Editing went fairly smoothly. Several chapters in the middle were badly broken (well, malformed from the start if I’m honest) but the fixes weren’t hard. There was a lot of connecting the dots: making sure all the clues and misdirections work as they’re supposed to and most of all ensuring the final solution is fair and theoretically guessable … but not too guessable. Whodunnits demand a tricky balance of conjury and clarity, and the only way I’ll know if I’ve got that balance right is when someone actually reads the damn thing and tells me if all the plot machinery. Which is what happens next.

One final note: as I’ve mentioned before, this is the first novel I’ve written using Scrivener. I’m pleased to report the software is unobstrusive and intuitive, and does a great job of simply letting you get on with the task at hand. Highly recommended for all writers, both fiction and non-fiction, in any genre or capacity.

• Weaving a carpet
• Hacking out a sculpture from solid marble
• Juggling scimitars whose blades have been honed to razor-shapr perfection
• Getting jiggy with someone you love
• Embarking on a long journey in a foreign land without map or compass
• Bringing up a child
• Building a replica of the entire city of New York out of matchsticks
• Exposing yourself in public

Any of these sound familiar to you? And which ones have I missed?

• Hell and High Water (article by Robert P Everett)
• The Final Voyage of the Starship ‘Enterprise’ (article by Brad Munson)

Where do you go after Star Wars? That was the question being asked by the staff at Industrial Light and Magic after they’d finished running the marathon that was Return of the Jedi. According to ILM production supervisor Warren Franklin, ‘Everybody was real down after [Jedi], wondering, “What will we do next to top that?”‘ The answer was to pull off the remarkable feat of handling two major blockbusters simultaneously.

The first of these was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the less acclaimed but still phenomenally successful sequel to Spielberg’s runaway 1981 hit Raiders of the Lost Ark. In Franklin’s view, Temple of Doom was ‘a real step forward for [ILM]. It was not as much work [as Jedi] … but there was more diversity.’

After a brief overview of the film’s development, Everett’s article gets into the meat of how ILM tackled its opening sequences including Indy’s Trimotor flight over Asia and the high speed road chase through Shanghai. The road chase is interesting in that it was shot with the principals in a car on the ILM stage – no high-tech effects, just an old-school live action shoot using what Dennis Muren describes as ‘lots of smoke and flashing lights.’

The Trimotor aircraft scenes, in contrast, were all bluescreens, miniatures and wire-work, with Dream Quest stepping in when deadlines got tight to complete the shot where the plane flies over the Great Wall of China. In this section of the article we learn that coal is great for building scale models of mountains, and share the optical crew’s delight in managing to incorporate a natural depth of field into the bluescreen cockpit shots (Indy blurred in the foreground, cockpit window and sky sharp in the background). Camera operator John Ellis concedes this latter was tricky, but applauds it as part of Muren’s and Spielberg’s ongoing mission to ‘do away with the conventions that everyone knows don’t look right but are generally accepted.’

The matte painting team gets good coverage throughout. Supervisor/artist Mike Pangrazio tells us how the stunning sunset shot of the maharajah’s palace was created by photographing a foam core silhouette propped on a Marin County hilltop and painting over the results – ‘The painting itself looked ridiculously bad – just brush strokes that end in a black sky,’ he says. ‘But on film, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done.’

The bit that everyone remembers from Temple of Doom is the mine car chase. Muren has nothing but praise for the live action footage Spielberg managed to squeeze out of the full-size mine shaft set, but doesn’t hold back when listing the challenges facing ILM when it came to matching its qualities in miniature. The biggest problem was that, in order to get sufficiently long runs of track, they were going to have to build their miniature caverns relatively small. Too small, in fact, for a motion picture camera to fit inside. A radical solution was needed.

The left-field answer was to re-engineer a Nikon still camera. Everett’s article describes in detail the extraordinary modification process which resulted in ‘a VistaVision format motion picture camera almost literally small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.’

