The crew worked on the picture for about a year, which according to Gawley is about half the time they had for The Empire Strikes Back. "I guess it's just that we are getting fast at what we do, but not quite fast enough. It's still a lot of work."
That work begins with something as simple as a sketch on a napkin. Rarely does this crew build from blueprints. It is a step they have found they can eliminate. With no blueprints and only a sketch to guide them, the model makers have an almost unprecedented amount of freedom. They must use their artistic skills as well as their technical knowledge. To start with a two-dimensional drawing and turn it into a three-dimensional sculpture requires imagination—something that seems to flourish at ILM.
Often the crew will build a prototype of foam core. The model will give the art director an indication of how his concept will look in three dimensions. What looks good on paper can look different in some sort of finished form. Changes and corrections to the design can be made before the final product is begun. Most assuredly, once building begins more changes will occur and new problems will surface. Solving the problems is part of the magic—part of the lure of modelmaking.
REDWOOD FOREST SEQUENCE
The bike chase through the redwoods could be considered a change. There were no plans for it in the original storyboards. Dennis Muren, the director of photography for the sequence, wanted something meaty, something along the lines of the asteroid chase that he had done in Empire. The result taxed the skills of cameraman and modelmaker alike.
"At first, with the bike chase scene, there were two choices," Lorne Peterson said. "Either it could be a very elaborate model that they could run a motion control camera through, or they could go up to the redwoods and do it with a Steadicam."
In the end the sequence was a combination of miniature forest, miniature bikes, and live-action plates shot in a real forest. Paul Houston headed the forest part of the project under Peterson's supervision. Several sections of forest were eventually constructed using two different scales. Peterson continued:
"The biggest trees were about six or seven inches in diameter at the base and six or seven feet tall. They represented redwoods that were 12 to 15 feet in diameter. And then there was a smaller size. The diameter of those trees was about one-and-a-half inches.
"We tried making them out of a variety of things, including actually getting small redwood trees. They just don't look the same. We spent a lot of time up in the Muir Woods and we actually went up to the redwoods themselves once to take photographs.
"One time we tried taking a real redwood tree of about 7 or 8 inches in diameter and kind of sculpting it with knives and cuts to give it that look. That didn't quite make it either. Eventually, Barbara Goluchi came up with a technique of taking sono tubes (used for concrete molds) and applying foam in cut strips. The she sculpted the thing away by the additive method. She sculpted maybe four or five of that variety of slightly different diameters, and then they were molded. We also did a flexible mold on one of them so that we could make it bigger or smaller in diameter. We could do that since the trees are only seen from one side. Finally, we cast them out of either flexible or rigid urethane.
"Barbara spent a lot of time experimenting to find out what different kinds of plants she could come up with for forming the branches of the trees. She had to go out and find plants that were kind of a miniaturized version of the real thing or at least tended to organize themselves the same way. When we do smaller trees, there is a certain type of juniper I've forgotten the name of it now—that has the same look.
"We also used some maidenhair ferns and a lot of moss. Some of the problems with using real plants are that many times they are going to sit around for days or be in real strong lights or be shot at a frame rate that won't allow for the wind blowing them. They can't rustle too fast." For those reasons, many of the plants in the forest are dried plants.
"We did a lot of tree stuff for E.T. and we learned a lot from that." concluded Peterson.
[ continued on page 2 ]