• A Planetful of Aliens (article by Ron Magid)
• Exaggerated Reality (article by Adam Eisenberg)
• Double Vision (article by Don Shay)
• The Right Blob for the Right Job (article by Robert G Pielke)

‘Be careful what you wish for.’ So the saying goes, and it pretty much sums up the trials of the prosthetics crew on mammoth makeup movie Alien Nation. The task of creating not just one or two alien creatures but an entire race fell on Alec Gillis, Shane Mahan, John Rosengrant and Tom Woodruff, working as a team under the Stan Winston Studios banner.

Magid’s article tracks the development of the alien designs from day one to final wrap. ‘The earlier designs tended to be more outrageous,’ says Gillis, with Mahan explaining that in the end director Graham Baker opted for a more subtle approach ‘in order to allow the character of the actor to be read through the rubber pieces.’

This decision caused headaches for Zoltan Elek, the man responsible for applying the makeups to the actors. Originally a champion of the ‘less is more’ approach, Elek found it hard to apply prosthetics so thin and smooth that ‘I could not afford to make any mistakes along the blending edge … It was a tough job.’

Makeup fans will rejoice as Gillis and the Winston team bring us step-by-step descriptions of their various life-casting and mould-making techniques. As well as revealing the magic ingredient they used to create a stubble effect on the aliens’ heads, they also bewail the difficulty of designing a body suit for an alien striptease scene and the challenge of securing the cooperation of an actor who ‘almost broke his contract because he insisted no on had informed him that his entire head would be covered by the makeup.’

But what comes through time and again is the sheer volume of work demanded by the show: some ninety sets of appliances were required for lead actor Mandy Patinkin alone, with each appliance requiring ‘at least seventy individual molds.’ Add to that the hundreds of background masks created for the film’s crowd scenes and you start to appreciate the slightly stunned tone of the team’s closing comments.

‘We figured that going from … the alien queen in Aliens to these straight prosthetic makeups would be simple,’ says Mahan, ‘but it was really a lot of work.’ And while the crew clearly got great satisfaction from working on a show comparable – in makeup terms at least – with the groundbreaking Planet of the Apes, Gillis has to admit it ‘was a huge logistical challenge.’

In Adam Eisenberg’s short-but-sweet article on Die Hard, visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund describes the ways in which he and his team at Boss Film Corporation helped achieve director John McTiernan’s vision of ‘exaggerated reality’, which dictated that in this film ‘the effects could not look like effects at all.’

Many of Edlund’s challenges involved blowing things up. For an iconic fireball-in-a-lift-shaft shot, that meant a forced-perspective miniature packed with pyrotechnic charges so toxic the cameras had to be operated remotely. ‘We did not know what we had for sure until we saw dailies the following morning,’ says Boss director of photography Bill Neil. Even more seat-of-the-pants was a night shoot of a miniature helicopter exploding on a small-scale replica of the Nakatomi building.

It wasn’t all black powder and brute force. In order to control the apparent speed of the elevator fireball rising towards the camera, Neil and his crew developed a nifty rheostat device to alter the speed of the camera dynamically through the shot. And Richard Vye contributed a clever computerised system that followed focus on actor Alan Rickman as he fell away from the camera during his death plunge. ‘If we had not had that computer focus system,’ says Neil, ‘we would probably still be doing [the shot].’

There are plenty more goodies, including a breakdown of the flawless match-moved tilt-down that blends from a miniature of the Nakatomi building to the live-action street, and the revelation that for most of the movie Bruce Willis used ‘latex “barefoot” boots that he could wear over his real feet.’ Best of all is Richard Edlund’s obvious pride in his achievements on the movie. I’ve noted before how critical Edlund can be of his own work, so it’s nice to hear him respond to producer Joel Silver’s mandate that ‘[the effects have] got to look great’ by concluding, ‘I think we did a pretty good job of fulfilling that demand.’

Dead Ringers is another movie that’s light on visual effects. This plays to Don Shay’s advantage, as it gives him time to dig deep into the challenging process of turning one actor into two.

Shay describes Dead Ringers as ‘a dark and disturbing account of twin gynecologists bedeviled by drugs and shackled by a lifelong psychic bond.’ Director David Cronenberg and actor Jeremy Irons – playing the twin parts of Elliot and Beverly Mantle – offer insights into the thought processes behind both storytelling and performance. Meanwhile, optical effects supervisor Lee Wilson outlines the revolutionary ways in which motion control and moving split-screens allowed Irons to appear as two characters in the same frame, without limiting Cronenberg to using a locked-off camera.

