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.