The scale might have been small, but the miniatures were still enormous. The article devotes a lot of space to their creation, and the various tricks the ILM team came up with: rock walls made of tin-foil, hand-blown miniature light bulbs to create scale, using Rosco smoke to create aerial haze … and so on. As someone who, as a kid, had a bedroom full of plastic kits and model railways, I can take any amount of this stuff, but if models aren’t your bag you’ll find plenty to interest you in some of the corollary discussions, such as the various psychological cues that were incorporated into the footage to evoke a true sense of speed and scale.

If you like anecdotes there are plenty, including a cute story about an experimental lava effect using vanilla pudding that proved to be ‘a major attraction for the studio’s relevant mouse population.’ ILM displays something of a rodent obsession, actually, given modelshop supervisor Lorne Peterson’s (none-too-serious) suggestion that they introduce virtual vermin to the miniature mine tunnels by ‘dressing cockroaches up in little mouse costumes.’

In short, the huge diversity of the Temple of Doom effects load is all here for you to explore. But, despite the diversity, there is still a unifying force. Whether flooding miniature tunnels, animating puppets in back-breaking sets or filming baby alligators in milky water for later superimposition into a real-world river, the objective was always the same: seamless integration with the live action. From ILM’s point of view, this was greatly facilitated by having Michael Kahn’s primary editorial team just next door, cutting daily and conferring when shots didn’t work. Effects editor Howard Stein found this challenging: ‘It was unusual editorial work … Everything had to cut in with the live-action … That makes things a great deal more critical for us.’

Difficult as Stein and the others might have found this way of working – a routine more akin to a live-action production shoot than a more traditional VFX workflow – you only have to look at the finished sequences to appreciate the efforts they put in. The showcase chase through the mines is remarkable not only because it works dramatically and looks terrific, but because the effects shots are cut so seamlessly with the live action … over and over and over again. I can forgive the movie all its faults (and it has many) for that one sequence.

While Temple of Doom allowed ILM to ‘keep it in the family’ by working cheek by jowl with their Lucasfilm colleagues in Marin County, Star Trek III was an altogether more strung-out affair, with 700 miles separating ILM and the Paramount production team in LA. Although effects supervisor Ken Ralson describes the live-action crew as ‘real helpful’, he still admits that the constant commuting meant that ‘I’d forget what city I was in sometimes … My mind was going.’

Not that all the live action was shot in LA. Like Indy’s Shanghai car chase, a few incidental scenes were shot on the ILM stage, including the space dock cafe interior, which made use of the facility’s giant bluescreen. On this occasion, it was director Leonard Nimoy who crossed the 700 miles to make the gig.

All those flights clearly gave Ralston time to think. It was his idea for Klingon commander Kruge to have a pet – a creature he describes as ‘a very mean looking reptilian dog.’ Munson’s article reveals that it’s actually Ralston’s arm inside the puppet, which he had to operate while squashed in underneath Kruge’s chair. ‘There wasn’t much room,’ he admits. ‘Where does your head go? Up a Klingon’s … anyway, it was a tight fit.’

The rest of the crew faced challenges too. The lengthy space dock sequences were ‘difficult and labor-intensive’. Even after artistic issues had been resolved (such as taking the decision to add aerial perspective to the space dock interiors using smoke, even though logically there’s no atmosphere in outer space), there was the thorny problem of match-moving the spacecraft models to the space dock interior. ‘We had to plot each shot out on the Moviola,’ says effects cameraman Scott Farrar. ‘There’s no secret to that; it just takes a long time.’

Then there was the whole business of screen time. ‘They’re exceedingly long shots,’ says Ralston, pointing out that in the Star Wars galaxy shots rarely last longer than 100 frames. Some shots in Star Trek III linger on the screen for 400-500 frames. ‘I’m clawing at the arms of my seat,’ he says, ‘saying, “It’s too long!”‘

As with Temple of Doom, ILM’s versatility is apparent. As well as bringing Kruge’s dog to life, the creature shop also made a whole genus of squirming worms. Animation and optical revisited the classic Star Trek transporter effects and came up with a new Klingon decloaking effect for the film’s opening. The modelmakers and pyrotechnics team destroyed a planet. And, in yet another Indy echo, the stop-motion experts sent the movie’s villain spinning to his death down a sheer cliff face.