The specialised motion control camera dolly (operated by ‘your basic IBM-AT clone – a Compaq 286 – and some Tondreau software’) enabled Cronenberg to shoot Irons performing one character while using a camera move, then to repeat that move perfectly when Irons switched roles. Crucial to the whole process was a video playback system that provided instant replay along with a quick-and-dirty approximation of the split-screen effect. The playback also enabled Irons to hear the first half of his performance via a concealed earpiece, and react accordingly.

Shay deconstructs this process in considerable detail, making it clear that the quality of the work was as much down to the care and craft of the operators as it was to the equipment. The devil really was in the detail, and detail is what we get, from discussions of the noise issue raised by the servos on the camera to the excitement felt by the crew as they succeeded in their ambitious attempts to rack focus across the split line.

Most impressive is Cronenberg’s refusal to get carried away: ‘If a twinning shot should suggest itself,’ he says, ‘then I would take advantage of it – but I would not force it.’ Cronenberg’s admirable restraint prompts Wilson to remark, ‘I would have loved to have seen a lot more twinning shots in the film – but that was not what this story was about.’

Dead Ringers also features a few of the icky makeup effects many people associate with Cronenberg. Here they’re confined to a dream sequence that shows the twins joined by fleshy connective tissue. It’s a juicy account of methylcellulose slime and condoms filled with liquid urethane, not to mention seven puppeteers working nearly one hundred cables to animate a withered parasitic twin emerging from Beverly’s stomach, in a second dream sequence that was ultimately deleted because Cronenberg judged it ‘too far removed from the rest of the movie.’

There’s also a sting to the tail. The Dead Ringers crew had hoped theirs would be the first film to feature motion-controlled twinning effects, but they were beaten to the box office by the comedy Big Business. Moreover, as Shay points out, while Dead Ringers was received well by critics, they took ‘little or no notice of its flawless optical effects.’ For Lee Wilson, however, that counts as a triumph. ‘In essence, Jeremy [Irons] provided the effects,’ he says, ‘all we did was connect them.’

If the first three articles in Cinefex #36 are examples of restraint, Robert G Pielke’s closing piece on the 1988 remake of The Blob is all-out mayhem. It’s also a good example of something we’ve seen time and again during this journey through the Cinefex archives: however skilled the team, if they don’t get the development time they need the visual effects are going to suffer.

In this case, the creature effects crew was led by Lyle Conway, creator of the stunning puppetry seen in The Dark Crystal and Little Shop of Horrors. The puppets they manufactured for The Blob were essentially gigantic silk mattresses filled with methocel. Pielke’s article outlines the many different techniques used to inject some semblance of life into these impossibly unwieldy creations, but nothing can hide the truth that, in order to create the Blob, Conway’s crew effectively had to create, uh, the Blob:

‘Once methocel was mixed with water,’ explains visual effects production supervisor Michael Fink, ‘and made to kick into a gel with a small amount of ammonia, it was nearly impervious to cleanup … It ate away at the asphalt parking lot, stripped paint from miniatures, gagged puppeteers … If anything was close to [director] Chuck Russell’s intent for the Blob, it was the material from which it was made.’

When it came to miniatures and opticals, Dream Quest Images fared rather better. Hoyt Yeatman’s breakdown of a wide range of miniature environments – augmented by the occasional matte painting – gives good insight into the kind of solid, reliable effects work that was Dream Quest’s bread-and-butter through the 1980s. Meanwhile, Tony Gardner’s gruesome makeup effects – including collapsing heads, snapping spines and general bodily meltdown – demonstrate both imagination and stoic resolve in the face of tight budgets and breakneck schedules. Overall this is a cheerful article about a joyfully goofy film.

Phew! I reckon there’s just enough time for a whistlestop tour of my favourite pictures from this bumper issue of Cinefex. From Alien Nation, there’s a fine multi-photo set showing the step-by-step transformation of actor Kevyn Major Howard into alien drug czar William Harcourt. From Die Hard, there’s a behind-the-scenes shot of the truly enormous ‘miniature’ Nakatomi building standing tall in what looks like the Boss parking lot. The Dead Ringers article features another step-by-step breakdown, this one showing the various split-screen elements used to construct the shot of the twins lying draped together in death, alongside the final composite.

