Ultraman Towards the Future AKA Ultraman Great part 4

This is another miniature set that Adam Grace and I put together for an episode of Ultraman Towards the Future in 1989. It was a resort hotel situated by the beach which comes under attack by a creature called Gerukadon. The monster puppet was styled on a frill necked lizard. It was cable controlled and supported on a steel pole which was masked by the creature's tail. It was outfitted with a flame thrower device so it could breath fire which gets quite a work out in the sequence.

 

The two main towers of the building came from the aborted Total Recall movie that was being made in Australia in 1987. That movie was shut down due to the 1987 stock market crash. The surrounding buildings were originally built for a television commercial by David Tremont Adam Grace and me. These buildings along with the aborted Total Recall buildings were purchased by the Ultraman production which helped stretch the miniatures budget considerably.

The picture below shows me painting the edge of the rostrums black to disguise the gap between the buildings and the foreground beach. The beach itself was just fine white sand with a sheet of thin reflective mylar as the water. The mylar was gently rippled by some fans to impart some movement.

Below Adam Grace is airbrushing some silhouettes on the backlit windows to help break up the solid white and make it look like there is an interior. The cars on the set were a pile of 1/32 diecast toys we painted up and weathered. They were used  over and over in various city settings for long shots and in the background. We also made up a number of 1/24 scale plastic model car kits for closer shots. The 24 volt figure 8 lighting can be seen re-used here as street lights mounted on poles as well as the 12 volt Phillips halogen bayonet mount spotlights.

The Palm trees were model rail kits with acid etched brass palm fronds.

This scene also had a very nice scenic art sunset sky backing. Unfortunately I don't know the scenic artist's name.

The tops of the towers were built with sections of breakaway glass. This was a brittle plastic material that came as pellets and was melted in an oven to make flat sheets. We then superglued pre-painted plastic strips on top for all the window mullions. Behind the breakaway facade was a structure already warped, damaged and painted to look burnt which would be revealed through the explosions.

The spectacular pyrotechnic effects were handled by Alan Maxwell and his assistant Judy Dabbs.

 

The amount of black smoke produced from the pyro was pretty severe from a health point of view. The studio roller doors would be opened up and a couple of large air movers employed to try and get rid of all the nasty fine carbon particles hanging in the air.

The picture below shows the back of the tower miniatures with the pre-destroyed structure in place. You can also see the pyro "bombs" rigged in position and all the wiring for the various charges.

The puppets for the show were made by the puppet crew consisting of Steve Roswell, Vicki Kite, Graham Binding, Norman Yeend and Warren Beaton.

Here the puppet is positioned on one of the buildings for a different scene. The sky background here has been painted with dark foreboding clouds.

 

Another building is attacked.

For a few shots a "little Jimmy" figure was mounted to be riding on the creatures back. It was made from a modified bendy toy.

The Gerukadon creature was designed with four limbs in a four arms type of confuguration. The director asked for some back legs to be added so it became a 6 limbed creature.

Thanks for looking.

 

Ultraman Towards the Future AKA Ultraman Great part 3

 Gigasaurus and the grassy plain environment.

 

Adam Grace and myself also built this grassy plain environment for the Gigasaurus episode.

We didn't have much time to build these sets so we needed solutions that were expedient. To get an instant grassy landscape we came up with the idea of using coconut matting used in the garden industry to make hanging basket liners. We managed to obtain a full roll of the stuff and just rolled it out over an array of raised rostra (wooden platforms) we constantly used throughout the show. Because our monsters were puppets we needed space underneath the sets to operate the feet of the creatures.

Shredded foam lumps were painted green and scattered with model railroad ground foam across the landscape for random plants and texture variation.

The coconut matting was brown in colour so it was painted in various shades of green using simple pump action garden sprayers and thinned water based paint. The distant hills were just scrunched up newspaper arranged in a pleasing formation under the matting and sprayed with bluer shades of green to make them appear further away on what was really quite a small set.  The picture below shows me wielding one of these sprayers. 

The road was just a simple piece of painted plywood screwed down over the matting into the baseboards of the platforms. The other notable aspect to this set is the sky backing, it's a really exemplary piece of work. We had two scenic artists on the show, the first was very junior and not quite up to the mark, the second was a more senior artist and was extremely talented. Good scenic art can make all the difference to a miniature.

The puppets were generally cable controlled using levers. The feet were operated with rods up through slots cut into the sets. As the puppet action was shot high speed all the puppeteers had to move pretty fast and be highly co-ordinated. It was sometimes quite comical to watch.

Two of the puppeteers Ross Browning and Ravi Prasad at the control levers with Steve Roswell one of the puppet makers.

The slots in the set had to be invisible to the camera for down shots. In the picture below Adam Grace is  hiding the edges of the slots cut in the matting.

The Gigasaurus puppet was also outfitted with a freezing breath gag which used liquid CO2 vented from its mouth.

 

Gigasaurus destroying an electrical sub-station with its freezing breath.

The puppet was supported by a steel pole which was mostly hidden by its tail. All the control cabling and the hose for the liquid CO2 freezing breath effect came down this pole.

The picture below shows Adam Grace (right) and myself attending to the rigging of the power lines. These were made from stainless steel fishing trace and had a nice weight to them so that they hung down realistically. they were also very strong and could withstand the inevitable entanglements with both puppet and the crew.

Gigasauraus supervising Adam Grace's work.

Two scales of transmission towers were scratch built by David Tremont plus a third smallest scale from plastic model railway kits.

Paul Nichola the visual effects supervisor shooting a POV shot from one of the Hummer flying vehicles with the puppet blasting its freezing breath at the camera.

 

 

The same set was also used for a night scene. We used a string of the 24 volt figure eight lighting on sticks for a perimeter effect with small Phillips 12 volt halogen spotlights mounted on the set pointing at the critter. A dry ice mist added to the cold effect.

The Gigasaurus puppet along with all the others on the show was fabricated by a team consisting of Steve Roswell, Vicki Kite, Graham Binding, Norman Yeend and Warren Beaton.

 

Thanks for looking.

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.