"Outland"

[KH Martin]

 

When I saw "Mission to Mars" I didn't feel like I was watching a scifi film for adults, but one that was framed as being adult, but that had this cgi payoff at the end that I think appealed more to teenagers. And that's the sense I get for a lot of scifi films shot in the last 20 years.

One of the zillions of screenwriters on that film was a guy who had been trying to get a remake of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (aka FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH) off the ground, and I think he wound up doing this just because they were going to step all over that UK film's principal conceit (that we ARE the martians.) That's a terrific science fiction concept, but it just got shoehorned into this mess of a movie, wasting it.

[George Ebersole]

Interesting, I did not know that. I've always been of the opinion that UK films always seem more refined and polished than American films. Which is kind of amazing since when I was working a lot all crew from the UK were salty as anything .... Ef-this, ef-that, everything was preceeded by "ef-ing". With many apologies to UK and European types who come to this forum.

 

Not to beat a dead-horse here, but to me "Outland" is a better film both story-wise and technically than "Mission to Mars" I think largely because "Mission to Mars", at its core, had teenagers in mind. So that film had a kind of candy gloss look to it, and the hokey mega-sized twirling alien at the end. I won't say "Outland" didn't have teenagers in mind, but it's a film that all reasonably mature or adult minded people can enjoy, assuming they don't mind the scifi / outer space backdrop.

 

Again, I'm surprised we didn't get more like it.

 

I mean, I now know what it takes to get a project greenlit, but it's like if you can make a reasonably budgeted project that's solid, then why not shoot those instead of dumping a half-bil of US currency into one "mega-hit" which is speculative? That's what I don't get. Ergo why I don't see why more "Outland" kind of movies were made, and instead to this day we get "Guardians of the Galaxy" or the new "Thor" movie.

 

Just me. Enough bitching. I need to go kick off the rust and shoot some footage.

 

Laterz.

[Dom Jaeger]

I like SOYLENT and the original WESTWORLD and a lot of SF pics that don't look too SF ... one I am especially strong on is DEATHWATCH, with Harvey Keitel and Max Von Sydow. Only tiny things indicating it takes place in a slightly futuristic time (made back around 1981 or so), but kind of like a science fiction version of NETWORK, and way too smart to find a big audience.

 

CHILDREN OF MEN really delivered the goods for me this century, but for other SF, I'd say EX MACHINA maybe (liked it but only saw it once, should see it again), because I think Garland might be a guy to watch for SF films, he has another coming soon. He and the ARRIVAL/BR 2049 guy might be The Ones.

Yeah for me Children of Men, Ex Machina and Moon have been this centurys sci fi highlights, with Inception and Villeneuve's recent sci-fi outings also being impressive.

 

It's a pity with so much top quality TV fare nowadays that no sci fi series has come close to competing. Well, maybe Rick and Morty. :)

 

The new Star Trek is OK but not terribly inspiring, and shows like Man in The High Castle or The Expanse which have the potential to interestingly explore possible or alternate futures haven't really done so. The Handmaids Tale was very well done but hits you over the head with its grim message. Maybe Westworld will improve in its second season. But where is the sci fi series with the depth, breadth and unpredictability of The Wire or Deadwood or Game of Thrones?

[KH Martin]

If/when we get a SF equivalent to THE WIRE, I will be utterly amazed.

 

I still can't believe we got THE WIRE at all, and that is after six viewings in eight years (I managed to miss it completely during the original run.)

 

Then again, I went through the new TWIN PEAKS three times before I let SHOWTIME drop last week, so I feel sort of, well ... quenched, right now.

 

CARNIVALE, THE WIRE, DEADWOOD, plus some short-lived UK shows like THE HOUR and THE GAME ... it's like all those countless theatrical disappointments in the last 20-30 years have been offset to a large degree for me.

 

I really still do miss the Kodachrome look of blue skies and deep shadows that are actually silhouette-black, and I massively miss seeing well-photographed miniature effects, but the powerful storytelling on some series has really overcome these handicaps.

 

I'm one of those few who actually think HIGH CASTLE improved 2nd season, but I find the look of the show a little off-putting. I watched about 20minutes of the new TREK and just didn't see the point.

[Dom Jaeger]

There are so many rich sci fi novels beyond just Phillip K Dick, who seems vastly over-represented in the world of sci fi movies and tv shows. What about Larry Niven's Ringworld, or Azimov's Foundation trilogy, or Gene Wolfe's fabulous Book of the New Sun series which I loved as a teenager.