And The Blob? It’s just packed with gore from start to finish. What else did you expect?

Incidentally, if you’re hungry to actually see a few of the pictures from these early editions of Cinefex, head over to their Facebook page and take a look at the ongoing Remember When series of posts, in which one image is being published from each issue along with its original caption.

• Cinefex
• Stan Winston School
• Amalgamated Dynamics
• Richard Edlund Films
• Dead Ringers featurette from 1988

Did you enjoy this Cinefex retrospective? If so, click here to read the others in the series.

Sense of wonder. That’s what these big, daft summer movies are supposed to be about. In recent years, it’s been sadly lacking. Movies have been getting too frantic, directors too afraid to let their cameras linger on something beautiful, for fear the audience will get bored.

In 2009, JJ Abrams did a great job of reversing that trend with the meticulously crafted Star Trek. Now he’s delivered a sequel. So is the sense of wonder still there? Let’s find out.

First the good news. Under Abrams’s confident direction, Star Trek Into Darkness is a rousing movie that contains pretty much everything you could want from a summer blockbuster: strong story, solid cast, spectacular action. The familiar characters of Kirk, Spock and McCoy – played by Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban respectively – bounce off each other to great effect. Watching the movie, there’s a real sense that this is the Star Trek you enjoyed when you were a kid.

Nowhere was this feeling stronger than in the film’s opening sequence, in which our heroes are trying simultaneously to escape from a tribe of bloodthirsty alien primitives, extinguish an active volcano and lift off the Enterprise from its underwater hiding place. It’s such a joyful, audacious sequence that it’s no surprise the movie takes a little while to find its feet once it’s over.

Once it gets going, Star Trek Into Darkness romps along at a decent lick. Abrams is a great storyteller, equally comfortable with intimate character moments and action set-pieces. His direction is so effective that it mostly makes up for the weaknesses in the narrative – yes, I know I said the story was strong, but sadly the script creaks in too many places for it to be truly satisfying.

Take the ease with which Kirk is despatched to the Klingon homeworld with his payload of super-torpedoes (super-torpedoes – really?). I know the set-up’s meant to be hokey, but the trouble is it feels hokey, so when the big revelation comes later it’s neither a real surprise nor – if you think it through – terribly plausible.

Then there are the big action scenes. Great as they are, strip away Abrams’s assured direction and some of the best visuals you’ll see this side of the Neutral Zone, on paper they’re just a little ho-hum. The high-speed transfer between the Enterprise and the Vengeance is a rehash of the space dive from the last Star Trek outing and the final showdown between Zachary Quinto and villain Benedict Cumberbatch, while flawlessly executed, is still just a fist-fight on a moving vehicle.

Cumberbatch, by the way, is one of the three outstanding things about this movie. Good as the rest of the cast are, he acts the pants off them all. As a Brit, I’ve been enjoying his TV performances for a good few years now so it’s great to see him up on the big screen. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough of him. When you’ve got an actor as capable as this playing a villain as interesting as … as the one he plays in this movie … it’s a crime not to give him all the screen-time he deserves.

The second outstanding thing about Star Trek Into Darkness is the visual effects, delivered primarily by Industrial Light & Magic. ILM have got really very, very good at throwing enormous starships around with weight, grandeur and sheer chutzpah. They’re also very good at water. In this movie they put the two together to stunning effect. In partnership with the third outstanding thing (director Abrams) they’ve delivered what I’ve been craving for a good many years now: a whole bunch of beauty shots.

Star Trek Into Darkness is fundamentally a thing of beauty. Whether it’s the USS Enterprise rising majestically from an alien ocean or the USS Vengeance on a collision course with San Francisco bay, there are dozens of shots that genuinely take your breath away. That’s why I’m prepared to forgive the movie its fundamental silliness and casual sexism. It’s why I’m happy to forget its undeveloped villain and remember the moments of genuine emotion between its heroes.

It’s why I’m pleased to say that the cinematic sense of wonder is well and truly back.

What’s that? You want to know what the novel’s about? Oh, if you insist:

A dead warrior king frozen in winter ice. Six grieving sons, each with his own reason to kill. Two weary travellers caught up in a web of suspicion and deceit.