The one thing Ken Ralston really enjoyed, however, was blowing up the Enterprise.

”I’ve always said I hated that ship,’ Ralston says at the beginning of the article. ‘I tell you it was wonderful: Boom! Goodbye!’ Sure enough, Munson’s text tells us exactly how they did it: an elaborate combination of effects involving steel wool, acetone and explosives. Lots of explosives.

Summarising the whole Star Trek experience. Ralston has only good things to say. ‘It wasn’t a real tough situation with everyone on each other’s nerves,’ he comments. ‘There was a good sense of everybody putting a lot into it because they felt they were contributing more.’ These remarks from Ralston mirror closely those from Warren Franklin after Temple of Doom. According to Franklin, on the latter film Dennis Muren and Steven Spielberg ‘were open to each other’s ideas, and it made for a very happy working relationship.’ Creative collaboration, then, is the theme of this particular issue of Cinefex, whether as a result of long-standing relationships, the closeness of the Lucasfilm community or the readiness of Paramount to bring their effects facility into the fold, despite the miles. Return of the Jedi, far from burning out the ILM crews, seems to have left them feeling pretty damn good.

My favourite picture from the Temple of Doom article is on page 27 – a black-and-white shot of the Nikon camera perched on its little mine car, on a set of tiny railroad tracks, surrounded by a tunnel miniature whose walls are clearly no thicker than baking foil. It’s a humble little picture, but somehow iconic. From the Star Trek III article, I like the photo of Tom St Amand animating the Kruge puppet on its bluescreen armature. Kruge is upside-down and you can almost hear him growling at St Amand to let him go, or there’ll be trouble!

• Cinefex
• ILM

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

Put simply, many visual effects workers are working impossible hours for low pay and no access to health schemes or pensions. The problem’s not industry-wide – this article in the LA Times suggests that some of the big players like ILM and Sony Imageworks are pretty responsible employers, although recently Digital Domain have come under fire for a scheme under which interns desperate for that all-important first screen credit actually pay to work for the company.

Now, there are people far more involved than me tracking the situation far more effectively than I ever could, not least VFX Soldier and Scott Squires. And I daresay there are plenty of folk who’d argue that VFX providers aren’t the only businesses struggling, say, to compete with cheaper international suppliers. I just think it’s sad that an industry which thirty years ago was soaring on a wave of innovation and artistry is turning into a consortium of sweatshops.

I’m not suggesting it was easy before. My retrospective looks at the visual effects industry through the Cinefex lens have thrown up any amount of stories about motion control cameramen falling asleep over their equipment in the wee hours, or optical departments working 24-hours shifts, or animators breaking their backs to work in impossibly cramped miniature sets. And in the earliest days of all, when Hollywood magic sparkled against the bleak backdrop of the Depression, job security was unheard of.

What’s different about those days, I think, is the sense of pioneering spirit. If you feel like you’re riding out into the badlands to strike a path that’s never been struck before, extra miles go with the territory. Today, visual effects are used so widely (and not just for monsters and spaceships but for all the drudgery of motion tracking and wire removal and all the countless invisible things that are now possible) that the VFX machine needs an awful lot of cogs. And who wants to be a cog?

Interviewed in Cinefex #11, Steven Spielberg has this to say about the state of the VFX industry circa 1982 – specifically about the decline of the old studio special effects departments:

‘There’s no longer a little door with the sign SPFX on it, which is sort of sad … Yet we owe those departments. Men like Arnold Gillespie and L. B. Abbott and Art Cruickshank were geniuses, and I’ve just been trying to learn from them.’

It’s precisely out of those doldrums that the modern VFX industry emerged. It would be a shame to see it sail now into a different kind of troubled water. Yes, the motion picture business exists, like any other business, to make money. Nevertheless, it should still be able to learn from the past. I hope there are enough folk working out there who have kept the passion to make what we all still look to Hollywood for: magic.

My most recent project, as I mentioned only last week, is a crime novel called The Frozen King. I’ve put the first draft aside so I can gain a little perspective on it before editing. I think I forgot to mention that it’s the first novel I’ve written with Scrivener, which was a joy to use by the way.

