Flight of the Navigator | VFXcool

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I'm gonna gush here, but I love this film so much. Lots of memories watching and rewatching this on VHS in the late 80s / early 90s, think I wore out the cassette tape dreaming about being David. Just something so unique and futuristic about the ship effect. And that soundtrack gives me goosebumps, particularly this track.

Really amazing to see the lengths they went to in those early days to achieve effects we almost take for granted now. They seem to have used every trick in the book! Full-sized props, miniatures, motion control, matte painting, rotoscoping, stop motion, puppetry(!) and of course the early CGI.

Thanks Captain D (and Alan) for taking us behind the scenes. And amazing how well this film holds up!

👍︎︎ 338 👤︎︎ u/ianjm 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies

Wow, he really outdid himself this time. I've never quite been able to wrap my head around how compositing and effects were done in the early days of computer graphics while everything was still done on film, and this explained everything so clearly. That anecdote about how they'd scan each rendered frame onto film and then delete it because they couldn't store more than 2 frames at a time was wild!

And the effect where they hid the rig holding the ship with mirrors was so cool!

👍︎︎ 226 👤︎︎ u/scifiguy95 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies

Most people don't put into their 10min video the effort that Alan puts into 5 seconds of his 40 minutes video

👍︎︎ 114 👤︎︎ u/SweelFor2 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies

The star of Flight of the Navigator, Joey Cramer, just did an AMA a few weeks ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/n193p2/i_am_joey_cramer_from_flight_of_the_navigator/

👍︎︎ 72 👤︎︎ u/CurlSagan 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies

aight wheres the petition to let Alan direct FotN2

👍︎︎ 74 👤︎︎ u/ben123111 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies

man, i like this guy so much and i can't quite explain it. he's like the cool science/maths teacher i wish i had in middle school or something.

👍︎︎ 51 👤︎︎ u/hoxxxxx 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies

I'm all for Alan retiring the Captain D look and doing more videos like this. I understand that must difficult to be doing this act for years now, I love his videos and the character doesn't need to stick around.

👍︎︎ 172 👤︎︎ u/MutthaFuzza 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies

40 minutes?!? Yeah no way I'll watch the entire thing...

40 minutes later wow, can't believe I was kept engaged the entire time.

👍︎︎ 155 👤︎︎ u/purebuu 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies

The sheer amount of flexing captain disillusion does in these videos is magical. Like i don't know anything about effects an what not (should on account of my hobby in photography) so most times i completely miss him doing something awesome but like the comments clue me in. :P

