Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left

I was mistaken when I said that Ultraman was the last miniatures show I worked on, I had totally forgotten about Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left which I worked on in late 1991. I went to the Gold Coast in Queensland Australia for six weeks to work on this show for the Model Smiths who were David Tremont and Jim Millet. They had a workshop at Warner Bros Studios and the visual effects were handled by a company that was called Photon Stockmen also on the studio lot.

I worked on Yorp's Station which in the story was half way across the galaxy just before you turn left. It was meant to look like it was peppered with meteor impacts and damage. The support struts and raw platform were already built, and I made the half cylinder nissen hut styled garage at the end and did all the detailing work as well as all the weathering and most of the painting.

 

The garage door was made to open by sliding up using a simple lever. One of the jokes in the show was that every time the Garage door opened all the atmosphere was violently sucked out causing chaos inside.

I sculpted the asteroid surface the station sat on out of paper mache as it was a non toxic material and there was ample time for it to dry out before it needed to be filmed. It was also summer so it just sat outside in the sun for a few days. In the episode a glass painting was used to extend the asteroid surface for a wider view.

The picture below shows a very young me way back in 1991 working on the model.

 I worked on a larger close up model of one of the city blocks. In the show the city buildings stuck out at an angle and were attached to cliffs which surrounded a lava pit. I built a couple of the buildings and detailed up the base the buildings are mounted on. Alan Pilkington, one of the other modelmakers is standing next to the model for scale.

Another small model I made was this stone hut.

In addition I worked on the internal detailing of this tunnel. I also built the doors that close at the end (not shown).

This is the outside of the tunnel set with Alan Pilkington at one end and Yorp's Station behind.

Most of the miniature work appeared in the first episode, which can be found on Youtube.

One of the highlights of the visit was that I got to see the large B17 miniature used in Memphis Belle which was set up at Movie World which was adjacent to the studios. This miniature had working gun turrets that emitted miniature muzzle flashes with a gas powered system. There was also a pile of smaller background B17 miniatures from the movie I got to inspect close up as well.

Ultraman Towards the Future AKA Ultraman Great part 2

Hummer Launch Tunnel

This was another miniature designed and constructed by me and Adam Grace. It was built in much the same way as the underground hangar and using the same materials.

 

The practical lighting was slightly different in that it used small 240 volt fluorescent fixtures. These small tubes were made to look even smaller by wrapping a piece of black camera tape around their middles making one light look like two. Down the centre of the runway embedded flush into a channel was some commercial building installation lighting, again of the 24volt variety. This had 4 separate lighting strings in it so you could make the lights chase each other though I don't think we used that feature in the show.  

Photo Credit Corrie Ancone.

At the starting end of the tunnel was a exhaust fan detail piece that was part of the Total Recall miniatures haul as was the roof piece over the rotating beacon. The rotating light consisted of an oval shaped mirror at 45 degrees which rotated on a large hollow bearing which was motorised. Through the middle of the bearing we shone a lamp gelled red which reflected off the rotating mirror and cast a rotating beam. Warren Beaton who ended up at the Weta workshop helped me engineer this.

 

Photo Credit Corrie Ancone.

 

The same Linear bearing tracks were installed so the Hummers could travel down the length. A special carriage was built for the camera so it could also travel down the track following or ahead of  the Hummers. Everything was towed by an endless loop cable in each track. It was powered by a motorised shaft at the far end that had a variable speed drive.

 

Frame Grab from the making of video showing the motorised cable shaft.

Frame Grabs from the making of video showing the camera on its carriage. You can see an Everready Dolphin torch either side of the camera providing some fill light as the carriage travels along the track.

 

The camera and Hummers did not have to travel fast down the track as the camera could slightly undercrank to make it seem faster. As the linear bearings ran so smoothly it didn't require high speed shooting. This also meant that longer exposures could be used and extra lighting was minimal.

 

Frame Grab from the making of video.

Two special Hummer models were constructed that had gas flame jets coming out their engines. An aluminium casting of the hull was made and fitted internally with a small gas cylinder, burner nozzles and valves to control the flame, all put together by our Pyro and physical effects supervisor Alan Maxwell. 

 

Photo Credit Corrie Ancone.

 

The Hummer

The original Japanese designed Hummer aircraft design. I do not know who the designer was.

The three view of the original Japanese designed Hummer. Note it was called the Ichthyonis on this drawing.

 

 

The Hummer aircraft was designed by a Japanese concept artist and I thought it was a pretty cool design. Unfortunately the large curved bulbous canopy proved too much for the live action unit to cope with when building a full size set so we were asked to re-design it with a more enclosed cockpit. A few of us had a go at it and David Tremont's version was preferred by the producers and the Japanese Effects overseer Mr Koichi Takano. You can see my rejected re-design attempt below.

