STAR WARS 1977 miniature effects

you know John Aaron and I had a little business doing industrial models and basically we got the work anyway we could which was usually by undercutting the cost of someone else that was doing them you know and not making much money at all but so all of a sudden along comes you know ILM and wants us to work for them and John and I had the forethought to think hmm money and thought well yes we would like to work on your project but we don't want to lose our clients and of course we have to be compensated for the amount of money that we would be our shop rate blah blah blah and it's reasonable that if we bring our skills and our talents to to you that we should be paid of like you know at least our shop rate and they were like [Music] okay you know and then Grant MacEwan who was the head of the model shop about a month later two months later we got to kind of know him he said you know when you two guys showed up you were the best thing that ever happened to me I said well what do you mean and we thought well I helped him help him you know he said no it's like you know my salary went up immediately because you guys asked for more money than I was making and they couldn't have me you know working with two guys that made more money than I did so my salary just went up it's in Dainius Li by a good percentage and and we were faking it too I mean John and I were just starving really yes we had this shop theoretical shop rate but it didn't bring into our business anything like that so John and I really lucked out when we asked for a certain amount of money our salaries just you know they've actually already in take that year that year the sky rocketed also Johnny Errol and I had tried to maintain our contacts at nighttime we made models at nighttime for other projects industrial design because we didn't want we thought we if we lose the clients we'll be in trouble you know because we had Kikkoman soy sauce and we did things for Yamaha and JBL speakers and things like that so we would take off their one so like at lunchtime we did these extended lunch signs with sandwiches while you drove to see somebody you know at that get there so that as soon as they were coming back for lunch so that we could talk to them and get back to Star Wars and of course we're starting at these giant bags and her eyes from working late I mean we'd work sometimes till 12:00 1:00 o'clock in the morning and then get up at 6:30 and you know get ready and get get to ILM by 8:00 Joe Johnston who was a friend of mine and was in the year before me or ahead of me rather in industrial design had been working on this what we thought was a b-movie doing you know some stuff on the side to pay his way through college and he was designing spaceships for it so I went and interviewed on that and I got the job of building models for that so it all kind of melded in together if I hadn't been going to Cal State Long Beach for an industrial design degree and I hadn't built all those models before that I probably never would have been in the right spot at the right time to get that job which got me into the film industry John John Eyre Aaron and I were originally hired for I think it was either two weeks or two months I can't remember which one it was and what we were hired for was to help solve the problem of the Death Star because it had to be multiples in foam you know it was like big stretches of area well the Death Star was you know interesting but it wasn't as fun as you could see in the other room they were finishing up the princesses ship which was originally had been the Millennium Falcon but they changed that because it looked too much like the ship from space 1989 and so they were starting to do the money of Falcon and that was like oh that's what you really want to dig your teeth into you know and so John and I you know Hoggard towards towards that kind of a thing we still did the other one we still the Death Star but we started to head in that direction so John and I had since we had an industrial design background we knew a lot of technical information and processes that the other guys didn't necessarily know and so one morning I saw them working on the ship and they would take five minute epoxy and they'd put the part on and they'd put tape you know hold it the five minutes fine it makes up a little bit more and it was just at the time in 75 that super glue had been invented I think the Japanese were the ones who invented and the first brand was called Eastman 9/10 and it was not available you know you wouldn't go into a hobby store and find it you have to go to very special adhesive places to get it and it was much even faster than superglue is now and so what happened was I came in one morning with a bottle because we had some in our shop and I took a pencil and I put it on the table and I said everybody stop for a second take a look at this and I put it off at like 5 degrees or something like that or two degrees I put a little superglue in there and then move my hand away you know and the pencil was stuck there at two degrees and sticking up in the air and it was like this gasp in the room you know like oh how did you do that you know and well let's see that glue what can it what's is and you know all the models from that point on were made with superglue and it you know you just imagine how it speeded things up compared to you know from tape and five-minute epoxy so it made quite a difference and and it was probably one of the reasons why not just that but multiple things like that that why John and I stayed not two months but two years - 20 years - you know all that kind of stuff John airlin stayed at Apogee III came up