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When the Terminator stikes the special effects had better be good
From: Enterprise Incidents
Date: Unknown
By: James van Hise
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Since his father won an Oscar for his work on George Pal's The Time Machine, you could certainly say that
Gene Warren Jr. grew up with special effects. In 1980 he opened Fantasy II, an effects production facility
in Burbank which has done work on Man From Atlantis, Winds of War, Spacehunter, Gremlins and the teaser
trailer for Dune seen last Christmas.
While beginning work on some selected shots for Return of the Living Dead, they were just finishing up some
demanding scenes for The Terminator, now playing at a theater near you.
Since The Terminator involves a chase set in the present as well as some scenes taking place in a robot
dominated future, the film presented its own special set of challenges. Being basically an action film, the
effects had to underscore this angle and in some important scenes support it. But as Warren read the script
by directory Jim Cameron, he was eager to get the project underway.
"Jim talked with us and gave me a script which I couldn't put down. It was one of the best screenplays I'd
read in years. I read it in less than an hour and became quite excited about the effects in December of '83."
Included in the future sequences were robot tanks called hunter-killers. Whilse these were designed by the
director, they were built by the crew at Fantasy II. "Mike Joyce, who runs the model shop, was responsible
for the tank," Warren explains. Gary Rhodaback did a lot of the helicopter, which is another hunter-killer
which we just call helicopter to keep from getting them mixed up. It's a flying hunter-killer as opposed to
the treaded hunter-killer.
"All of the machines are really a part of the mechanical army which takes over the world in the future. So
is the Terminator. It's just a more sophisticated form of machine. It's supposed to hunt out and get rid
of humans."
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Explosive moments
Making explosions look convincing in miniature is a specialized craft all its own. Lending his expertise in
this area to The Terminator was Joe Viskocil. Viskocil has created convincing explosions for the Star Wars
films, Dragonslayer, The Winds of War and others.
In The Terminator, Viskocil had to rig explosions to show a hunter-killer being destroyed in a future
sequence as well as a gasoline tanker truck blowing up with the Terminator aboard.
Warren explains that in showing the convincing destruction of a hunter-killer, part of the trick was
building another version of the model which was so fragile that it would not resist even a small explosive
charge. "plus, it's not as detailed as the first one because when you cut to it you habe only about 12 to
15 frames before the explosion starts. It was built in such a fashion that it would break away, twist and
bend to look like exploded metal. It was built differently to allow the tread to blow off when the bomb
lands under it. You see the tread roll over a miniature bomb during the sequence where they've been
stalking it.
"The explosive used in this is mainly just black powder. So it's not the explosions that are powerful,
it's how you build the miniature. It doesn't take that much because the miniature is extremely fragile."
Much the same thing was done with the tanker truck, except that here the miniature had to look perfect.
"Two tanker trucks were built on a scale of two inches to the foot," Warren says. "It translated into
about twelve inches long so the whole model was eight feet in length. For the type of that were doing,
to make it look convincing that was about as small as we could go."
As anyone who has seen this footage can attest, it looks extremely convincing and not like a miniature
explosion at all.
Mechanical anatomy
One of the more striking images in The Terminator comes when Arnold Schwarzenegger's title character,
stripped of his fleshy disguise by a horrendous explosion, continues his pursuit with his exposed robot
skeleton now revealing his true nature. There were two versions of this robot form built. The full-sized
one was made by Stan Winston and its use was built and contracted for separately from Warren's
responsibilities. But the miniature armature which Fantasy II made for stop-motion animation had to be
built to match the full-scale model before any serious filming could be done.
"The armature was actually built by Doug Beswick," Gene related, "and he had a couple of helpers on it
whom he supervised. Doug worked closely with Stan, whose place built the full scale version. Doug had to
match it and build the armature puppet in pieces following Stan as he build the full-sized one. Stan
had to keep making changes in the large version and Doug had to wait for the parts to come out. If
changes were made on something he'd already done, Doug would have to change his model to match Stan's.
"While the whole film could have been done with only the full-scale model, it would have meant another
six months in post-production. As it is there are about twenty shots of the full-scale robot frame.
Miniature stop-motion is used when you need a particular kind of action seen for the entire puppet. This
is used when, for monetary and technological reasons, it becomes difficult to do in full scale."
