WILD WILD WEST miniature effects

you know it's not a it's certainly not one of the high points of filmmaking but uh we were talking earlier about while west and uh there's the collapse of monument valley when the spider comes in and shoots monument valley now you could from a model maker's point of view you could have made that a full movie just the collapse of monument valley close-ups and multiple camera moves and but what happened was i was working on i think on phantom menace doing the big rock formations for the podrace arena and uh around finishing it up and they they came and asked the producer on the star wars or on phantom menace whether or not they could borrow me for a month or two two months and uh it was a similar kind of a structures you know monuments of monument valley and the the deal with it was that was so difficult at first is i knew the physics of things that when giant rocks fall on the earth they kind of embed themselves they don't bounce you know a big rock falling off of yosemite or something like that just as incredible amount of force just like in men in black that spaceship wouldn't have plowed into the earth in that same way but emotionally that's what you needed you know and we had to come up with a way that the ship would plow into the earth had to be low enough density rather than like real dirt to do that well a similar problem with the rocks for wild wild west was that rocks don't bounce and yet they were their foam you know they're like surfboard foam and they're imagine the football size to half football size to one and two times the volume of a football so it's these pieces that are all put together like a like a mosaic and um so i thought this the idea was that i thought i don't know if you would know but there's a old metal mallets i mean uh yeah a big man a mallet you know like thor when you thor's hammer uh you hit an anvil and that thing will bounce it goes and when you hear people making swords you know in old medieval movie there's a certain sound to what happens with a steel mallet well i don't know 25 years ago they invented the plastic mallet that is it's all plastic polyethylene and inside that the reason that it doesn't bounce you you hit it and it goes whoa it does not bounce and the reason it doesn't bounce is inside there inside the head of it is a whole bunch of lead balls and in a oil chamber like uh like oil you put your engine so what happens is when you raise the hammer the mallet overhead like this inertia causes all those little lead shell shots to travel backwards and then when you quickly hammer forward they they still continue that way but then when the also they come to a dead stop they travel forward and they continue the inertia of that hammer down on and there's no bounce so the majority of the force actually as opposed to even the the steel hammer you you get action reaction kind of thing the physics of it whereas with the plastic mallet it's all the force continues on down so i thought um that's interesting they don't bounce so and i knew that i knew that you know and i thought god what if we just applied that same thing to the rocks that we make the equivalent of like a big irwin bit or a spade bit and we bore this hole into the thing and then we use a plastic jars for the little rocks you put a small plastic jar for the big rocks you put a big plastic jar fill it with oil like two-thirds with oil and then fill it with the lead shot corresponding to their size so smaller ones get a smaller amount of lead bigger ones get a bigger amount of lead and uh and it it's somewhat in the center of them if you had it off to the side that wouldn't be any good you know they might flop so lo and behold you drop them into a bed of sand or in this case walnut shells ground up walnut shells and they go they don't they don't bounce you know so no one no one except the people who were working on the product ever knew that and in a way they would have complained if the rocks bounced and it looked phony and it wouldn't look good on the film but they you know we're going oh god you know what's the best we can do i guess you know or maybe we'll try to solve it some other way with dust or something but um lo and behold those when that monument valley happened that's what they went oh and it it made it seem like it it has real weight to it you know it's it's like not giving away the magic trick you know you don't want them to see the you know the card up your sleeve or anything like that and that's what it was if people had they may not have known in consciously that there was something wrong but in their bones human beings know the physics of things you know the weather was changing so if we didn't get that shot at the end of the collapse of monument valley uh it was near the end of october and in marin county it starts to rain at the end of quarter it's like clockwork you know so sure enough we got that shot first take one day and it started sprinkling the next day and getting windier and then you know we never i don't know what would have happened had we not been able to get that shot then because we wouldn't have been able to get it until springtime say and their movies coming out you know you know too that we also for west and i'm not trying to uh whip that pony um the the town the western town was a model too it was a very large-scale uh town i think it was it wasn't half scale but it might have been third scale and what had happened there was that they went they used a western town that was out east of los angeles somewhere it was a film town and what happened was when they they wanted to do one of the big flaming shots right away maybe start rather than starting out on the little ones and big explosions all that stuff well they found out that the what nobody had tested the water pressure on the fire hydrants and everything and they just assumed that they were gonna so the water pressure was good for the first you know uh two minutes a minute and a half and then it