 

Or if we look to more recent books, the work of China Mieville springs to mind as something that might translate well. I loved David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, but the movie didn't do it justice, it should have been a long form series if anything. The Expanse was a sci fi book series supposedly comparable in scope to the Song of Ice and Fire series but the TV show doesn't hold a candle to GoT.

[George Ebersole]

I used to read a lot of it in the 70s and 80s. Some of it was very rich and worthy of having a shoot script translated from it. Other books were garbage, just like any other genre. Jack Chalker, Stasheff, Alan Dean Foster, Piers Anthony were some of the good authors. Dalton, Culbreath, and a few others, in my opinion, weren't that good. They weren't even hacks, just people writing any old thing that some publisher took a chance on.

 

I think most studios and production companies back then just didn't know enough about the genre to take any chances on it. I still think that's the case, but there's enough technical talent out there that it doesn't make a difference, you can make whatever it is you don't understand look good. Dump a lot of cash in a project, and watch the returns.

[George Ebersole]

If/when we get a SF equivalent to THE WIRE, I will be utterly amazed.

 

I still can't believe we got THE WIRE at all, and that is after six viewings in eight years (I managed to miss it completely during the original run.)

 

Then again, I went through the new TWIN PEAKS three times before I let SHOWTIME drop last week, so I feel sort of, well ... quenched, right now.

 

CARNIVALE, THE WIRE, DEADWOOD, plus some short-lived UK shows like THE HOUR and THE GAME ... it's like all those countless theatrical disappointments in the last 20-30 years have been offset to a large degree for me.

 

I really still do miss the Kodachrome look of blue skies and deep shadows that are actually silhouette-black, and I massively miss seeing well-photographed miniature effects, but the powerful storytelling on some series has really overcome these handicaps.

 

I'm one of those few who actually think HIGH CASTLE improved 2nd season, but I find the look of the show a little off-putting. I watched about 20minutes of the new TREK and just didn't see the point.

 

I've heard a bit about The Wire over the years, but never saw an episode. There's so many police shows that a man gets exhausted of them (and family sitcoms too).

 

And I guess the other reason I brought up "Outland" on this forum is because the SFX are mostly minis. There's no CGI...maybe Jupiter's atmosphere, but the looks more like traditional animation to me (this is afterall 1981, and the kind of hardware to render that would have made the film prohibitively expensive ... but I could be wrong). Regardless, the minis and use of ImtraVision, to me at least, looks more real and convincing than digital inserts.

[KH Martin]

Yeah, I think Jupiter is just a large painted globe in OUTLAND, they didn't do CGI for planets till 2010.

 

I think the problem in OUTLAND fx-wise is that they were, to use a phrase I remember from a magazine, trying to produce post-STARWARS look with pre-2001 fx ... no motion-control, etc. Some of the better shots just used double exposures, no matting, to place the descending shuttle together in frame with landing gantries that are at the frame corners. So basically we're talking SPACE1999 approach to everything, which was often the case in the UK, since they didn't get motion control over there till ALIENS, so far as I know. (why they didn't just do the fx stateside? Maybe a money thing -- though OUTLAND had a healthy budget at the time. I remembered the budget being reported to be close to 30 mil, though I checked just now and the numbers I'm finding are in the 16-18 mil range.) It's almost like The Ladd Company projects were allergic to motion control, given this was their first film and THE RIGHT STUFF, done a couple years later, wound up limiting its use to just some of the orbiting capsule shots (but I think Kaufman's on-the-fly/no frills fx approach worked wonders there.)

 

Plus I remember that the modelmakers just about died when Hyams had the whole base spray-painted white with coarse spray that obliterated most of the detailing like scribe lines that they put into the thing, and the coarseness of the paint is such that you can sort of see the pebble-effect in some of the extreme closeups on the introvison shots (like when Connery is walking behind what look like teacups or rocket nozzles -- the scale is utterly blown.

 

Apparently they couldn't get a good exposure with the gray coloration (you'd figure they would have tested the approved prototype with wedges and lighting before commissioning the whole base model be done in that color), and couldn't go to a longer exposure, so making the thing white was the only option.

[Phil Rhodes]

There's significant griping in the Cinefex article on Aliens as to the paucity of moco availability in the UK at the time.