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In order for Peter Kleinow to animate it realistically, the model had to be capable of a variety of
movements not unlike those of a living being. "The model is quite articulated," Warren explains, "but
to get it to do all of those things it needed to do simultaneously is very difficult, particularly when
matching the footage of the model with that of a living man it's supposed to be chasing. I got a number
of shots which are quite convincing and other which are marginal. But it's like making movie sound
effects - you cut them short and around and they work great. They've also got a lot of closeups and bust
shots of the full-scale one and they're good-looking, too. On ours we had great control of the head and
eyes and filmed som very terrific moments."
One of the full-scale shots was of the robot Terminator smashing through a door. The robot is seen from
the waist up and the result is very convincing. But others would have been nearly impossible to
accomplish with a full-scale model required to make quick, humanlike movements.
"In fact, for the fight sequence, to do that with a full-scale puppet would have required it to stand there
full figure, bash the actor, recover and take a couple of steps backward. To build a full-scale puppet to
do that would have cost another million dollars, and then there'd be the question of how much money would
have to be spent to get it shot. You'd have to take a week with a full crew just to get that one shot. So
those kind of sequences were reserved for the miniature, on which we can spend a week to get one shot with
a crew of three instead of a crew of twenty on an expensive, elaborate soundstage or location set."
The rigors of animation
Because of the demands to make it look and function as convincingly as possible, it took Winston longer
to make the full-scale Terminator frame than had been anticipated. This in turn caused a delay in getting
the animation model made. "As a consequence," says Warren, "it took Beswick five or six weeks longer to
get the model to us. This put a big crunch on this part of the operation, so we had very little time to
familiarize ourselves with the model. Kleinow just had to jump in, animating footage for the movie with
the two foot tall puppet.
"This was unusual to begin with because it's difficult to animate something when it's that tall. Plus,
there were tough setups. For instance, for one setup there's a projector fifteen feet in the air, with
some lenses pointing down and others up. This is how the live action was shot and we had to match it.
So, in order to animate the puppet on a relatively level base we had to make these difficult setups,
which are time consuming. To keep the camera and projector level we experimented with tilting the set
at a funny angle, but then the animation became virtually impossible because of the effect of gravity.
On a two-legged thing, when it's walking and it's on one leg in mid-step, the leverage puts it off
balance. You can't tighten up the joints enough to hold it in place. That's when we decided to go with
the projector on the ceiling idea.
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"But a setup like that take about three days just to get arranged, and you have to wedge the plate
and fix your lighting. On the fourth day you can animate and then generally you have to do it a second
and third time. This is because it's not only difficult to animate the puppet to get the action just the
way you and the director want it, but sometimes things happen. The camera might move and there are
generally a number of gimmicks going on to get the shots not just aesthetically different but technically
different. Some of the shots have taken as many as sixteen to eighteen hours to do although they're only
120 to 130 frames long. This is because of what's involved, such as backing up the film, multiple passes
and matting out something when the Temrinator goes behind the figure on the screen that we're trying to
match up with. All of that becomes very time consuming."
Many technicians are divided over whether Go-Motion, the variation of stop-motion developed by Industrial
Light and Magic, is either important or necessary. Warren has his own thoughts on the issue.
"I've got nothing against Go-Motion, but you have to find the time and money to do it. It would have been
prohibitive on this show. There just wasn't the budget for it. Go-Motion is more expensive and in most
cases, for what we're doing, we don't need it."
Warren's shop has had other experiences with stop-motion prior to The Terminator. For instance, Kleinow
animated the crowd of gremlins swarming down the streets after they leave the YMCA in last summer's smash
hit Gremlins.
"That was, I would say, a record-setting shot," Warren says. "Certainly it was for the number of figures
used in a stop-motion scene in a major motion picture. Those figures were five inches tall and in the last
part of the scene, say the last ten or twelve frames, there were 46 of them. It took about 45 minutes a shot
fot the last 24 frames. Peter had to animate each puppet because he not only had them running out like that
but in every shot there were two or three of them leaping over others."
Future life
Other fantasy films are currently on the docket for Gene Warren Jr.'s company. On a small film titled
City Limits he'll be doing opticals and will be contributing some key effects shots for Dan O'Bannon's
Return of the Living Dead. Among these will be smoke from a crematorium in the film's opening (which settles
in a graveyard) that is an optical, as well as more obvious shots like an atomic blast.
The work of Fantasy II speaks for itself; in many cases the firm's shots are so convincing that they
aren't even recognizes as being special effects. Not all effects people strive for the flashy. Some prefer
to have the unreal just look uncannily convincing. This is really what the art of special effects is
all about.
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Last modified: Feb 04 2008
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