👍︎︎ 31 👤︎︎ u/VitaminZebra 📅︎︎ May 20 2021 🗫︎ replies
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-But... why, Captain? -Because, Alan, I've got a lot on my plate! The inconsequential viral ads everyone knows are fake aren't going to debunk themselves. I'm really not good at public speaking. It's easy. Just sit right here. Look right into their eyes and... Talk like you're certain they care. I'm off. [electric motor buzzes] But I don't even know what to talk about! -Just let your imagination take flight. -[intro music starts] I'm sure you'll navigate your way to something. [mechanisms click and buzz] [metal thud] [Alan] Flight? Navigate? Hmm. Navigate. [Alan clears throat] Every now and then it's good to get away from the f-fake you know, viral... videos and... look at the effects from movies... from big movies because-- And the people also, the... the artists who create them. And, um... even if you don't know about visual effects they're fun to learn about because they're just plain cool. And also it's like "school". The title is two words at the same time. [triumphant theme from the film plays] [static noise cuts off music] Sometimes a movie is objectively good and sometimes it's subjectively amazing because you saw it at the right time and were the target audience. It ignited your imagination, shook you with possibilities. As far as I'm concerned, Flight of the Navigator is such a film. It's a classic tale. You know: a boy has a crush on a girl, gets kidnapped by an AI spaceship from another galaxy, returns eight years later having not aged a day, becomes the subject of intense study by the all-powerful... NASA, manages to escape their clutches, reunites with the spaceship, which needs navigation data it stored in his brain, and goes on a joyride around the world, never even thinking about his crush again! If that doesn't sound awesome, then you weren't a kid in 1986. And that's on you. But as a... kind of adult now, I admit, the unusual tone of the movie may have partly been an accident, a result of two companies pulling in two different directions. For the American audience, Disney wanted heart-warming family drama. For the international market, PSO needed less dialogue, more action-driven spectacle. And somehow, against all odds, Despte a bunch of similar genre movies failing at the box office the previous year, The director, Randal Kleiser, pulled it off. He made a film that leaps effortlessly from wild flying chases to heart-to-heart chats, to moody musical interludes, composed by Alan Silvestri who had just finished scoring another little film called Back to the Future! But I don't want to talk about the Synclavier system he used to make an entirely digital score on this movie or how it was Sarah Jessica Parker's first feature film role, what lessons Paul Reubens' performance as the voice of Max teaches us about future first contact scenarios, -- [Max chuckles like Pee-wee Herman] or how the young lead actor Joey Cramer, went on to face some serious life challenges. You can check out trivia blogs or insightful crowdfunded documentaries for that. The Captain would probably focus on how when the turkey is thrown down in the music video David is watching, there's an insert of it hitting the floor, but in the song's official music video that shot isn't there! But I'm here to talk about one thing. The ship. And all the artistry that made it feel real. [mysterious motif from the film plays] The look of the hull alone might be the biggest flex in the history of sci-fi vehicle design. It's iconic and recognizable, but not easy to reproduce. No fan art I've seen ever nails the shape. But that's understandable. The film's own promo art can't get it right. What the heck is that? Even this painted poster by Rich Davies for the 2019 limited edition Blu-ray release doesn't have exactly right proportions. The wingspan's too wide, the hatch is too small, and there's a weird extra dimple, come on! It's as if you have to obsess about it your whole life, trying over and over, to even get close. I guess that's because the design isn't the product of any one artist. Edward Eyth is credited with designing all the sci-fi elements in the movie. After all, he's also a concept artist who's contributed to the futurist aesthetic of a little movie called Back to the Future Part II! But on Navigator it was production designer William Creber who first envisioned an otherworldly vessel, inspired by shells, Randal Kleiser came up with the idea of it being metallic and able to change shape. Some of Eyth's initial concept sketches were then refined as clay sculptures by designer Daniel Gluck, and the work of finalizing the look and making the 5-foot maquette that would be used as reference throughout the production was done by sculptor Jim Casey! It was a group effort, is my point. And it didn't stop there. Steve Austin, a... yacht builder... and his team constructed a giant fiberglass mold that was hauled across the entier continent to a company in Florida which used it to build two identical-looking full-scale 20-foot-long ships. One was a sealed, lightweight version, at 700 pounds. Let's call it Ship A. Ship B was a 1450-pound open-door version, complete with an aluminum mockup of the interior and a big load-bearing post through the center, for anchoring to a crane. They were built in Florida because... well, that's where the movie was set and mostly filmed. [static noise] When I first moved to America as a kid high on my list of places to visit was Disney MGM Studios where both ships were put on permanent display after the movie came out. Like many people, I have home video from the studio backlot tour, going by those majestic things. I made sure to check them out every time I was at the park. [alarm beeps] Uh-oh. [loud electric zap] [Alan yelps] [loud electric zap] [Alan grunts] [exhales] I guess this isn't about