dropped down so they burned up the whole town and uh they lost it it was embed insurance covered it and all that kind of stuff but now here they were they got one good explosive shot with the real town and they didn't have the town anymore and so they asked ilm to to do that shot and we reproduced it we made metal frameworks it was all collapsible so it could go in trucks because we had to go the most southern part of the united states not florida but right at the mexican border in arizona because at the time of year we were we needed to get like a you know a 10 11 o'clock sun because the other footage had been shot when the sun was at a certain angle and so we wanted to go as further south as we could get near the equator and have desert a desert kind of a situation and so all that town had to be collapsible in multiple since it was going to be burnt down they had to have multiple walls that could go on the steel framework and everything so we could explode it extinguish it you know shoot it again get rid of the old burn up walls put in new burnable walls all that stuff so that was that was kind of that was very challenging but um one of the things i i loved about it mike lynch was i think he headed up that part of the project and uh he made himself a pair of shoes that had little horseshoe prints all over it so he did the final setting and he would go out to you know do this and do that and do this and the final thing before you start to shoot so it left these little as if like 10 horses had come into the this section and gone over to here you know so they'd be random horseshoes i i got uh involved with the wheelchair for wild wild west we had this uh this wheelchair where the the um dr loveless character has no legs and so he's permanently affixed to this platform where the seat of the wheelchair would be and among other things we had to figure out how to make his legs go away it was ilm's task to actually do the cgi part of that but the wheels that they were going to put on this thing were like bicycle wheels the zillion spokes and they were kind of scratching their heads and man this is going to cost a fortune to take out and put back all those spokes and to make it look convincing and i had been called in by tom pock to help out because bruce katien was working on it and had kind of got things going but it was he was having some problems with the mechanical aspects of it and wasn't it didn't look like it was going to make the deadline or be up to the quality that the movie deserved because that was a very expensive big budget very beautifully designed movie and everything had to have this 19th century technological quality to it whether it was a practical set or a miniature model or cgi whatever it all had to match it had to look beautiful had to look 19th century so i kind of gave this a little bit of thought and said you know the wheels probably should look like the flywheel on an old sewing machine or cash register or something and it could just be like three or four thick broad curved cast iron spokes with maybe some gold pinstriping it doesn't have to be like bicycle suppose so they went yeah we can do that so then i had to make a pattern for generating the uh these these curved spokes and get them laid out just right so that they would actually be physically strong and have the look and mount into the wheel away you know so the wheel would be operational and on the first day that we tried it out with kenneth branagh playing the part of dr loveless we had the chair rigged up with knee covers that catchers baseball catchers wear knee protectors or shin guards i guess they're called and that's where he put his calves to tuck in below the seat and so we sat him down in it and got him comfortable in that which everybody was kind of worried about how he's going to fit into this device having come upon it for the first time so he settles in gets his legs where he wants him puts his hands up on the armrests grabs the joystick we've got the little servo motor energized and connected to the joystick and he does this wonderful thing apparently kenneth branagh had been in a wheelchair before for some previous role because this was the part we were worried about is he going to be comfortable and is he going to be able to move this thing around smoothly and operate it so when we're all watching him and he moves his eyes camera left then he moves his head camera left and then he moves the joystick and takes off like this with perfect blended smoothness it was like i had problems over with and as it turned out he had a great time in that in that because he has to act through the whole movie in that one device so it had to be you know had to be perfect from that standpoint ergonomically they wanted actual practical steam coming out of the little miniature boiler that's mounted behind him and uh i really don't think they could have got it because i think steam at that scale it would have been like the water vapor on ghostbusters i think it would have just disappeared in camera it's like when you're doing rain you know you have to provide three or four times what you think is a realistic amount of rain for it even to register on film and so we ended up with some kind of i think it was uh smoke cookies or no the little miniature miniature foggers that's what it was we didn't want to do it with pyro because you'd have to keep cleaning it up and re-lighting it and so forth but somebody found some little foggers that are you know about the size of a hero sandwich and we just kind of gutted them out and just put the mechanism there in a little tank so that it would make some oil some oil fog coming out of the stacks but i was very proud of that model and it proved itself quite practical and workable in the movie

Channel: piercefilm productions

Views: 54,266

Keywords: special effects, miniature model, western, visual effects, behind the scenes, making of

Id: Huw-gPTutLQ

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021