these days you know getting a giant blown-off arm you know through any kind of airport security but back then it was like [Applause] whatever I thought for sure that I'd be able to continue doing matte paintings with a paintbrush and Camera trickery um for the rest of my life since RoboCop yeah the industry is visual effects in particular have changed so radically in the digital world you're in an arena where you have your frame and you can do anything you want with it you don't have to go have a separate camera shoot something else you can create it in the digital world right there and you can put it into the frame right there with the Advent of computer graphics and Photoshop mat paintings the cut and paste methods and just using photo collage um matte painters could for the most part start coming out of the wwor um people that couldn't create a realistic painting with their hands and with a paintbrush were suddenly um there there's just like tons of matte painting artists now there's a completely different kind of Realm of equipment that's necessary and the accessibility of course these days visual effects are done in a variety of ways you can create something completely from scratch in the computer build 3D models and light them and so forth and do that all entirely in the machine you can go to a store and you could buy the software the hardware you know most of the stuff that you would need to actually do visual effects I don't know if there was a uh If there really is a um a need for doing stop motion anymore stop motion animation is still around but certainly in a far diminished capacity in regards to doing visual effects work I I think it's um you know it's been replaced by computer Graphics pretty much I found that um by the late 1990s by 1997 that um early in that year that for the most part any phone call that I got requesting a mat painting shot they wanted to know for sure that was doing it with computer Graphics it's a completely different world that's the way of Hollywood and the film industry the technology only reflects you know what's current and it's constantly being replaced you can watch the film nowadays and and the shots do hold up one of the biggest compliments for me on the on the whole project was when my friends who really didn't understand what we did would come over walk up to this thing and kick it and it was Hollow they'd be shocked you know they thought it was a 4 ton giant robot that we had built they're actually artists who happen to be working with very sophisticated special effects [Music] [Music] e

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Id: 6HgF4kq4j50

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 25 2013