STAR TREK The Motion Picture 1979 miniature effects (part 1)

this was this was what everybody wanted star wars was a monster hit as we all know and suddenly everybody in town wanted blue screen miniature visual effects so there was a lot of work for a lot of us and a bunch of us got in around the same time working for magicam and then we all branched out and went in different directions when star wars hit so big they decided to make it a feature film and scrapped all the stuff they've been doing and started again and they recruited a couple of uh my classmates tom pock and chris ross out of art center and they were both good friends and you know chris ross said he dropped straight out of school and said i'm going to design intergalactic spaceships for a living that sounded really good to me so i started pestering tom and chris for a job and you know it took a long time but by i think may 78 i got on board on star trek i actually worked for three different companies i worked for magic cam and then for bob abel and associates and then bob abel's company was fired from the job and doug trumbull stepped in to to supervise the visual effects work so he made a huge deal with paramount pictures to get his equipment back from close encounters and his uh and his show scan development project and split up the work between that newly formed group and apogee which is done john dijkstra's company they came into our facility in hollywood that was abel's so-called french knitting mills company because that was the name over the top of the building and sort of divided up the model crew and i wanted to go to apogee because tom pock was going there and so my other friends were going there and i thought that was where the real work was going to be so i went out to interview at apogee and they they thought they had enough people there and so i felt kind of like what's going to happen now bill millar was actually the guy that sort of coordinated all the the the motion or the movements of the crews between the apogee facility and the maxella facility marina del rey i ended up going down to marina del rey where there was no model shop we just had a little room not much larger than the room that we're in right now and uh turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me and so i ended up working for you know doug trumbull to finish that job off when bob abel closed down dick singleton left the project and russ simpson had left magikam and come on board the able crew 2 and he came down to maxilla and was a de facto head of the model shop then during the course of that work then greg gene who had worked for doug trumbull on close encounters of the third kind had been busy off doing 1941 for spielberg but that finished up and so he became available and doug hired greg to start a second model crew right around the corner you know a block from the building we were in uh to build some of the veger stuff for the end actually apogee built more of veger but greg did a lot of these oddball things like the crystal steps and a lot of other parts of feature and uh he had a busy little crew going around the corner too there was a there was a lot of work to be done that we had like i believe it was at least two split crews and it's almost 24 7. and doug trumbull took over the job of the visual effects for star trek and we moved from hollywood down to marina del rey into the building that eventually became boss film but at the time it was called stoic star trek optical enterprises inc company so it was the model shop the stages the accounting everything was there we spent a year as star trek optical doing star trek with doug trumbull as the boss we had a small model shop that had maybe uh five people in it but some stellar model makers mark stetson being one of them i was the painter so i painted all the miniatures and did a lot of airbrushed background artwork and nebulas and and galaxies and stuff and leslie ecker was kind of the design guy i had met mark stetson at art center college because we were in the same major he was a couple of terms ahead of me and he had taken a term off to do some work uh as a model maker and mark had been trained in in pattern making back east i think he'd worked at general electric's product design lab and so he was a skilled model maker and he had gotten a job in hollywood working on star trek the motion picture the first star trek movie and he was on the team of guys building the first enterprise model and so i just graduated i was literally i remember it as if it were yesterday sitting around in the living room and just sort of musing about how i would find my first job having really no idea how to do that because in those days art center didn't teach you anything about that and mark said well you know my boss is looking for a couple of designers you should go in and show them your book and so i think about 12 of us went in and he hired two of us and i was one of the lucky guys and um so really my first film work was as a designer and we were asked to design small areas of spaceships that hadn't been attended to by the art department and you know model makers like to work from drawings often at least in those days especially so like the the engine the cell of the klingon ship or uh one of the little accessory ships around the enterprise things like that um i was asked to design that was really fun and that job morphed into several other jobs on the same picture it was a crazy production and we were hired by robert abel and associates who in a period of a year and several million dollars hadn't produced a frame of film so only a few weeks after we were hired we were all fired because the studio pulled the job from the company and immediately rehired instantaneously by this guy doug trumbull who i had never heard of lots of other guys seemed to know who he was so we were all gathered together and all told like i got good news and bad news the bad news is you're all fired the good news is you're all hired i had talked to grant and he he hired me for star trek the motion picture and so i went over there and worked on you know most of the models were built they had been built at magikam originally when it was under a different company and then when trumbull took over they went over to another shop and so i'm not sure that sort of the disposition of these models but the klingon chip had been built for the most part and it was beautiful but the the nose the front of it had just no detail whatsoever on it it was just completely sort of clean it had some paint detail and the top dome area was uh the bridge had three little windows painted on it so there's not nothing on it and they wanted to do a shot where they're going to go full wide and then come all the way push all the way into this dome it was a bridge and it was an inch in diameter a little the little hemisphere and so grant gave me that he said just do really fine detail and granted put some windows that were backlit in there and i just did incredibly small detail on that thing and they decided not to do the wide shot they just started really close and so that's what's in the movie that little dome that's full screen is this big across and and i actually used parts i got from dennis schultz watch parts uh vacuum tubes back when they had vacuum tubes vacuum tube parts there were little metal rings and they were very sharp you know very crisp detail did did that i did a lot of detail work on it worked