In a distant time long before our own, wandering bard Talus and his companion Bran journey to the island realm of Creyak, where the king has been murdered. From clues scattered among the island’s mysterious barrows and stone circles, they begin their search for his killer. But do the answers lie in this world or the next?

Nobody is above suspicion, from the king’s heir to the tribal shaman, from the servant woman steeped in herb-lore to the visiting warlord whose unexpected arrival throws the whole tribe into confusion. And when death strikes again, Talus and Bran realise nothing is what it seems.

Creyak is place of secrets and spirits, mystery and myth. It will take a clever man indeed to unravel the truth. The kind of man this ancient world has not seen before.

Meet Talus – the world’s first detective.

That’s all for now. Rest assured I’ll be blogging about the book some more as we head towards publication in the spring of 2014. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with some kind words from Solaris head honcho, Jon Oliver:

Graham’s novel is a murder mystery like no other. A richly evoked past draws you into this unusual thriller and the characters of Talus and Bran have to be one of the most entertaining crime-fighting duos ever. A startlingly innovative book and a corking good read!

• Solaris Books

Just occasionally, I’ll experience one of those precious moments of epiphany, when the herd scatters to leave a single prime specimen staring me right in the eye. Think god rays beaming down from the heavens and all the hairs standing up on the back of your neck. It really does happen, you know.

It happened to me yesterday while I was taking my lunchtime walk (ideas often arrive when I’m walking or driving and that’s probably science too).  Three things in my head suddenly collided and the god rays came down. If there hadn’t been people around, I’d have cried.

The first of those three things was a childhood memory. As a kid, I was an enthusiastic modelmaker. At one time my bedroom was home to over a hundred plastic construction kits: fighter planes, galleons, tanks, you name it. But my pride and joy was a model railway. I had little interest in the trains themselves, just spent hours building a tiny world to sit them in. I’ve jotted the words ‘model railway’ in various notebooks over the years, knowing that one day I’d write about that meticulous miniature world but never knowing how or why. Now I’ve worked it out.

The second thing was the realisation that my children have become adults. If, like me, you’re a parent suddenly discovering the nest is a lot emptier than it used to be, you might recognise the complex broth of emotion that accompanies this revelation. The closest I can get to describing it today is sweet pride salted with grief; that’s nowhere near good enough but it’ll do for now.

The third and final component was a traditional Zulu song I first heard at a Soweto Gospel Choir concert. It’s called Ngahlulele. Music frequently informs the words I put down, although I prefer to do the actual writing in silence. Turns out this song is the soundtrack for the end of my story.

As clearly as I see these separate components, I’m still none the wiser as to why they chose that moment to collide in my head, nor why the collision generated the story idea it did. In reading the above, you’ll most likely be puzzled or confused. I’d like to think you’re intrigued. No matter. The important thing now is writing the story down. And that’s the really, really hard part. Unwritten stories are china shops and, like most writers, I’m a bull.

If I do manage to get the words down without breaking them, I’ll let you know. And if I screw things up? Well, in that case you’ll probably never hear again about a story with the improbable working title of Ngahlulele Junction.

HENRi tells the story of a lonely soul trapped inside a disembodied human brain that’s being used to run the control systems of a spacecraft. Through the course of the film, HENRi – whose name is an acronym standing for Hybrid Electronic/Neuron Responsive Intelligence – gradually evolves into an autonomous being. Meanwhile, lost memories of HENRi’s forgotten former life are beginning to resurface, challenging this curious entity to make sense of what – or who – he truly is.

It’s a simple, affecting tale told eloquently through the use of a remarkably expressive animated robot and some stunning miniature sets. The film has a majesty that belies its miniscule budget, thanks to Sasich’s uncompromising vision, some top-drawer cinematography from Tim Angulo, a rich score by Kevin Riepl and solid voice and cameo performances from Keir Dullea and Margot Kidder.

According to the ‘making of’ documentary that accompanies the movie, 90% of the robot scenes were achieved by integrating a CG character into the practical model sets, with a minority of shots being nailed by using a quarter-scale rod puppet. It was Sasich’s original intention to make the whole movie using the puppet, but disappointing results prompted the switch to CG. It’s to Sasich’s credit that he bit the bullet and did what was needed to make the movie succeed. And succeed it does, with its robot lead delivering a genuinely moving performance.