me. Let's stay on topic. Why did they build the ship full-sized, anyway? Well, this helped a lot with realism. Almost all the scenes where the ship hovers close to the ground were shot using the two full-sized props. Ship A was featured early on, when it's transported into the NASA hangar, discovered there by David, and then begins its escape. They hung it on a single, thin aircraft cable, counting on the folds in the surrounding plastic drapes to disguise it. You can kind of spot it sometimes. Here, as the ship starts to turn around, it's being spun, still hanging on the cable. And a few hand-animated optical energy arches make things more epic. In scenes where the door is open, Ship B was supported by an enormous truck-mounted crane attached through a cut-out hole on the port bow. This custom-built, one-of-a-kind crane was made by special effects supervisor Jack Bennett and could swing the ship up to 32 feet, and support the weight of the actors inside. Its shining moment is in the gas station scene, when the camera is mounted on a second Titan crane to capture a dynamic landing. Later you can actually see the Bennett Crane truck in the shot, disguised as a practical vehicle in the background. Pretty sneaky. Having a real ship that holds up in closeups and wide shots gave a lot of directorial freedom, but Kleiser didn't abuse it. We barely even catch a glimpse of the ship until half way through the film. Prior to then, the director took time to build up anticipation and set up various story elements. Although, you know... even as a kid, I felt it was weird that the whole plot about liking Jennifer Bradley never got resolved. [static noise] I mean... he should've seen her again at the end of the movie somehow and had the courage to strike up a conversation, just like his dad taught him. [alarm beeps] Damn it! [loud electric zap] [loud electric zap] [Alan sighs] Ok, the giant ship is fun and all, but at some point they had to actually show the thing flying, right? And if you've heard anything about Flight of the Navigator at all, it's probably that it featured early computer animation. It was the first movie to use reflection mapping to depict a realistic, metallic 3D surfce on film, at a time when portable data storage devices maxed out at about one megabyte. How? The task fell to an ambitious Canadian company called Omnibus Computer Graphics, one of the first digital animation vendors. They mostly worked on commercials and TV intro graphics, but eager to expand, the bought up two American CG companies, opened a facility on the Paramount lot, and purchased a one-of-a-kind machine called the Foonly F-1 from another established computer tech firm, "Triple-I." They had previously used it to create some of the iconic stylized visuals in Tron. But Omnibus wanted to push it all the way into photorealism. This was beyond even the most powerful desktop computers of the day, like an SGI IRIS workstation, which Omnibus also had. Only a supercomputer would do. The Foonly was part of a messy arrangement of huge cabinets, patched together, requiring specialists like computer wizard Dave Sieg to run and maintain. There was no off-the-shelf modeling or animation software. There were barely graphic interfaces. Everything was pretty much run through command line. To build a digital replica of the ship, the Omnibus creative team, which included Jeff Kleiser, the director's brother, took sculptures of both the slow and high-speed versions and drew a matching set of points on them. Then cross sections were digitized with a stylus on a 4x6-foot Calcomp tablet. 3D scanners or even digitizing arms weren't a standard yet. Those points had to be put back together in the computer. A utility, which would eventually be put into PRISMS, the predecessor of Houdini software, helped connect the points with smooth splines that then defined the surface of a triangle mesh. This wireframe shows up throughout the first half of the movie on computer screens, when David's brain is analyzed. Both versions of the ship having the exact same topology made it possible to blend from one to the other, a principle that's still a major part of 3D animation today. But for shading, these days we use sophisticaded ray tracing algorithms to simulate the behavior of light and depict reflective surfaces realistically. Back then they had to rely on a much more basic technique. [old news reel fanfare] If you wrap an image around a 3D object, it looks... like an image wrapped around a 3D object. But if you assume the image is on a sphere around the object, check how the angle of the faces on that sphere differs from the angle of the faces on the object, in relation to the camera, and distort the image accordingly, it looks like a reflection. Might sound simple, but back then, things like this had to be figured out and coded for specific computers from scratch. At Omnibus this was done by a guy named Bob Hoffman. Once a few tests proved the technique would work, Jeff Kleiser joined the production team and gathered video footage at all the locations during the shoot and second unit photography. Stills of this were stitched into approximate environment spheres and used for the reflections in each shot. It took some trial-and-error to match the color and tone of the film footage, but it worked! [triumphant theme from the film plays] Just one small problem. How do you put it in the movie? Adobe Media Encoder wouldn't exist for another quarter century. The TRANEW software used for rendering on the Foonly had no anti-aliasing. It couldn't smooth the jagged pixel edges in the rendered images. But it rendered them at whopping 6000x4000 pixels, which was higher than the resolution of the film recorder. So the smoothing happened naturally when it was put on film. Even though the ship usually filled a small part of the screen, each frame took around 20 minutes to