To distract myself from the annoying voice of that MS calling ‘Edit me, edit me,’ every few minutes, I’ve been dipping fingers into my favourite bubbling-under projects. Some are hotter than others, and each one tastes different. Here’s the list:

• The Haunted Tree is the follow-up to The Frozen King. A big part of me wants to launch straight into it, but I’m fairly sure it would be a bad idea to even consider that before the first MS is in a more polished state.
• String City Apocalypse is a full-length MS I finished recently, a novel developed from a set of weird fantasy detective stories known collectively as The String City Mysteries. It’s in good shape but the first chapter’s broken and needs fixing.
• Black Dog is, I think, a novella. You’d probably classify it as horror or dark fantasy. Either way, it’s one of those stories I’ve been circling for years, trying to find the key to unlock it. I have a reasonably coherent story in my head, and an opening I quite like. Here’s the latter:

Later, I learned that was a term used by Winston Churchill to describe depression. That made such pictures in my head: the stalwart bulldog stat black dog esman prowling the English countryside while German planes threw down bombs on his head, all the time tracked by a silent, night-dark hound with eyes like red coals.
The thought comforted me, because I had a black dog too.

Black dog is older than Churchill, as I subsequently found out. Samuel Johnson wrote to James Boswell about him way back in the eighteenth century. ‘What will you do to keep away the black dog that worries you at home?’ he said. I’ve no idea what tricks Boswell had up his sleeve to combat the beast. The same as the rest of us, I suppose: hide when you can, run when you must.

You can keep going back through history and folklore. Look deep enough into the dark times and you’ll see black dog there. He was friend to witches, the faithful companion of Old Splitfoot. He was Cerberus, howling at the brink of Hades. He was the Hound of the Baskervilles. Black dog roamed then as he roams now, more than a wolf and so much bigger than anything man can endure.

So strange, then, that when I first met black dog for myself, I knew none of this. I was fifteen years old, and my friends Max and Paulie were too. Of the three of us, Max and I made it through that summer and got to be sixteen. Paulie stayed behind. It was a summer full of ocean storms, the summer we found the undertow.

The summer I created black dog.

• Finally there’s The Music of the Spheres, a colossal fantasy series that’s been threatening to kill me for some time now. As with Black Dog, I think I may just have found the way in.

I haven’t been entirely idle during this week of indecision and procrastination. There is the day job after all. I’ve also managed to write half a review of Cinefex #18. So if you remember that summer when you went to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom before crossing the road for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, come back soon to get the skinny on all those juicy visual effects.

Meanwhile, I think I have actually decided which of the five projects listed above is going to get my full attention for a while. I just haven’t decided if I’m going to tell anyone yet.

I still don’t want to say too much about it, but I am here to record the fact that at 17:19 GMT I wrote the final word in the final chapter of the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on since just before Christmas.

That last word (in case you’re interested) is out.

As I think I’ve observed here before, finishing a first draft is a funny old business. There’s elation, yes. Relief too. Exhaustion. A strong desire to drink red wine in large quantities. All sorts of other urges I should perhaps keep to myself. There’s also a nagging suspicion that all those words you just strung together may not quite add up to the coherent narrative you had in mind when you wrote that first word all those months ago.

And, lurking underneath all those feelings, is the sure knowledge that, when you return to the manuscript after the essential cooling-off process known in the trade as Putting The Bloody Thing Aside For As Long As You Can Stand To, the hard work of editing will really begin.

I’ve already let slip this new book’s working title, which is The Frozen King, so I can safely blab that out again. I’m happy to tell you it’s a short novel (first draft just under 62,000 words) and that the story is essentially a murder mystery – not something I’ve written before. One of the great pleasures of getting it to this stage has been slowly crawling my way up the whodunnit learning curve, which proved to be rather steeper than I’d anticipated.

That’s all for now. Before I get too deeply into the red wine, however, I will tell you that the first word of the book (in case you’re interested) is Screams.