 

I'm very tired of police procedurals. It's practically all we make here now.

 

I'm not sure I've ever seen it in HD, which would probably make it much less convincing. I might avoid that reality. I like the rest of the film so much that the performance of the young actor playing the son character is really fingers-on-chalkboard irritating.

 

P

[Jon O'Brien]

It's all police, cooking, monkeys mating in the trees, dumbo reality shows, and River Monsters.

[George Ebersole]

So far I've only seen the bluray on my computer, and not my larger 70" TV which I've yet to unpack until I get new carpeting put in. But from what I've seen everything looks okay. I don't notice any scale discrepancies.

 

There's one shot that uses traditional animation in a real ham-fisted way, and that's the SFX shot where one of the bad guys during the green room show down gets shot into the zero atmosphere of Io (Jupiter's moon). There they used traditional animation to show the guy's body breaking apart, which, compared to the other effects in the film, looks kind of hokey.

 

The shuttle landing uses traditional smoke effects for the thrusters. There they might have helped themselves by spending some money on animation for the engine exhaust, but otherwise it looks okay to me.

[Jon O'Brien]

I still think the opening sequence of Star Wars (1977) is one of the best ever in any 'space ship' shot. Pure optical photography of a real model, entirely made by hand (shot by John Dykstra, a genius). Beautifully lit, too. I think old fashioned model photography in sci-fi is fine for feature movies. Yes, you can usually tell it's fake but it just looks so fascinating if it's been done really well. I'm a bit over CGI spaceship shots. They look 'perfect' but they are somehow often a bit ho-hum on the entertainment scale, at least to my eye.

[KH Martin]

I still think the opening sequence of Star Wars (1977) is one of the best ever in any 'space ship' shot. Pure optical photography of a real model, entirely made by hand (shot by John Dykstra, a genius). Beautifully lit, too. I think old fashioned model photography in sci-fi is fine for feature movies. Yes, you can usually tell it's fake but it just looks so fascinating if it's been done really well. I'm a bit over CGI spaceship shots. They look 'perfect' but they are somehow often a bit ho-hum on the entertainment scale, at least to my eye.

Agree with you on most of this, but really Richard Edlund is the guy who did the most to make this shot happen, from producing a proof-of-concept to determining the lens chosen. A couple of the modelmakers spent several weeks detailing the underside of the 3ft star destroyer, and that is a big part of it as well. Dykstra's achievements on the film are enormous, but Edlund's contribution is massive too.

 

I've been messing with a screenplay about the formation of ILM, based on my old CINEFEX article (along with about 15,000 words that got cut from the article), for a VERY long time now, and figuring out the specifics of who did what and when plays havoc with screenwriting, because it is like a push-me/pull-you in terms of reality vs. three-act structure.

 

I used to describe the script, A LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY WITHOUT CGI ... (aka A LONG TIME AGO IN A VAN NUYS WAREHOUSE ... ) as RKO 281 meets BARBARIANS AT THE GATE by way of GROWING UP BRADY, but to be fair, it is nowhere near as compelling as BARBARIANS, which is why I keep fussing with it. The material is often compelling, and there are a few tidbits of history that got left out of the official version (still can't get a response from the guy who wrote THE MAKING OF STAR WARS about one particularly odd omission.)

 

One of the toughest parts is writing it so that you don't wind up with trademarked visual elements creeping into shots, since that would make it a huge signoff for Lucas and/or Disney. My conceit is that a director could shoot a lot of this stuff from the perspective of the miniatures being photographed, so you see the crew and the Dykstraflex rather than the spaceships ... after all, everybody already knows what the vessels look like ... and by shooting the pyro models obliquely, I'm making it more about people ducking the flying debris than the shot itself.

[Jon O'Brien]

That sounds an interesting idea! I think I'd go more with a "based on" concept than pure history, myself. One of the fetching things about it could be faithfully capturing that rather fun feel of the 70s that I, so far, haven't seen perfectly captured yet. Down to greenish glass bottles of coke, bottle cap remover on the wall outside the milk bar door (well, my local milk bar had that, anyway), stripy t shirts too tight, flares, long hair, period-era McDonalds, 70s cars, Suzie Quatro, Abba, Sweet, and AC DC.

 

Correction: Abba might be period-incorrect. Maybe they were slightly later.