render. And with a washing machine-sized hard drive of... 50 megabytes for the system, and another striped pair for data, there was only enough space to hold two of these high-res images. So once a frame finished rendering, -[metal clang] -It was sent directly to a PFR-80 film recorder, basically a high-quality CRT screen interfaced with an old Acme animation camera. The recorder would expose the image onto a film frame, in three color passes, then delete it from the buffer forever and advance the film to the next frame. Completing a shot this way could take days and there are horror stories of opening the magazine at the end to find the whole film roll jammed in the camera! But by all accounts, this didn't happen on Flight of the Navigator. Even after a successful render, all you had was a strip of film with the ship animation. The computer couldn't be used to combine it with a background. That kind of stuff was still done... optically. It meant also rendering a matte of the animation, slapping that against a print of the background and making a copy onto a new strip, which left an unexposed area in the shape of the ship. Then that was laid against the full-color ship animation and printed again for the final composite. That's the simple version. To create realistic hotspots on the shiny surface, they had to render an extra highlight pass. Sometimes a hand-animated shadow was also thrown in by compositors, although it's... well, nothing to write home about. The real test for Omnibus came later, with the "time storm" sequence. At the climax of the movie, the ship travels through another dimension, requiring full-screen CGI. Facing much longer render times and a looming deadline, it was clear the Foonly simply wasn't fast enough. So Dave Sieg worked out a deal with a friend at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, to let them use the CRAY XMP, then one of the fastest computers in the world, able to render the frames in a fraction of the time. In a recent retrospective, Jeff Kleiser shows some test footage of the sequence, which makes the final result all the more impressive. [sci-fi storm noise rises] [noise stops] But here's the thing... This ship, right here... is not CG. [ominous music] It's a model. [chuckles] A miniture. Let's take a moment to talk about visual effects journalism. For as long as effects have been part of movies, producers and studios have been crafting... misleading narratives around them as a promotional tool. [Kopelson] We used an actual railroad. This was not miniatures, it was not trick photography -- [dramatic music sting] [Alan] These days there's a prejudice against "too much CGI." So studios love to pretend their upcoming blockbuster was crafted by hand, with models and puppets and love. And that computers were barely involved. Reporting on the massive digital work that was done on top of all that is... discouraged. But a while back, the trend was opposite. CGI was the new, revolutionary storytelling tool, so if you used it in any capacity, your film's effects were "done with CGI." But out of the 61 optical effects shots in Flight of the Navigator, just 18 used computer animation. The rest were done with... well, just about every other technique available at the time, but chief among them... motion control miniatures. This was the standard way to get sci-fi vehicles flying for many years and Captain Disillusion has talked about it before. Models were shot in stop-motion, only not by hand, but on robotic supports, which could repeat pre-programmed motions exactly, multiple times, making it possible to capture different aspects of a shot as separate passes. Motion blur was also possible by moving slowly during longer exposures. In fact, that's how you can tell which shots were motion control in this movie. Just look for the blur. CG animation couldn't do that yet. Although they tried to use some double exposure tricks in compositing to approximate it. [Helen] Jeff! [Alan] For those of you more familiar with visual effects, -[static noise] - alarms might be going off about now. "How could they've possibly shot motion control with that smooth mirror surface?" You're right to be skeptical. The Cinema Research Corporation motion control crew, headed by effects cinematographer George Muhs, had to hack their way around a ton of unique challenges. For one thing, the ship's seamless hull made it impossible to hide any attachment points on it. Instead, they used five different ships, three slow and two high-speed versions, each with a different mounting point, away from the camera view. The IMC motion control rig, appropriately nicknamed the Cruciflex, travelled on a 40 to 60 foot track that could lift, slide and rotate the camera, and control focus. All kinds of sweeping moves were possible. The ship model would either be on a simple c-stand or sometimes on a separate model mover base, but mounted on the reverse side of the roll axis so the ship's hull wouldn't reflect it. It did, of course, need to reflect some approximation of the environment in the live-action plate. But unlike with CG, the solutions here were as low-tech as it gets. Muhs bought two white cargo parachutes from an Army surplus store. They were draped around the staging area and acted as light diffusers with a vague appearance of clouds. This worked for most shots. All the hotspots from the lights were carefully flagged off and instead, a single ENH projector bulb, shining through a top hole in one of the parachutes, was shot in a separate pass, simulating the sun. That way, its intensity could be controlled in compositing and even blinked on and off to imitate cloud breakup. And instead of the traditional black, light gray cards were often used behind the model in the beauty pass, so the reflected tone could blend with the rest of the environment. And then there was the challenge of matte