on veger i wasn't really good at the veger stuff though you know the organic stuff that wasn't my thing so worked a bunch on you know worked on epsilon 9 and the space office complex added some detail to that and whatever sort of came my way you know i think i painted some you know i was doing some painting i think it's been so many years i'm not sure exactly but i met a lot of you know you know grant was a fantastic boss grant mccune and dykstra was great everybody was great everyone was so nice to work with back then doug's i met doug smith he was a dp shooting miniatures were still friends to this day and did work on spock's space space pack when he flies into veger but we worked on epsilon 9 with gary roderbeck and me and some other guys on epsilon 9. apogee had bought their own uh plastic injection machines to make the uh it's like a series of trust work we did uh veger we we did maintenance work on the klingon ship we didn't have the enterprise there we didn't do that there those were the main things we worked on so we ended up working on the enterprise which was the main model and the klingon chips the enterprise took about from the time they finished the model making which actually went on while i was painting took almost five months to paint it was all uh automotive acrylic paints all of which were new to me you know i was an art airbrush kind of guy and so everything that we did in a little shop obviously went out onto the motion control stage where dave stewart was a photographer camera guy and doug trumbull of course was the ba our boss and we worked uh hellacious hours sometimes up to 15 and a half hours a day which gave us just enough time to get home and sleep to have our official eight hours off and a half hour drive time because we were at that by that time we were all in the union because it was a paramount which was lucky for all of us because we we got into the union and we were able to on that one show get our one card anyway we had kind of a special little situation and we were a pretty tight-knit little group i actually lived in the model shop for an amount of time i had no apartment or house so we ended up on that project for i think a year very close to a year brick price movie miniatures which later became wonder works and i was part of his original crew it was about nine of us and we really made his shop and we got star trek but he also had running project ufo the tv series so we were making the spaceship of the week the ufo of the week and some of them were really silly unfortunately for star trek we were all hoping to build spaceships no somebody else had that i think it was able had that at that time we did props hand props phasers communicators dry cords belt i did me and alan foshee built 450 belt buckles those are biorhythm things and i mean we really got tired of that i used to go to a lot of the local science fiction conventions around the west coast as a kid and i like to collect movie memorabilian posters and so forth and one of the other people who collected was greg jean and i would chat with greg at the conventions i mean i knew he was in the industry and that he did this work but i never really thought about hitting him up for a job but he hit me up he said to me one day hey you know if you ever want to work for this sometimes i need a lot of people and i said i'd love to so he actually did end up calling me there were a group of us who he had kind of mentioned that to and he called us one day and said hey we're on star trek the motion picture we need an army to get this thing done in time do you want to come to work and needless to say yes was the answer it was really strange we were in a sort of warehouse in marina del rey that i think they had rented just for that that one street even there were three separate facilities all working on star trek at once this was late 79 when we were working on on this and uh alien of course had come out earlier that year and was a was a very big film to model makers and everyone who loved film and science fiction and uh the first screenplay that i wrote just to sort of entertain myself was a sequel to alien and um it was one of those things that got passed around among my friends and a lot of them liked it very much and we were working on the sets one day i think it was star trek working on the miniatures and there was a copy of the script laying around and trouble walked by and saw it and said hey what's this and i said oh it's a you know it's just a sequel to alien and it's not official or anything and he said did you write it and i said yeah and he actually flipped it open and started reading it and he's like this is good you got to get this in and i was like well great if it never goes any farther you can't ask for a much better endorsement than that i had left buck rogers uh because they had cut my overtime down to almost none and i had already been hearing rumblings from grant mccoon that he was definitely staffing up because that show was sold to a certain opening date and they had x number of shots i mean the list was humongous and so it was parceled out all over town and and grant had a large chunk of the work and he needed people that could just basically hit the ground running so i promptly left buck rogers and uh i i had a my last day was a friday and my first day at apogee was saturday so that was kind of basically a seven day a week deal from the day i hired on which was some time i think in august all the way up to opening you know opening in the theaters he put me to work right away with doing some exterior skin surfaces for the feature model they had a lot of real estate that model was over 50 feet long they had a lot of real estate to cover with fairly intense interesting looking detail based on these tiny little gouache paintings that sid mead had done they're beautiful little things but all the details on them of course are done with brushes that are that wide so you really have to kind of get down close and imagine what sid was thinking of uh what's it really going to look like and following that how's it going to be made so grant you say here pete solve this if you need some guys grab them so having been a crew chief already i kind of felt like okay i can do that i just jumped right in and i said i i need i need some big giant drawings of what that stuff looks like just who's who's going to do that okay marty klein marty gave me these wonderful big drawings we duplicated them front to back so that they would you know bookmatch the bright side to the left side laid them down on very thin sheets of surfboard foam and cut cut through the drawing made just all these little pierced openings to match the drawing cut the foam through the pieces away took the main skeletons and laid them on the vacuum form pulled some very very thin styrene over them left it on there stuck them up on the model painted them done it it worked for some strange reason it did the job they all stuck down they took the paint just fine and everybody was happy so i felt pretty good about that later on there were some other things on star trek that were less than perfect but it was all in all it was a really fun exciting shoot

Channel: piercefilm productions

Views: 79,433

Keywords: making of, behind the scenes, special effects, miniature model, Enterprise, Klingon, visual effects, spaceship, Douglas Trumbull

Id: IcBI7E2Cxxo

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 21 2021