HENRi is just one of many independent creative projects funded through the Kickstarter website. As a sci-fi short placing heavy emphasis on traditional, practical techniques, it’s in good company, having much in common with Phil Tippett’s Mad God and the recently launched Harbinger Down, a creature feature from ADI’s Alec Gillis.

Projects like these are important for the skills base of the movie industry. While I don’t personally buy the argument that practical effects are better than CG (please, let’s respect all the tools in the box, guys) I think it’s important that such undertakings are supported and funded, because they may be the only way to ensure that the old techniques survive.

Maybe some of the current detractors of CG could take a leaf out of Eli Sasich’s book. With HENRi, Sasich has demonstrated integrity with his original desire to create a film with a traditional look and feel, yet shown enough smarts to embrace digital solutions when it was clear his vision demanded it. The result? A fine short film that promises even finer things to come. I’m looking forward to seeing where Sasich’s journey takes him next.

• Download the movie from the official HENRi website
• Kickstarter
• Mad God
• Harbinger Down

James Brogden – The Smith of Hockley
Joyce Chng – Dragonform Witch
Zen Cho – Fish Bowl
Graham Edwards – A Night to Forget
Jaine Fenn – Not the Territory
Christopher Golden – Under Cover of Night
Kate Griffin – An Inspector Calls
Alison Littlewood – The Song of the City
Anne Nicholls – The Seeds of a Pomegranate
Jonathan Oliver – White Horse
Mike Resnick – The Wizard of West 34th Street
Gaie Sebold – Underground
Adrian Tchaikovsky – Family Business
Ian Whates – Default Reactions

… as posted by editor Jenny Barber on her blog.

When I was a kid, nothing was more likely to keep me glued to the television than a Ray Harryhausen movie. I waited with bated breath for those characteristic wide shots where the grain of the film jumped up just enough to tell you the monsters were about to make their entrance. And what monsters! Dinosaurs, a gigantic bronze statue, a squad of sword-fighting skeletons! What treats for an impressionable young mind. And what great memories.

But here’s the thing: they weren’t just monsters. They were characters. A huge part of Harryhausen’s skill lay in his ability to imbue even the most fantastic creatures with real personality. The word animate derives from the Latin word animus, meaning spirit. Animation is about more than just blessing something with movement. It’s about filling it with life.

What’s more, in breathing life into his puppets, Ray Harryhausen also energised an entire generation of filmmakers. Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson – among many, many others – have all expressed their debts of gratitude to Harryhausen and his work. George Lucas has said that ‘without Ray Harryhausen there would likely be no Star Wars.’  The online community is awash with tributes, but the one that’s stuck in my mind comes from actor Patton Oswalt:

If I believed in God, I’d want him to be like Ray Harryhausen – nudging us one frame at a time toward the sublime & fantastic.

• Official Ray Harryhausen website
• The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation

• Romancing the Rabbit (article by Adam Eisenberg)
• Willow (article by Jody Duncan Shannon)

The 1980s was the decade when traditional (by which I mean optical and mechanical) visual and special effects were being pushed to the limit. Techniques don’t get much more traditional than hand-drawn cel animation, so it was inevitable that sooner or later one of the new breed of young ambitious filmmakers would drag the well-worn concept of combining animated characters with live action into the modern age. The filmmaker in question was Robert Zemeckis, riding high on the success of Back to the Future. The film was Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Making Roger Rabbit – in which one of the lead actors is a hyperactive cartoon rabbit – was an extraordinarily complex business. Luckily we have Adam Eisenberg on hand to make sense of the madness. His behind-the-scenes article is a winner on every level as it takes the production completely apart, with detailed insights into preproduction, the gag-filled live-action shoot, the animation itself, a second ‘Toontown’ shoot with actor Bob Hoskins working his guts out on a bluescreen stage and finally the painstaking optical work needed to bring everything together.

The man in charge of Roger Rabbit‘s animated content was Richard Williams, most well-known at that point for his Casino Royale and Pink Panther title sequences. Initially sceptical of the project, he was tempted when he discovered he and Zemeckis were on the same page: ‘We both agreed that the key to doing this movie was interaction.’ Williams was finally won over when Zemeckis proved how clever the storyline was by acting out the entire first shot of the movie for him. Now that’s a deleted scene I’d love to see.