passes. See, normally you could backlight a model over a bright backdrop or overexpose it on black velvet to create a matte. But neither approach worked with this giant, shiny Christmas ball. You certainly couldn't blue-screen it. [chuckles] That would be a disaster! Instead, after every other pass of a particular shot was done, model wrangler Mark Wolf spraypainted the ship with Nestle Streaks 'n Tips white harispray! This diffuse white version was filmed for the matte, then the white layer was washed off, requiring only minor touch-ups with the same chrome bumper spray paint used on the full-sized ships, and the model was ready for the next scene. For some of the wilder aerial maneuvers, they had to get really creative. The vertical takeoff and landing outside the hangar was set up sideways, with a wooden board attached to the camera platform, simulating the ground. Complete with a post-it note to stand in for the yellow jumpsuit of a background actor in the footage. As the camera moved away, the "ground" stayed with it, giving a realistic falloff to the reflection. To get the lighting pass of the nighttime approach into Ft. Lauderdale the crew laid a black cardboard sheet with color gelled holes, lit from below, and some white Christmas lights laid on top. In the last shot of the Beach Boys sequence of the the Everglades, the camera base gragged a blue cloth roll with painted clouds, providing the reflected sky in the water reflecting in the bottom of the ship. Then the model was filmed again, rigged upside-down to provide its own reflection in the water. For the dreaded "time storm" shots, they bounced light from a huge sheet of foamcore and a crazy tapestry of color gels onto the bottom of the ship in one pass and the top in another, to imitate the chaotic inter-dimensional CG environment. On some of the more complex nighttime shots, they even combined multiple lighting passes in-camera by rewinding the film and shooting across the exact same frames to save on compositing steps. It's amazing what natural nuances you get for free when working with physical models. And not all of them needed motion control. This one seems to have been used in the underwater scene. A few of these specialty shots were handled by Fantasy II Film Effects, a company with a rich history of adding magic to movies. Its founder Gene Warren Jr. was one of three generations of effects artists. The studio included an 850,000-gallon tank for underwater work. There they dressed a minimal ocean floor set to surround the ship model. It's obviously really there. It's reflecting the environment perfectly, moving with motion blur. So at first I thought maybe they suspended it on these wires and simply yanked it up for takeoff. Except... the miniature is buoyant, aggresively so, So then I thought maybe they did the opposite and held it down by the wires, through the floor, then cut them, causing it to shoot up. But its trajectory seems controlled, pushing in stages, going forward and banking to the right. Maybe I got it all wrong and this was another motion control shot. But we already know there were limitations to how cleanly they could composite those. And other than the separately filmed, hand-rotoscoped bubbles element, this looks flawless. There are no mounts or rods or wires that could be obscured! Plus, the motion control guy literally told me they didn't work on this! I don't... know that to think! -I just... I can't... I just... -[tense musical pulse builds] -[dramatic music sting] -Tell me your secrets! [clears throat] I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I think this same model might have also been used in the scene where a guy sees the ship in his rearview mirror. It was probably just puppeteered across on strings, as a sort of forced perspective gag. Speaking of forced perspective, there’s even more to unpack in the hangar sequence. It’s when the ship becomes the focal point of the story, so they really had to step up the effects. We already know that the transformation and departure were CG, the vertical takeoff and landing were motion control composites, and the U-turn inside the hangar was the full-sized Ship A on a cable. But what about the triumphant exit through the blast doors? You might assume that this simple close-up is a full-sized ship too, but let’s think about it practically. Ship A is designed to be suspended on a cable and Ship B can only be swung around in an arc by a crane. It would be super impractical to rig up either of these huge props to move perfectly straight forward for just a brief insert. This is a miniature rigged close to camera. Well then, this has got to be a full-sized ship being pushed out by a forklift, right? You can kind of see a support hiding in the dark right there. Nope. This is actually the same miniature, combined with a classic in-camera effect known as the Schüfftan shot. Along with may other practical effects on Flight of the Navigator, it was masterminded by visual effects supervisor Peter Donen, son of respected director Stanley Donen, who did, you know, this thing. [jovial musical score plays] The ship model is only a few feet away from the camera, so whatever rig is supporting and moving it, extends in front of the building. It’s covered beyond the edge of the blast door by... a mirror. Okay, but exactly what is this mirror reflecting? Maybe it’s aligned perpendicular to the wall, showing the part of it that continues behind the camera, with the two extras there, looking the opposite way? Well, then the highly directional morning sunlight would be hitting them completely differently, and obviously not match. No, the mirror is actually reflecting... the very spot it’s covering up! This production photo clearly shows a second large mirror set up to relay a clear view of the area behind the on-camera mirror onto it, like a periscope. Of course the perspective is