here after we did when we started to do empire we were all kind of young and only a couple of guys there a few guys had worked on any feature films anything like that before and those were guys that had worked on silent running with Bruce Dern so they had built some of those miniatures worked on those so they had an inkling of what was going on and and where this movie was in the scheme of things you know but I don't think anybody knew when we were working on it for most of the time we thought it was a like a b-movie it had some funny design stuff we had seen some black and white temps coming over from Europe from England of Carrie Fisher as Princess our Princess Leia and she had these her hair up in these big buns and it looked really kind of funny you know and we thought you know but of course when we saw what they called the NATO real which was I think it's national alliances theatre organ owners or something like that they put a 15-minute reel together to sell the movie to to see who wanted to distribute it and who would pay for the rights to distribute it and when we saw that reel it blew everybody away we knew when we saw that that this was going to be a biggie and it was just I can't tell you the feeling that everybody had it was like I've been working on that you know it was just it was hard to get your head wrapped around yeah even to this day I haven't I've never worked on anything else that you quite got that kind of feeling about you know from then on you're hoping to get that high again you know of building something and really putting your all into it and even working harder than any of us probably did on Star Wars and not having it come back with the same payoff you know there's there's plenty of films that I did better on that I think I contributed more on and and even had learned enough stuff to use more tricks of the trade or things that we came up with ourselves but the overall show didn't capture all the things that Star Wars knew but the model shop was small enough I think we had seven people in there for most of the time that everybody did everything I didn't but there are there was a few things that everybody didn't work on that a few guys did for instance the sandcrawler that was I think that was Steve and Joe and bill and grant Mattoon Grant MacEwan was the head of the model shop at that time well always and he was really a good a good guy to work for too but for the most part I think I worked on everything else on Star Wars I started out as a model maker but for the last half of my 13 months on that job I ended up being the model shop person on stages at night when they were they were getting into a time crunch so Richard Edlund would shoot on the day shift and Dennis Muren and Ken Ralston and I were the night shift so Dennis Muren was was the cinematographer of the camera man Ken Ralston was his assistant and then I would handle the miniatures and if Dennis said you know these these wings as they get far enough get further away the wings are disappearing in the eyepiece so I know they're not gonna make it on film can you do something to lighten them up so that they show up and so it be left up to me whether to put you know we had some white tape that I could put on the wing and then do some lines and a little bit of aging so it doesn't just look you know abnormally white or I could use chalk or some other techniques to plus out the model for the shot or if the camera ran into the model while they're programming it and it sounds silly and you and you think that somebody would have to not being paid paying attention to what they're doing to do that but some of the time the computer would just go haywire and it would decide to run the the camera back to the start position which might mean that if it ran straight back to the start position as its backing up it might clip a wing off of the model that it just had moved around so there were fixes like that enough to always need a model maker on stage so I became that that night shift and in doing that I learned all so much from Dennis Muren I I knew the principles of photography I'd had learned that at college but I learned the art of it from Dennis in California especially on Star Wars and Close Encounters the model makers were allowed to see dailies everybody knew they set there they got to hear the director and the supervisors and all these people say we like this we don't like that get somebody to change this and so people could take that information go back they could feel good about themselves because I got to see what they were doing on camera and they felt part like they were part of the production I I suddenly described it as like the whole group cause it was cast and crew and it's almost like we all took a gasping breath at the same time and like sucked the oxygen out of the room all of a sudden it was just like it's amazing dynamic that happened in that room because we'd all only seen little bits and pieces we'd not seen it with sound we haven't seen it with you know music all that comes till it really added to it and so that that experience that especially from somebody who had not worked on films before was just extraordinary and it was really extraordinary to all the people in that room - we knew we were having fun we knew we were getting paid to do something we all loved we weren't getting overtime we weren't getting paid that much but but we were working on something and and it was fun

Channel: piercefilm productions

Views: 68,597

Keywords: Star Wars, special effects, miniature effects, model, sfx vfx, spaceship, ILM, A New Hope, behind the scenes, making of

Id: 7skyMcMtgCE

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020