Early Scifi works part 1

This is a look back at some of my early scifi modelmaking efforts.

I was always captivated by sci-fi and fantasy film and television programs, particularly all the Gerry Anderson puppet shows of the 1960s and the Ray Harryhausen films with Jason and the Argonauts being my favorite film as a child. I was mesmerised by 2001 A Space Oddysey seeing it from the back seat of a car at a drive in theater in 1969, I had no idea as a seven year old what was going on but it is a film that has stayed with me. I even remember seeing a trailer for The Green Slime a shlocky Japanee scifi monster film before 2001 came on.

I saw Star Wars at age 15 and like many others it had a large effect on me at the time. Prior to Star Wars information about Special effects in cinema was largely hidden but with Star Wars release there was a plethora of information about special effects and how it was done and I got the distinct impression it was something one could aspire to as a career. There were also  descriptions of various modelmaking techniques which I devoured in my thirst for knowledge on the subject.

I had a MPC TIE fighter plastic model kit and an MPC Millenium falcon kit which I largely bought for the detailed photo of the original studio model on the box art, the kit itself was pretty disappointing with a very underwhelming level of detail.

I started to read books about plastic kit and scratch-building in styrene which I then applied to my first efforts in making a spaceship of my own design.

The first one I made was heavily influenced by the Y-wing fighter from Star Wars. It was kitbashed on a 1/72 F14 Tomcat kit with sctratchbuilt nose cockpit and boxy styrene engines underslung on pylons.

 Many years later I chopped off the nose section and glued it to a back ended X -wing fuselage from the MPC kit. Not sure what I was thinking there.

 

 

The second effort was using the Tie fighter back end again with a scratchbuilt nose and engines.

 

 

 

 After High School I applied for a Film and TV course. There were two choices one in the English department and one in the art department. I naively thought that given I was better at Art than English I would choose the Art department stream.

Once I got there however the Film and TV course I was enrolled in was instantly renamed "Media Design". This was 1980, there were no personal computers so we did such archaic and short lived processes as tape slide presentations along with video tape. We did however have an Oxberry animation camera which I learnt to operate shooting 16mm film, though with a simple gate and magazine change you could also shoot 35mm film.

One of the projects I had to do was an instructional video. I chose to do a video on How To Build a Spaceship. In fact I never made the video, I just built the model. I got to try out a number of techniques I had read about in magazines on how they built the models for Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. The College had a fairly well equipped workshop and so I used these facilities to construct the model. It was a wooden frame covered in sheet perspex (acrylic). I even went to a neon sign maker and got them to make up a piece of neon for the engine light at the rear. They very kindly gave me an old 3000 volt transformer to run it. It was covered in kit parts with a carved jelutong (pattern makers wood) nose section which was the second nose I made having rejected the first one, a pattern that has consistently dogged my scifi modelmaking efforts down the years.

This was my first serious attempt at a filmable model and was around a metre long. The detailing is crude particularly underneath as you can see in the pics below. At this point I had not put in enough study to formulate my detailing philosophy.

Later I made the moon dome model below, heavily influenced by similar domes on an episode of space 1999.

I attempted to make a small moonscape, not all that successfully as I used diatomaceous earth, used in pool filters for the lunar dust. Its a bit fluffy in texture. The dome was made from a plastic terrarium. It was a lot easier to find these shapes made from the right sort of plastic Styrene, ABS and Acrylic in the 1980s.

Another model that got photographed on the moonscape was my first vehicle, scratchbuilt out of styrene sheet atop a Tamiya 1/35 tank plastic model kit. It was not radio controlled, just a static model.

After graduating form the course and being unemployed for a year and a half I sent the photos above from the last three projects, the  metre long spaceship, the dome and tracked vehicle to an industrial model making company and scored a job learning all the tricks of the trade working on Engineering plant and piping models, industrial design prototypes, shipbuilding, architectural and topographical models.

To be continued...