shifted slightly, but the distance and the pattern on the wall help disguise that. By lining up the first mirror exactly with the edge of the blast door, and using a neutral density filter on the rest of the frame to compensate for the loss of light in the reflection, Peter Donen achieved a nearly flawless composite in-camera. -[David] Wow! Must be nice to go home from the shoot with the effect already done. Although, if the hanger exit was the fastest produced effect in Flight of the Navigator, the most time consuming might 've been the steps. They float securely in mid-air and you can guess how this was done in-camera. Each step was supported by a thin rod, angled just right to be hidden from the camera by the step itself. Other than a few hero shots though, they had to cut a lot of corners with this throughout the movie. It’s not perfect. But the way the steps form couldn’t be improvised. Part of the hull liquifies, revealing the entrance, while the melted excess solidifies into the steps. And this was achieved with… -[happy chime] -Good old stop-motion animation. Artists at Fantasy II sculpted dozens of individual carvings depicting the melting action frame-by-frame. I know that because... here they are! [drum roll] Genuine, hand-painted resin. [sniffs] Mmm, 34 years of visual effects history. This was one of the first elements shot at the start of production. But during principle photography they decided to change the number of steps the ship had, so all this had to be redone from scratch. Can you imagine? Hey, let’s reanimate it ourselves to see what we can learn! [upbeat synth music from the film plays] [music crescendos] [spacey melting sound] [metallic clicks] The door shape starts flowing in a straight line, then pulses with waves until individual blobs break off from top to bottom. And because each step finishes forming in sequence, the last few sculptures are recycled across them. It clearly took incredible skill and patience to craft this, but, once the replacement series existed, it could be shot repeatedly to match whatever live action angles were captured in different scenes. At the gas station, you can actually spot these square peg supports within the rotoscoped boundary of the steps before the matte-painted spiral patterns fade on to cover them. Gene Warren, Jr.’s one complaint was that the time crunch prevented his team from sculpting a different animation for the door closing. Instead they ended up just running the opening sequence in reverse. Hey, what’s going on... there? What’s with this funky matte line? Well, let’s think about it practically again. You’ve got a full-sized Ship A, which is sealed, hanging in your shot. Then, as the superimposed animation of the steps begins, you need to change it to Ship B, which has an open hatch. But how do you swap one 3400 cubic foot prop for another, line it up exactly, and not disturb the multiple chains hanging off it? You can’t. Instead, you have to use Ship B the whole time, and make it look like it’s sealed at the start. But how do you do that in 1986? Well... you paint it. And I mean paint it, with actual paint. Founded by effects cameraman, Bruce Block and artist, and Titanic enthusiast, Ken Marschall, Matte Effects operated out of a room built in the corner of a sound stage at Fantasy II, where the duo produced sophisticated matte work for a ton of movies, including Flight of the Navigator. Some of it was rig removal and touch-ups. In that first door-opening shot, Marschall needed to paint a sealed and open versions of the entire bottom half of the ship, with closely matching reflections to the real one so they could be seamlessly intercut. In this scene, the area that contains the crane arm supporting the ship, was replaced with a painted patch of the sky. Matching the color and tone of footage is challenging even for modern day matte artists using digital tools, but imagine trying to judge the colors from a strip of film on a light table, painting the element with acrylics on black cardstock, filming that, developing the film, checking how well it matches, then going back to make adjustments on the painting, and repeating the whole process until you get it right. Not to mention sometimes having to paint with altered colors to accommodate the quirks of interpositive film stocks and save steps in the compositing process to preserve quality. The guy was kind of a genius. The most striking matte work on the movie though, was done by another cameraman and artist duo, David Stipes and Jena Holman. Holman painted the vast 4x8 foot photorealistic panoramas seen when the ship flies up into the stratosphere and other exotic locations. These stunning, intricate paintings hold up even in extreme close-ups. For some scenes, they were captured with motion control at Cinema Research, but for others, they were shot real-time on a makeshift rig built by Stipes, with spins and dolly moves to simulate the aerial maneuvers seen on the ship’s view screen. And that view screen was... real. Really there, I mean. Other than an angle at the end of the movie, which was clearly picked up as chroma key, with Joey Cramer wearing a funny wig, everything seen inside the ship actually existed as it appears. This seems to be a recurring theme with this production. Anything that could be staged for real, was. [static noise] Some of the financing for the movie came from a Norwegian production company called Viking Films, which meant that money had to be spent in Norway, a country known for its stunning mountains, glaciers and coastal fjords. So naturally, after wrapping up in Florida, the production moved there to shoot all the... spaceship interiors. From the first moment David catches a glimpse of what awaits him through the door, we’re seeing Norway unit photography. Even the largest studio in Oslo couldn’t accommodate this huge structure, with 150 feet of