After a series of unsettling and occasionally horrific set pieces, the narrative flits backwards and forwards through time as Donald recalls various expeditions to far-flung corners of the world, where strange encounters may – or may not – have happened. Donald’s memories reveal the secrets of his curious life one patient step at a time. At their heart is a series of strange truths about his wife Michelle and their twin children. Once completed, the jigsaw puzzle of their intertwined lives proves to be one of cosmic proportions.

The great strength of this novel is Barron’s ability to spend many pages building a detailed real world for his complex characters to inhabit, then to skew it deftly sideways with sudden flashes of macabre invention that show an altogether inhuman otherworld skulking scratch-deep beneath its surface. For this reason, to read The Croning is to experience a slow burn, but it’s one worth succumbing to as all those apparently untrustworthy threads weave themselves into coherence.

Barron’s considerable success with short fiction to some extent informs the novel’s structure. The prologue – an irreverent retelling of Rumpelstiltskin that manages to be simultaneously witty and chilling – might almost stand alone, as might some of the later vignettes. Everything here is ultimately relevant, however, from the meticulously interlocked narrative to the well-developed characters (in particular the extraordinarily sensual eighty-something Michelle) and the vivid prose, all of which combine to create a novel which is more than the sum of its parts … and which promises to linger long after reading.

Laird Barron is the Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation. His first novel, The Croning, will be published by Nightshade Books on 8th May 2012.

• Laird Barron’s blog
• The Croning – Nightshade Books

• Ghostbusters (article by Adam Eisenberg)
• The Last Starfighter – Imagery Wrought in the Total Forge (article by Peter Sørensen)

When I first saw Ghostbusters in the cinema, back in 1984, I didn’t ‘get’ it. There’s a particular flavour of American SNL humour that doesn’t always survive the journey across the pond to the UK. Plus, the movie had been so hyped, with that infectious Ray Parker Jr song playing endlessly over the radio, that maybe anything was going to be a disappointment.

Or perhaps it was just me because, second time round, I loved Ghostbusters unreservedly, and I’ve loved it ever since. How deliciously spine-chilling, then, to read up afresh on the miracles wrought by visual effects maestro Richard Edlund and his team during the making of this classic supernatural comedy.

Ghostbusters was Edlund’s first assignment after leaving Industrial Light and Magic to take over EEG, formerly operated by Douglas Trumbull and Richard Yuricich. Edlund tells how, after he’d taken hold of the reins, initial negotiations to work on first Dune, then Ridley Scott’s Legend of Darkness (sic) fell through. ‘I was depressed for a week,’ he says. Then, proving the old adage about feast or famine, he ‘was approached to do both 2010 and Ghostbusters just days apart from each other.’

Eisenberg’s coverage of Ghostbusters is a full-featured affair, embracing everything from Edlund’s initial restructuring of EEG – ‘Basically we had to totally change the place’ – through preproduction, location and studio shoots all the way to post and optical. As usual, the article is based on first-hand accounts, but there’s an added breadth here as we get to hear not only from the key effects personnel, but also from a range of other folk including writer/star Dan Aykroyd and producer Michael Gross.

While Aykroyd tells us a little about the origins of the name Gozer, and why he chose to feature a villain made of marshmallow, Gross confesses that ‘the concept of the Stay-Puft man made everyone a little nervous going in.’ We don’t always hear from producers in Cinefex, and Gross’s voice is an especially interesting one here, giving us a wide-angle view on the production as a whole, while still zooming in on the little details.

Another good voice is that of John Bruno, the EEG art director who also storyboarded all the effects scenes. The storyboard artist is something of an unsung hero, so it’s nice to hear Bruno talk in detail about his process. Gross compliments him on the way he ‘created specific illustrations that took into account … what angles were best for the effects,’ and remarks that ‘when the set was finished … we realised that what [John] had boarded many months before was exactly what we were seeing through the camera.’

Ghostbusters might be a hip comedy, but you only have to read Eisenberg’s article to be reminded that it’s also a major effects picture. We get the goods on everything from stop-motion animation to cloud tank photography, animatronics and puppetry to matte paintings. Matthew Yuricich, assisted by Michelle Moen, produced over forty of the latter for the movie. According to Gross, ‘They’re so good I can find only about half of them myself.’