 

My (rejected) re-design concept art based on the original Japanese design.

 

As I recall, since David Tremont ended up re-designing it he was assigned to build all the models of it. There were two sizes, the larger 1/48 scale one seen in the UMA base hangar photos and a smaller one, probably half the size, used for distant shots. The larger Hummer models were 370mm long 300mm wide and about 130mm high.

The four photos above are courtesy Norman Yeend who was one of the monster puppet team on the show and still has an original Hummer model.

 To be continued...

Ultraman Towards the Future AKA Ultraman Great part 1

For an all too brief period, in the late 1980's, I worked as a modelmaker in the visual effects industry. Miniature effects was the only thing I ever wanted to do and I loved every second of it. Despite the hard work and sometimes stressful moments it was the best fun I ever had in my life and nothing since has ever come close. The last miniature project I ever worked on was a TV series of Ultraman made in Australia in 1989. The show was called Ultraman Towards the Future but renamed Ultraman Great in Japan. It was the first series of Ultraman that was filmed in english and outside of Japan. The long running show began in 1966 and was started by Eiji Tsubaraya famous for being Toho's former visual effects chief and bringing Godzilla to life.

Hard to believe, but there is a recent Japanese Blu-Ray release. Funny thing is that it was only ever finished at analog TV PAL resolution 720 x 576 pixels. The Japanese version would have been NTSC at 720 x 480 pixels.

Our show was a Tsubaraya co-production with the South Australian Film Corporation. All the live action parts of the show would be shot in Adelaide and surrounding areas in South Australia. The miniatures unit however was originally assembled in Sydney where at the time I shared a workshop with two other modelmakers, David Tremont who eventually ended up at WETA workshop and Adam Grace who went on to work on props for all the Star Wars prequels, the Matrix films and many other big blockbusters. 

We had some preliminary discussions with the Visual Effects Supervisor Paul Nichola about the miniature effects which had to be accomplished for an extremely low budget. We talked over strategies that could be employed to get the most bang for the buck. In a somewhat radical break with tradition we came to the conclusion that instead of men in suits for the monsters we could use smaller scale puppets and thus the miniature sets could be much smaller and therefore cheaper. As modelmakers our enthusiasm was for the demolishing of city buildings and blowing up models type of action and I'm not sure that any of us had actually seen an episode of Ultraman at that point. What we totally failed to realise at the time was how important the fight scenes were to the Japanese producers and the fans of the show. That had some serious implications for the visual effects later on. This monster puppet concept must have been fully approved by all the producers however because that's the premise we started out working on.

Part1 UMA Base interior

The first task I had was to design and build UMA base along with Adam Grace. We had the interior to build which was set underground in a cave blasted out of the rock that UMA island was made from. It was designed in a Hexagon shape with a central elevator that could lift two of the UMA orange flying vehicles, called Hummers, up into a launch tunnel above the main hangar.

The main structure was built from pine painted to look like concrete. The blasted rock walls were made from Fin stock, a thick aluminium foil used to make the cooling fins for refrigeration and air conditioning units. The aluminium was scrunched up and then carefully teased out and when painted looked just like blasted rock. It was then stapled to the wooden structure. It was easily bent up out of the way to allow access for a light or the camera.

This is the outside of the UMA base interior set. You can clearly see the crinkled Fin stock aluminium stapled to the outside of the structure.

 Adam got a pile of acrylic trusses laser cut and built all the miniature steel work that supported all the miniature practical lighting. The other thing hung that off the trusses was a box that contained a tiny pocket colour TV, very high tech at the time, that had graphics replayed on during some shots.

You can just make out the tiny colour TV on the far truss with something on the screen.

The practical lighting consisted of strings of 24 volt lamps that came pre-clamped onto figure eight cable and small Philips 12 volt halogen spotlights that had a small bayonet mount. They were powered from various transformers. The 24 volt figure eight cable lighting was very flexible we strung it up on many miniature sets as street lighting or industrial lighting.It was designed to be used in commercial building fitouts so was pretty robust. We would crank up our power supply to its max 30 volts to get a bit more brightness out of them.

I took this photo with just the practical lights turned on.

A lot of the service equipment scattered around the floor was from Hasegawa 1/48 scale aircraft carrier equipment kits. This means that the model UMA base was essentially built at 1/48 scale. Quite a small scale for a visual effects miniature. The two white service trucks I designed and built from a lump of pine, some kit parts and some wheels from some cheap toys from the supermarket nearby the studio. I still have my original concept sketch. The trucks were moved by simply pulling them on wires.

