DESERT GALLEONS
Near the very beginning of the film is another alien landscape. This one is desert-like and it presented its own very special set of problems. As Peterson described it:
"There were two different desert sequence models. One of them involves a barge out in the desert. They built this big, huge, long thing that looks a little bit like a galleon, out near Yuma. (All the shooting at the Yuma location was done under the code name Blue Harvest Productions). In a way, that sequence really reminded me of pirate films, Errol Flynn films.
"At one time they were planning on building that whole barge, shooting the whole sequence and then destroying it in the end. The explosions guy here, Thane Morris, felt, of course, that he could blow it up and that it would be a fun project. There were a couple of problems. One was that Lucasfilm promised the Department of the Interior that they would leave the location exactly as it was. If they blew the barge to smithereens, of course, there would be a much bigger area that they would have to take back to normal, and it would cost more. The other problem was it was a one-shot deal. If they blew it up and it didn't look the way that they wanted it, then it would have cost exactly as much money and there would be no way of doing it again. So, on the side of less cost and a better gamble, it was eventually decided to do it as a model and blow it up. We could do multiples of the model.
"We made the barge about three quarters the length of the (7 ft.) table and about 2 1/2 to 3 feet high. It has big sails on it and lots of rigging. The first barge was for motion control; we knew we would have to do that and the skiffs. Then Sean made molds, very, very large molds of it. He started experimenting with different materials, like waxes and epoxies, to get a really brittle material that would break up nicely. Part of the art of exploding things is to determine the size of the objects that come off. If you are blowing up something like the Death Star, and it's really only five feet in diameter, and when it blows up only these big pieces fly off, it's not very realistic. The shrapnel has to get smaller and smaller the larger the object is supposed to be. Sean finally came up with some really brittle epoxies. Charlie Bailey headed up that part of the project. He said they eventually made 8 or 10 of those barges, I think. Of course each one had to have the sails and rigging just like the real thing.
"At one time we were going to go back to Yuma to set the barges up in the same situation (as the live action set). We planned to set up the barge with the same hills in the background and then we would make up a little foreground set piece of sand of a smaller scale. We would probably dig the camera down in the ground a couple of feet and light it up and shoot it like that.
"We were ready for that when the weather started turning bad back in November. Normally, they don't have rain out there. We had the charts for yearly rainfall and the wind speed and things like that , by week and by month. Then all of a sudden it changed. They had more rain than they had had in something like 15 years.
"Instead of gambling on the weather, it was finally decided that we would do the shot up on the roof of the new stage. That meant hauling sand and platforms and everything up to the roof. We set it up so we could use the sky—the unobstructed sky. We used different grades of sand so the stuff that is real close to the camera did not look like gravel. By the time we got out to the end of the set we were using Yuma sand. They sent it up wet and we had to dry it out." They used the Yuma sand to color match the foreground sand.
"There were two different aspects in blowing up the barge: In one all the windows blow out and the fire starts, but the barge doesn't blow up; and for the other we took the first barge out carefully and then set the other one in. That one was blown to smithereens, with shrapnel and all."
[ continued on page 4 ]