There’s a lot about special effects too: those on-set physical illusions like exploding walls and hydraulically-operated earthquakes. My particular favourite is the eggs that pop out of the box and start frying on Dana Barrett’s kitchen worktop, a live stage effect that involved pre-scoring the shells of real eggs and using compressed air to fire their contents out on to steel tiles preheated with hidden burners.

Every page turn of this article reveals a new effect and a new challenge for the film-makers, so it’s all the more extraordinary to remember that the entire Ghostbusters production was turned around in just a year … and that it still looks amazing. Here’s Richard Edlund’s summary of the experience: ‘Making a big picture like Ghostbusters is like fighting a war … it really is like battlefield conditions.’

Reading old issues of Cinefex in sequence as I am reveals a kind of background story arc to these major effects films – particularly when it comes to the characters involved. By tracking the careers of people like Edlund and Trumbull, we get an insight into how things are constantly changing in this ever-volatile industry.

With Edlund specifically (and I realise this could just be me reading between the lines), I get the impression he was much more content after the move to EEG/Los Angeles than he’d been in the latter years at San Francisco-based ILM. ‘I’m a naturalised Angelino,’ he says. ‘I knew I just wasn’t a Marin County person.’ Moreover, he seems very happy with his work on Ghostbusters, concluding that, even though the film ‘was like doing Poltergeist and Raiders together, in half the time … ultimately, I think, we pulled it off.’ Upbeat words from a man who, back in Cinefex #2, rated his work on The Empire Strikes Back at a rather disappointing 6.5 out of 10.

On the subject of story arcs, by far the most significant one in the 80s and 90s is, of course, the steady emergence of digital technology. If Ghostbusters is a hectic lightning storm spewing out the very best in optical and mechanical effects, The Last Starfighter shines with the pure, clean light of the laser-sharp cutting edge. At the same time, it’s worth noting that, like Tron before it, The Last Starfighter has a storyline in which video games play a key role, in part justifying the use of CG effects … and perhaps excusing any shortcomings those effects might have.

The Starfighter article is written by Peter Sørensen, the man responsible for several previous Cinefex pieces on computer generated imagery. Once again, he offers us what is now a fascinating snapshot of the state of the art circa 1984. Back then there were no desktop PCs, and an outfit that wanted to crunch the kinds of numbers needed to make photo-real images had only one option: buy themselves a Cray X-MP supercomputer.

The outfit in question was Digital Productions, a breakaway from Triple-I, operated by John Whitney Jr and Gary Demos. Sørensen is in his elements as he reels off the specifications of their monstrous number-cruncher, which was ‘absolutely jam-packed with 200,000 special microchips’ and needed a liquid freon cooling system to keep the temperature down on its monumental 100,000 watts of power.

In modern-day parlance, the Cray was to all intents and purposes a self-contained render farm, running software that took its instructions from a lesser VAX 11/780 workstation and churned the necessary thousands of individual movie frame images. The VAX, by all accounts, wasn’t as user-friendly as a modern system, especially when it came to creating the model spacecraft needed for The Last Starfighter.

‘Objects are first drawn on paper in a manner similar to that of engineering blueprints,’ Sørensen explains. ‘The drawing is then placed on an “encoding table” to be “digitized”.’ A lot of this article is devoted to the intricacies of these and other processes, many of which seem quaint and clunky today. All the same, it’s clear they form the basis of everything that’s happened in the discipline since. The only thing that’s really changed is the processing power available and the sophistication of the computer interfaces. Even by 1984, the basics of geometric manipulation, mapping and rendering were all well and truly in place.

When all the technological jargon gets too much, concept artist Ron Cobb is on hand to give it that human touch. Talking about his inspirations for the various vehicle designs, Cobb tells how he combined what he describes as ‘Spitfires in space … a kind of Star Wars thing that’s becoming a bit of a cliche’ with ‘some of the crazy faddishness from the attack of the killer helicopters – Blue Thunder.’ I was interested to read how Cobb drew inspiration from real-world developments reported in Aviation Week and NASA reports, and amazed to learn that he was ‘able to envision designs so clearly in his head that he skips the sketching stage … and confidently makes blueprint-like drawings right off the bat.’