A proof-of-concept test scene, filmed at ILM and animated by Williams, set the seal on the project – and prompted executive producer Steven Spielberg to comment that he’d ‘only seen film history twice in his life. The first time was … Star Wars – and now [I've] seen it again with this rabbit.’

Eisenberg’s article devotes plenty of column inches to the special effects used in the live-action shoot to create the critical interaction between the as-yet-undrawn cartoon characters and the physical set. Producer Robert Watts remarks that, ‘About eighty percent of the movie we were shooting with only half the cast present … Thus it became like shooting a giant “Invisible Man” movie.’ Gags ranged from puddle splashes all the way through to sophisticated robotic arms that would ultimately be obscured by the animation. Responsible for these were Michael Lantieri and George Gibbs.

The range of on-set effects is really extraordinary: a self-riding bicycle, a stretching automobile, a piano that played itself. ‘Every day we were required to provide some effect,’ says Lantieri. ‘Every shot – no rest.’ Equally critical was the performance of Bob Hoskins, who had to make his audience believe he really was seeing an imaginary rabbit. ‘I studied my daughter Rose,’ he says. ‘Rose has invisible friends that she plays with.’ In the end, Hoskins got so good at visualising Roger that ‘I lost control … I would hallucinate the Toons in very weird places – like in restaurants off the set.’

Creative insights from Bob Zemeckis, Richard Williams and visual effects supervisor Ken Raltson give this article great depth. Zemeckis recalls a conversation with George Lucas in which they discussed how difficult it is to cut a movie when one of your stars hasn’t even been drawn yet, while Williams reveals that different animators would draw Roger differently.

Ralston comes into his own when he talks about the fine line between keeping the animated characters looking like cartoons, yet giving them enough dimension to lock them convincingly into the real world. Among other things, his team at ILM developed ways of laying coloured shadows over the animation – an industry first. ‘What we came up with we call 2¾-dimension,’ he says.’

All of this is presented in the usual mind-boggling Cinefex detail. Take the iconic Jessica Rabbit musical number in the smoky Ink and Paint Club, for example. The scene featured a live-action motion control shoot with an actress, moving split screens to optically remove the lower half of her body, animation with multi-layered effects overlaid to create shadows on Jessica and sparkles on her dress … and much, much more. So much more, in fact, that ILM optical supervisor Ed Jones puts his department’s workload for both Roger Rabbit and Willow (in production at the same time) at ‘almost three-and-a-half years’ worth of work in eight months.’

What’s clear from this article is Zemeckis’s absolute commitment to the project – and the trials he faced in bringing it to the screen. Richard Williams remarks that when Zemeckis ‘would run the movie without the animation, it would look like a dog. He would get into terrible depressions.’ Yet Zemeckis not only pulled it off, but created a critically acclaimed film that grossed well over $300 million worldwide. What’s more, he’s continued since then to push the envelope of visual effects with such groundbreakers as Forrest Gump (think digital limb removal and the integration of modern actors into archive footage) and The Polar Express (think game-changing performance capture).

ILM legend Dennis Muren was recently in the press for advocating a ‘less is more’ approach to visual effects, based on the assumption that audiences are fed up with each new effects-heavy film trying to trump the last for sheer spectacle. While most people would agree that Roger Rabbit is a full-on, all-stops-out cinema experience, Muren’s viewpoint finds a strange echo in Robert Zemeckis’s closing remark from this 1988 article. ‘[Roger Rabbit is] an epic movie,’ he says, quoting Robert Watts, ‘not because we’re going to have an army of fifteen thousand people and blow up an entire village in one shot, but because what we’re trying to do is have an animated rabbit pick up a crumb.’

As long as filmmakers like Zemeckis are still operating, I’m sure there are going to be plenty more crumbs to enjoy.

By the way, I love Roger Rabbit (though I confess I never quite got to love Roger himself – he was always a bit too manic for my taste). In an age that tends towards hyper-realism when combining real and animated characters (The Smurfs, anyone?) it’s worth remembering that the real wit and wonder of Roger Rabbit comes first from its storyline – which both depends upon and celebrates a conscious clash of visual styles – and second from the fine line walked by the creative team in making the cartoon characters just real enough to be believed, yet ultimately still part of their own, kooky, two-dimensional universe.