horizontal throw required for the view screen’s rear projection system. So the production found a massive abandoned aircraft hangar on the outskirts of the city and soundproofed it just for the shoot. The set itself was built back in Burbank by the scenery fabrication company, Design Centers, and shipped disassembled all the way to the Norwegian capital. It was a series of modular metal scaffolds supporting the shape of the cabin with levels above and below for various transformations and the rigging of Max. The alien patterns on the walls were vacuum-formed out of transparent UVEX plastic as individual panels. Each was then vacuum metalized from the back so bumps and scratches during filming wouldn’t damage this chrome coating. The coating worked like mirrored sunglasses. It looked opaque when lit normally, but direct light from the other side could shine through. This is what really gave the ship’s interior its other-worldly look. It was intricately lit through the walls, the colors and patterns changing with the mode of operation or the mood of the scene. You can see the difference this made in the sequence where Max powers down and only the projection screen or sometimes mockup paintings bounce light into the cabin. But my favorite interior effect happens early on when the ship changes shape for the first time. And it has nothing to do with the mechanics of the set. [David] Uh-oh. [Alan] It might be the most literal use of a dolly zoom in movie history. The space is supposed to be distorting, so it does. Also there were puppets. Max was made of the same = UVEX panels as the walls, but they were covering sophisticated chain and cable driven mechanisms in a steel frame, engineered by David Goldberg at Design Centers, and puppeteered by the duo of Tony Urbano and Tim Blaney. This master and apprentice were no strangers to making robots come alive, having just come off another iconic ‘80s comedy sci-fi project, Short Circuit. [Number 5] Whoa! [mumbles] [cow moos] [Max] Moo! Max was hung from a trolley that rolled back and forth on a gantry, which in turn traveled on tracks along the top of the set. Pushed and pulled with planks operated by a couple of grips on this X-Y rig, the puppeteers rode in the trolley and controlled Max with levers and squeeze triggers. There were also other variations of Max’s body: a heavy hand puppet version for appearing from below, A minimal stunt version for traveling along a wall, And even a marionette for some of the exterior location scenes. Tony Urbano was a virtuoso marionette…tist. Max’s intricate eye was achieved with a couple of interchangeable heads. One used a simple bundle of fiberoptic strands that transmitted light from an illuminator up on the trolley with the puppeteers, all the way down through the arm to the frosted glass dome of the face. The other head used a $25,000 dollar ultra-fine fiber-optic projection system, purchased from an optics lab. It could transmit crisp, high-res images from a film projector to a special lens in the face. But it wasn’t flexible enough to be snaked through the arm, so it set up statically for a handful of shots the first and last time we see Max. The fiber-optics look great in the dim ship interior scenes, but they were no match for the bright sunlight of exteriors, or even the artificially lit fake exterior door inserts. So during this whole conversation between David and Max amid the cows, Max’s face is actually an optical composite. Footage of what seems like a pattern playing on the advanced fiber-optic rig was double exposed and painstakingly match-moved onto the face dome in about a dozen lengthy shots. Luckily, the spherical shape and the chaotic pattern made the rotations of the head irrelevant and the match ended up looking so convincing that I for one didn’t notice it was a composite until... literally today! Urbano and Blaney also handled the alien creatures David encounters on the ship, including the adorable Puckmarin, whom Blaney voiced. [Puckmarin emits buzzing laugh] [Number 5 guffaws robotically] Now, the creatures get a bad rap from the fans sometimes and I’m not sure why. I guess, they’re jarring to see in the midst of all the high-tech visual effects. and some of the puppets are kind of basic. -[eye ululates] -[Alan] The giant eyeball was just a prop rental from CBS Studios. Most of the others were built by special makeup and effects artist, Laine Liska. He took his time, so the puppeteers didn’t have a chance to examine or rig the puppets until arriving in Oslo. Not happy with some of the overly bright paint work, they had to redo it on location. They also fabricated an extra character from scratch and I think it’s the coolest one -- the slime worm that has a cold. Made out of packing material, it was generously coated in Prell hair lotion and... KY jelly. -[David] Gross! -[worm slurps] [Alan] The wide shots of the creatures were filmed in the interior set with Urbano and Blaney giving some general movement to most of the puppets at once. But a separate insert stage was built where the pair performed each individual creature in close-ups. So don’t tell me it’s not impressive. This took real skill! I mean... fine, if I had to pick the dodgiest shot in the movie, it’s probably this. But I prefer to focus on the positive. To me, the best effect in the entire film happens when we’re given our first glimpse of the entire ship. -[dog barks] -[mysterious theme from the film plays] I’ve seen this moment so many times over the years and I always assumed it’s another obscured perspective shot, like at the gas station, with the atmospheric fog hiding the crane truck in the background. But let’s think about it practically one more time. This is the front of the ship and we know the hole in Ship B for attaching the crane was in the front left section, so it should be visible here. Well, in fact, it was. And it took