It’s fun to read about the various glitches all these new techniques, including the moment when the operators forgot to use the appropriate computer commands, resulting in a randomly-coloured Gun Star that ‘came out looking like a black-light “flower power” spaceship.’

You can also sense the excitement – and frustration – that came from working with systems that promised so much, but were not yet perfected. Director Nick Castle cites the big advantage of working digitally as the ability ‘to do everything in one pass … that saves you the loss of several generations, which is great in terms of look.’ But some of the new tricks he wanted to try, like scanning the face of actor Lance Guest on to his computer-generated counterpart, remained tantalisingly out of reach. ‘There were time problems,’ Castle laments.

This frustration is evident in Sørensen’s somewhat evangelical text as he lapses something that occurs only rarely in Cinefex: editorial comment. ‘Perhaps the major problem with The Last Starfighter,’ he states, ‘is the fact that the imagery still suffers at times from the overly clean, surrealistic-reality problem.’ But he ends on a positive note, asserting that, ‘Those problems could have been overcome if there had been a little more time to dote on details.’

More interesting to me were Ron Cobb’s closing remarks about the impact of computers on, well, everything … and in particular the uncertainy that still surrounded the new technology. ‘I think there’s a real need for the culture to grab ahold of this technology,’ he says. ‘To most people, computer graphics is a detached, alien technology … It’s a shame if that persists.’

It’s worth noting, however, that Cobb was clearly in awe of the Cray, saying that it ‘reminded him of the monolith in 2001.’ His remarks remind us that these were the frontier days when computers, in the minds of most people, were still magical things. What better place then than Hollywood, that fabled western land of the American Dream, to make the magic real?

There are oodles of behind-the-scenes photos in the Ghostbusters article, including some hilarious shots of Mark Wilson and a team of puppeteers performing Onionhead (AKA Slimer) on the EEG stage. My favourite image, however, shows Bill Bryan’s head and shoulders poking out of the top of the Stay-Puft suit, while the marshmallow man’s detached foam rubber face sits grinning in the foreground.

When it comes to The Last Starfighter, there are plenty of frame blow-ups demonstrating the slick quality of the Digital Productions CGI images. To the modern eye, they have that pristine computer-game look that betrays their origins, but there’s no doubt that, for the time, they were damned impressive. In a photograph that shows the reality of working with 1980s computer technology, Kevin Rafferty is shown poring over his encoding table with a pair of hand-held cursor devices, painstakingly converting detailed blueprints into digital assets.

• Cinefex #17
• Ivan Reitman on IMDB
• Nick Castle on IMDB
• Richard Edlund Films

• “To be innovative you have to know the rules first” – 40k Books interviews Jamie Todd Rubin
• “Horror is about not having room for hope” – 40k Books interviews Kaaron Warren
• “Writing means searching for the perfect word, all the time” – 40k Books interviews Graham Edwards

The ebook in question is called Girl in Pieces. It’s the fifth instalment of The String City Mysteries, my series of hardboiled detective fantasies published by 40k Books, and it’s fresh out today. It’s a heart-warming story of golems and gangsters and a girl who’s, well, in pieces. Will our intrepid hero find a way to put her back together before the spiders get him? And what exactly does happen when a thunderbird the size of a city block gets caught in Medusa’s glare?

To find out more about the story – and to read an extract – click here. If you’re feeling brave enough to face the spiders without further ado, below is a link to download the Kindle edition direct from Amazon (if you prefer your ebooks in flavours compatible for iPad or Nook, come back in a few days, when they’ll be ready and waiting for you).

• Download Girl in Pieces for Kindle

Girl in Pieces by Graham Edwards was first published in the April 2008 edition of Realms of Fantasy. It was nominated (long-listed) for a Nebula Award and reprinted in Ellen Datlow’s anthology The Best Horror of the Year Volume One. This is its first publication as a stand-alone ebook. So what are you waiting for?