Adam Eisenberg’s article is a tough act to follow, but Jody Duncan Shannon manages it adroitly with her in-depth analysis of Willow, George Lucas’s foray into fantasy. While it didn’t reach anywhere near Roger Rabbit‘s worldwide gross of over $320 million*, Willow did okay. More to the point, it contains some rather interesting visual effects.

Willow was an early outing for Ron Howard as director. However, it’s producer Lucas who haunts much of the article’s subtext. In extracts from interviews with ILM staff including Mike McAlister, John Knoll and Chris Evans, there are frequent references to ‘what George wanted’. McAlister spends time towards the end of the article musing on what it meant for ILM to be working on a Lucasfilm production at this stage of their development. ‘This was for the boss,’ he concludes, contemplating the ‘shoot from the hip’ approach that resulted in an unusually large number of ‘fixes in post’, ‘and the boss gets to work however he wants.’

Like Roger Rabbit, Willow features its fair share of firsts. Matte supervisor Evans enthuses about in-camera composites of paintings, miniatures and projected live-action, claiming that ‘it has never really been done before – certainly not to this degree.’ There’s also a beautifully clear and informative description of pin-blocking, a technique by which actors playing tiny fairylike beings called brownies were filmed on a bluescreen stage for later insertion into moving background plates. It’s an early form of match-moving, relying on eyeballing the movement on the plate and manipulating the bluescreen footage on a motion-control animation stand frame by frame to follow the action. (The man responsible for much of this painstaking work was John Knoll, who has since risen through the ranks to supervise the visual effects for some of ILM’s biggest shows in recent years.)

As well as fairies and forests (some built in miniature using juniper sprigs left over from E.T.), Willow also boasts a two-headed fire-breathing dragon. Phil Tippett talks us through the creature’s design and construction, and doesn’t hold back on communicating his disappointment about the way it eventually appeared on screen. ‘We couldn’t do everything we would have liked to make the puppets realistic,’ he says, adding that his attempts to have the two heads play off each other just ‘wound up being comical.’

Fantastic though all this stuff is, much of it is familiar to the average VFX devotee. But Duncan Shannon’s Willow article has a couple of magic tricks up its sleeve. First is a visit to Available Light, the Burbank facility that provided animated mouths for the film’s talking animal characters. ‘We’d get into these raging discussions about how much of an “ooh” sound a possum can make,’ quips company head John Van Vliet. Second is yet another milestone on the road to digital, namely the scene in which the character Raziel undergoes a rapid transformation through a number of wildly differing animal forms, including a goat, an ostrich and a tiger. The scene was supervised by Dennis Muren.

The effect was achieved by using a computer morphing programme that took footage of partially-transforming puppets shot in front of the ILM bluescreen and stretched it in two dimensions to achieve blends between the different creatures. CG supervisor Douglas Kay breaks down the process of scanning the original footage (at a whopping 3500 x 1400 pixels), while George Joblove talks digital bluescreen extraction and Doug Smythe explains the actual morphing process. ‘It was as if we had printed each frame of film on a rubber sheet,’ Smythe says, ‘and then used an array of pins that could be stuck into the rubber at various points and moved around.’

(It’s tempting to view two-dimensional morphing as a disposable step along the way to fully 3D CG simulations. However, it’s recently found its feet again in films such as Captain America – featured in Cinefex #127 - for which visual effects company Lola used similar techniques to digitally shrink the body of actor Chris Evans.)

And so Willow leaves us with another reminder – as if we needed one – that ILM was the undisputed champion of the visual effects ring throughout the 1980s. With both of the effects-heavy films under discussion this issue, the facility was punching hard and fast … while all the time quietly ushering in the new age of digital.

Now we’ve looked back at the words in Cinefex #35, it’s time to consider the pictures.

The Willow article shows off the ILM matte painting and miniatures departments to great effect. Caroleen Green’s painting of Bavmorda’s throne room is particularly impressive. But I can’t resist the beautiful sequential shots of Tad Krzanowski’s third-scale goat puppet undergoing its amazing transformation into a curious hybrid that will eventually become an ostrich.

