“The Bradbury Building has some really beautiful photography in it. It’s a very famous landmark in Los Angeles. As always...the Bradbury Building was shot at night. The Bradbury Building was occupied by lawyers and doctors during the day. It had to be spiffy clean during the day. The crew would come in the evening after everybody left and completely trash the place. It became a swamp. It was just unbelievable what they would try to do to make it look like this skuzzy, horrible, dimly lit, smoke-filled, rain drenched, leaky building. We had to shoot a shot up into the ceiling of the Bradbury Building. It’s a huge open grid glass skylight. No one could give us the time...they were all busy shooting their live action, and racing around. We couldn’t intrude. We wondered...how we going to get our shots? Richard Yuricich and I figured out a way to ignore them altogether. We took a 4 X 5 still camera and put it on its’ back on the floor, in the middle of the atrium, shooting straight up through this building. Since we didn’t have a lighting crew, they wouldn’t give us a lighting crew, nobody had the money for a lighting crew, Richard would be on the floor. He would open the shutter on queue. I would race around on all floors, with a big strobe light, and flash all the floors while the shutter was open. So the light became accumulated long-time exposure to try to get the lighting we wanted for our job. And nobody knew we were there. And then this photograph was brought in, we blew it up to about a six foot wide color photograph, and pasted it onto a giant sheet of glass. And then cut out all the openings where the windows would be in the ceiling so that we could shoot this very strange shot of this advertising blimp which passes over the roof of the building. So, what’s happening in this shot is; the blimp is a miniature, it had lights all over it, just like the Mother Ship, almost the exact same lighting sources; and there’s smoke both on the other side of the glass and on the camera side of the glass. So a bright beam of light that passes through the glass, toward the camera, is actually looking completely natural. It was actually quite simple to do.”
|
Advertising blimp, as seen from the Bradbury.
“One of the things we found out while working on Close Encounters is, if you want a light to be this bright, you can’t shine it in the smoke. You can only have a partial exposure in the smoke. If you want this to have a lens flare, you shine this light directly into the camera with no smoke. So there’s one exposure with smoke. And one exposure without smoke. And they have to be exact timing, that‘s superimposed on each other. That’s part of the whole compositing thing. So, this blimp, which is under motion control, is moving on a track that’s supported from the ground. That’s a 35mm movie being projected on the side, on the fake screen on the blimp. There’s a projector up in the ceiling here. There’s another projector on the other side of the blimp. There‘s a projector from down there. Each of those exposures is a separate time that the film has to run through the camera and get those all perfect and synchronized. And if somebody flubs up and doesn’t get back to the right start mark, or one motor doesn’t work, you have to start all over again. But that’s just an example of the kind of compositing that goes on to try to create a sense of natural realism.”
“Blade Runner is likely to disappoint moviegoers hoping for sleek thrills and derring-do. But as a display terminal for the wizardry of Designers Lawrence G. Paull, Douglas Trumbull and Syd Mead, the movie delivers.”
~ From TIME Magazine, July 12, 1982

"This is one of Sid Mead’s drawings of a Spinner. Sid is really, I think, one of the best, if not the best, futurist artist alive today. He’s done a lot of really great work. He’s worked on many, many movies. He’s one of the major talents in the industry. So, this is the Spinner."


"So, that’s the miniature spinner construction right there. You can see the scale a little bit. I have very few photographs of this miniature. I have no idea where it is now. But, it was really quite a beautiful work of art. It had a zillion fiber optics, quartz lights, and stuff inside, including a little miniature Harrison Ford. This is what a model shop looks like. The model guys are always the happiest guys in the crew. These guys are really hard workers and very talented. And always having a good time, and loving this kind of work."

"This is a typical storyboard. Part of the sequence you just saw. (Deckard and Gaff on their way to the Tyrell Building.) And you can see that we diverged from the storyboard sometimes. It’s just a guideline to make sure the shots are there and tell a story. Exactly how the shots are framed or how fast they move changes from time to time, based on our professional judgment. In my opinion, you shouldn’t make a movie unless you have a good storyboard for every shot, and know exactly what you’re going to try to do, and how it’s all going to come together."
"Now I’m going to take you inside the Tyrell’s office. This is a front-projected shot. This is an image being projected on a giant screen outside the set. That was the only way we could the composites so that the actors could walk in front of the image we wouldn’t have to build a new set outside the window. The same technique was used on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and 2001."
"For the billboards in Blade Runner, you sometimes use unconventional materials for props. For example,]”...this wall on this model. I would say this was probably eighteen inches wide and about twenty-four inches tall. We found these kind of Lego block things at a toy store, that had this embossed surface on them, like [the top of a Lego]. We painted it silver, and then just projected these 35mm movies shot from way off to the left, onto the surface. When you project the movie, it had to be a non-smoke exposure. Dave Dryer shot and prepped all these movies. He’s a really good commercial producer."
"Here’s the side of the pyramid being used as another building. This was a mock-up of the Millennium Falcon, out of Star Wars. There’s a lot of inside jokes that the model builders get into, because they don’t know if we’ll ever see them."

"This is one of the shots in the movie where live action charted with this vehicle in the front of these buildings. [The Bradbury] was dressed by the studio with some weird columns, and things, added to fronts of real buildings. And then, Syd Mead would design this whole skyline. All this is painted, and added as another exposure. When you see this, with the combination of smoke, and weird atmospheric stuff, and rain falling all at the same time, it starts looking pretty believable. We had one night where we shot all the rain for our visual effects by making a big truss out in our parking lot with rain sprayers over the top of it and lights behind it. It was weird shooting up into the dark sky. But, we were lighting up rain, and shooting that. We could slow it down, and it would increase the scale. So, there’s a lot of superimposed rain in a lot of these shots. Any kind of rain, any kind of atmosphere, any kind of beams of light, tend to make things look more incredibly real."
Navigation - You are on page 5
[INTRO][PAGE1] [PAGE2] [PAGE3] [PAGE4] [PAGE5] [PAGE6] [PAGE7]
|