 

My original concept for the UMA service Truck.

The floor of the hangar had linear bearing tracks inserted and the model aircraft sat on a platform mounted on a linear bearing. It was moved using a cable made from stainless steel fishing trace which was wrapped around a little aluminium pulley driven by a cordless drill at one end and over an idler pulley at the other end. The cable had lead fishing weights at both ends to increase the mass of the system. The cable was mostly hidden in the linear tracks and the carriage complete with Hummer model moved very smoothly due to the mass of the counterweights.

View looking down the elevator hole in the ceiling showing the linear tracks in the floor. Another photo with just the practical lights on.

 Most of the interior shots were filmed with an Arri ST 16mm camera at relatively (for miniatures) low frame rates. The UMA aircraft miniatures moved quite slowly and precisely along their tracks so high speed was not a requirement. The other thing to note that virtually all the miniature shots were filmed in smoke which was vital in making such small scale models appear huge. We had two miniature studios each outfitted with an oil cracker smoke machine. It used compressed air blown through nozzles to atomise the Shell Ondina medicinal oil (like baby oil). To the eye the smoke is very thick, its like walking around in a fog however through the camera it is much less as the back of the set could be only a metre away. It looks much further due to that aerial haze. Usually while one studio was filming we would be setting up the next miniature environment in the other. On occasions both would be filming at the same time.

Paul Nichola looking through the eyepiece of the Arri ST 16mm camera and moving a miniature service gantry about in the foreground to compose the shot.

Some UMA base interior shots did require a high speed camera particularly when explosions were involved. I'll talk about the high speed cameras we used in a later post.

The elevator employed a part of a miniature originally built for Total Recall. This was not the movie that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1990 but the 1987 Dino DeLaurentis precursor production that was originally being directed by Bruce Beresford. Miniatures supervised by Gene Rizzardi had been completed for a Mars Hilton complex interior and a full New York Street with the buildings on both sides of the street in diminishing scales. The production ended with the 1987 stock market crash leaving the DeLaurentis production company bankrupt. The miniatures were then put into storage in a shipping container and left in a paddock on the outskirts of Sydney for about 2 years. David Tremont negotiated the sale of the miniatures to the Ultraman production as having worked on Total Recall (as did Adam Grace) knew the person to contact.

The elevator was built on a rig built by the mechanical effects team supervised by Neville Maxwell. It was able to raise and lower. The tracks on the elevator were inset on a turntable that could be rotated by hand into the correct position to align with any of the 6 tracks on the main floor. In this manner any of the six Hummers ( I think this was before the US army military vehicle was heard of) could travel to the elevator and be lifted up into launch position.

There are other parts from the Mars Hilton incorporated into the UMA base. The big ventilation ducts and the detailed boxes either side of the Hangar Doors also were also repurposed. All these parts were urethane casts from masters made for the original Total Recall production I believe by modelmaker Philip Colville. The masters used a lot of Evergreen styrene strips which were pretty new in Australia at the time. In fact the Total recall miniatures production introduced a number of new techniques to Australia including the use of Urethane fast casting resins.

 

The doors I designed were just some extra detail to break up all the blasted rock and suggested some other room behind. They didn't open and were made from styrene sheet. We had been working on this set for a couple of weeks when the main unit action production designer/art director from South Australia visited. He looked over what we had been doing with some surprise and asked me who had approved building this set. I replied the Effects Supervisor Paul Nichola. He seemed a little put out and then asked me who had designed the doors, I replied that I had and he seemed even more put out and went off in search of Paul. Later I discovered that he was a little miffed as he was supposed to be passing designs down to us from the main unit art department.  After that we were assigned a miniatures unit art director who reported back to the main unit production designer. He was a very nice man but openly admitted he knew nothing about miniatures. I ended up figuring out what the setups would be needed for most of the miniature environments, how many rostrums (raised wooden platforms) would be required and what configuration, materials to be ordered, which model maker/s to assign to a particular job etc and pass that all on to him and he would do all the paperwork and a layout drawing and keep the main unit informed. For that reason at the end of the production I was given an assistant art director credit and not a modelmaker credit.

When we finally got to see some of the live action material I noticed the live action set doors had been styled very much along the lines of the miniature ones. I was young and very naive and had no inkling of the political machinations that can go on in a production particularly one that is split into separate units in different states. We were all to learn much more about this later.

To be continued...

Photos credit: Some of the early photos of UMA base with only the practical lights on were taken by me but all of the rest of the photos were by Corrie Ancone the miniatures unit still photographer.