The Roger Rabbit article has a good range of stills from the movie, together with some excellent before-and-afters showing how the special effects rigs were covered by the animated characters. Then there are all the behind-the-scenes photos showing poor Bob Hoskins strung up on wires in various positions of extraordinary discomfort. My favourite is a shot of Hoskins patiently enduring the attention of the effects crew while wearing a mechanical rig designed to make it look like Roger is squirming around under his coat. On the actor’s face is a classic ‘How did I get into this?’ expression, while the rig’s design gives the unfortunate impression that this multi-award-winning thespian has inexplicably grown a pair of spring-loaded nipples.

• Cinefex
• Robert Zemeckis at IMDb
• Richard Williams at IMDb
• Richard Williams – The Animator’s Survival Kit
• Ken Ralston at IMDb
• Michael Lantieri at IMDb
• Ron Howard at IMDb
• ILM

Did you enjoy this Cinefex retrospective? If so, click here to read the others in the series.

*BoxOfficeMojo

To use the Writer’s Monologue®, simply record yourself speaking aloud the passage below and load the resulting file on to your favourite MP3 player. Every time you sit down to write, just plug in some earphones, put the Writer’s Monologue® on REPEAT and write away!

So how does it work?

Simple! With the Writer’s Monologue® playing at low volume in the background, your brain no longer has to expend precious energy coming up with all those irritating doubts and worries. Now you can channel all your efforts into the job at hand: getting the damn writing done!

Writer’s Monologue® - it does all the agonising so you don’t have to!

Okay, here goes, time for another writing session … only this time get straight down to it – don’t waste time reading back through what you wrote before … you know what they say, keep the first draft moving forward – write now, edit later! … still, a quick flick back over the last few pages wouldn’t hurt, just to refresh your memory … here’s that last scene, you know, the one where … yes, that’s not bad … actually that’s pretty good … this is good writing, you know … God that’s good … that’s bloody good … so much pathos … the mix of character-driven action and profound insight in the human condition … this is probably the best writing you’ve ever done! … this is a guaranteed, solid gold bestseller!… not that you do this for the money … it’s all about writing from the heart … writing isn’t commerce, it’s art … still, if you could just get that book deal … hell, never mind books, this story’s got ‘movie adaptation’ written all over it … ah … wait … that sentence sticks out like a sore … no, don’t tinker … now’s not the time to start editing … just get on with telling the damn story … well, okay, it does read better like that, but is it the right tone of voice? … come to think of it, is ANY of this passage right ? … shit … oh shit … shit shit shit … this isn’t looking so good … actually it’s pretty bad … have you ever seen such leaden prose? … where’s this character’s motivation? … you know, this is probably the worst writing you’ve ever done … you’re such a talentless no-hoper … this book’s dead in the water and you know it … everything you ever wrote is shit and this is a hundred times worse … a thousand … you’d better abandon these pages and start the next scene … was that the phone? … stop, don’t get distracted … right … paragraph indent … open speech marks … that definitely was the phone … no, it’s someone at the door … never mind, they’ll call back if it’s urgent … open speech marks … did you get the lasagne out of the freezer? … open speech marks … you probably did … open speech marks … if you didn’t you can always order in pizza later, the main thing now is to focus on hitting that daily word count … okay, that’s more like it, now you’re rolling … pepperoni would be good … start the chapter with a good old action scene, that’s the way … or maybe tuna … delete, delete, delete … no, just a plain margherita will do … now how many words have you written? … forty-seven … is that enough for this session? … hard to say … if they’re the RIGHT words that should be enough … only one way to find out and that’s read back over what you just wrote … uh-huh … uh-huh … uh-huh … well, it’s crap but it’ll do for a first draft … fancy a coffee? … no, just keep writing, you can make a drink in a minute … still, a coffee would help … no, keep writing … no, coffee … no, writing … maybe a cup of tea … aaaaaaaaaaargh! [REPEAT]

Basil’s Trump

I say it’s an animated film, but I guess that’s not entirely true. While Basil’s Trump does contain a fair amount of stop-motion, lack of both time and budget encouraged us to devise as many ways as possible to avoid that time-honoured and time-consuming technique, resulting in an ingenious collection of manually-operated rigs and tricks that Rube Goldberg would have been proud of.

I recently unearthed a set of photos Roger and I took during the making of the film. Apart from transporting me into a cosy nostalgic haze, the pictures also show in some detail how we made some of the puppets, sets and visual effects that feature in the movie – I hope you enjoy them!

• Watch Basil’s Trump