a lot to get rid of it. First, a motion control animation stand at Cinema Research was used to match move a matte in the shape of the hull to rebuild the edge. It was given about the same density as the deepest shadows in the ship hull. Then, hand-drawn smoke was animated to fill the upper right area of the background, hiding the crane arm. Finally, another less dense pass of smoke was animated flowing on top of everything to blend the elements together. The only remaining clue is a tiny misaligned wedge at the start of the shot. It’s hard to appreciate the difficulty of this in an age when artists can do far more elaborate things on their laptops for fun. In fact, it’s always bugged me how they had to use Ship B here, plugged up with a clearly visible hatch. I’m just gonna fix it real quick. And... there. The world has changed. Every effects company I talked about has either gone out of business or faded into dormancy over the years. Omnibus famously over-expanded into 30 million dollar debt and shut down, affecting almost 150 people. I kept looking in on the practical ships as they decayed on the curb of the backlot tour. Eventually, one was repurposed as the roof of a refreshment stand. Then the whole tour was demolished to build something new. Much like the Port Everglades power plant where those first glimpses of the ship were filmed. [loud demolition explosions] [concrete crumbling] -[static noise] -The iconic candy cane striped stacks are gone forever, replaced by a "next-generation clean energy center," which... I guess is good. Flight of the Navigator is not a perfect movie. It’s got a few... outdated elements. [Max] Hey Blimpo! Oink oink! Too many twinkies, ha-ha! But there’s also a lot of warmth and spirit, and the earnestness with which the story is told wins me over every time. I can still feel how scary it is to walk through those woods, to be trapped, to step into the unknown, to rebel, to break free. It probably won’t surprise you there’s talk of a modern reboot. Like the original, it’s been stuck in "development hell" for years, with various people slated to write and direct, including at one point, Jurassic World’s Colin Trevorrow. In a 2015 interview he hinted that the story was going to be "about brothers," which, you know, sounds okay if you don’t remember the plot of the original film at all. The brother relationship arc was brought to a pretty satisfying conclusion already. Personally, I like to research the weak aspects of a movie for reboot potential. For example, that Jennifer plot hole? I came across this Japanese promotional brochure from when the movie came out there. It’s got lots of cool stills and production photos and buried among them is this image: David, in the waterfront setting at the end of the movie, talking to a girl. Could it be that the resolution to that story actually existed but was cut out? I wanted to know more. So I dug up a production script. And guess what? There is a scene of him talking to a girl at the end. Only it’s not Jennifer, it’s the twelve year old version of Carolyn McAdams, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character whom David met as an adult woman. That’s crazy! There’s also a whole subplot about Max’s alien masters intending to destroy him because he screwed up the mission. So much is left unexplored. What are the Phaelonians like? What happened to the Puckmarin, an invasive alien species left on Earth for fun? What was David’s life like after this traumatic experience that only he knows really happened? Did he eventually pursue Carolyn? And did Jennifer find that weird? Was it a cosmic disruption of the space-time continuum? What if Jennifer, the token crush of the original movie, were the central character of a new story that also started in the relative past. You have a new, slightly older female Navigator from the 1990s winding up in the 2020s for some reason. Sarah Jessica Parker and Howard Hesseman could reprise their roles, not to mention Joey Cramer himself who’s rehabilitated and ready to return to acting. I say reboots are over! Sequels are the new reboots again. It’s worked for other ‘80s properties. Of course, you’d need the right director. Someone experienced, but not too old and jaded either. Someone with a devoted online following, well versed in visual effects and in directing young actors. Someone who’s been creating sci-fi and comedy content for over 20 years. Someone with encyclopedic knowledge of the would-be franchise and a passion for revitalizing it if only given the chance! [Captain D] Hey! I'm back. What’s going on? I... I'm explaining-- -Are you trying to get another job? -No, I was just-- Hey, we’ve got a verbal contract pal. Get back to your intern station! Go! What are we talkin’ about here? Flight of the Navigator, huh? -[outro music starts] -Oh, yeah. I know all about that movie. It’s where they used computer graphics for the first time ever. Says so right here in this Blu-ray booklet. Also that it was done by a company called "Omnibus Computer Animation." That’s what it says. Ooh, that’s a really good drawing of the ship. Hey, remember when he was weightless up in space or whatever? You could totally see a big pole holding him up. Looked so fake. The whole movie is basically a rip-off of ET. Now that’s a good effects movie. The puppet was so cool. Much better than the puppets on Flight of the Navigator. Anyway, is that enough? You can edit this into something, right Alan? [chuckles] Flight of the Navigator. [laughs] What a dork.
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Channel: Captain Disillusion
Views: 1,479,919
Rating: 4.9822168 out of 5
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Id: tyixMpuGEL8
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Length: 41min 28sec (2488 seconds)
Published: Thu May 20 2021
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