Edited November 7, 2017 by Jon O'Brien

[George Ebersole]

Star Wars; the opening shot where both models are in focus really sells the enormity of the two space craft.

 

How do you get that kind of a shot? How do you keep everything in focus as it moves away from the camera?

[Samuel Berger]

Star Wars; the opening shot where both models are in focus really sells the enormity of the two space craft.

 

How do you get that kind of a shot? How do you keep everything in focus as it moves away from the camera?

 

My guess would be lots of light, very wide lens, stopped down.

 

The surface of the Death Star was filmed outdoors in daylight.

[KH Martin]

 

My guess would be lots of light, very wide lens, stopped down.

 

 

Yeah, plus long exposure times. Also an electronic follow focus. They had a tilt focus thing that let them keep the title crawl in focus, too.

 

My fave shots in the original SW are probably when the Falcon comes roaring out of the sun at the end ... the flare edge on the ship is just awesome. Also really like when the Falcon 'backs out of the garage' in the death star escape. Still amazed that was a programmed move, it just has this handmade feel like it was a highspeed shoot with a model being spun or thrown. I've never been that thrilled with the movie itself, but I find it to be a miracle of film editing, even now, and there are a few action vfx sequences that I've rewatched dozens of times.

 

Motion control work for models got very refined over time; 20 years later, I think mo-con was at its zenith with SPACE COWBOYS and EVENT HORIZON and STARSHIP TROOPERS, and then it, like the baby, got thrown out with the bathwater by most, in favor of doing nearly everything with CGI, instead of the mixing of techniques that made so many 90s flicks work so well.

[Stuart Brereton]

 

I've heard a bit about The Wire over the years, but never saw an episode. There's so many police shows that a man gets exhausted of them (and family sitcoms too).

 

Perhaps a little off-topic, but The Wire is not really a 'police show'. In its first season, it concentrates on the activities of the police force, but in season two and later, its scope is far wider, and well worth a look. Don't be misled and think that it's merely a Police procedural.

[George Ebersole]

Yeah, plus long exposure times. Also an electronic follow focus. They had a tilt focus thing that let them keep the title crawl in focus, too.

 

My fave shots in the original SW are probably when the Falcon comes roaring out of the sun at the end ... the flare edge on the ship is just awesome. Also really like when the Falcon 'backs out of the garage' in the death star escape. Still amazed that was a programmed move, it just has this handmade feel like it was a highspeed shoot with a model being spun or thrown. I've never been that thrilled with the movie itself, but I find it to be a miracle of film editing, even now, and there are a few action vfx sequences that I've rewatched dozens of times.

 

Motion control work for models got very refined over time; 20 years later, I think mo-con was at its zenith with SPACE COWBOYS and EVENT HORIZON and STARSHIP TROOPERS, and then it, like the baby, got thrown out with the bathwater by most, in favor of doing nearly everything with CGI, instead of the mixing of techniques that made so many 90s flicks work so well.

 

I think one of the older documentaries it was a programmed stop motion move. When you take another look at it you can see the stop motion in action. Incredible stuff.

[George Ebersole]

Perhaps a little off-topic, but The Wire is not really a 'police show'. In its first season, it concentrates on the activities of the police force, but in season two and later, its scope is far wider, and well worth a look. Don't be misled and think that it's merely a Police procedural.

 

Maybe I'll start another topic, but the thing is when I was a kid watching recycled shows from the 60s during the 70s, police shows weren't the only things that used to be produced. You had adventure shows, spy shows, scifi anthology like Twilight Zone and what have you.

 

I guess IntraVision didn't open new horizons for new scifi, much less scifi on TV. That's too bad. Whatever.

[KH Martin]

 

I think one of the older documentaries it was a programmed stop motion move. When you take another look at it you can see the stop motion in action. Incredible stuff.

The Dykstraflex was programmed to move WHILE the exposure was underway, so it wasn't a traditional move-then-shoot stop motion setup; it was specifically designed as a continuous move so there'd be motion blur, as if they were shooting a moving object in realtime, so as to NOT give that staccato effect. (EDIT ADDON: I'm talking about the original film; I don't know how the recreated opening shot from SW that was made for an IMAX film years later was accomplished; maybe that one WAS done with conventional stop-motion, though if so I don't see how they could have gotten the sense of speed as well as scale, unless that shot wound up strobing like crazy.)

 

The only traditional stop motion dimensional animation I'm aware of in the film are the creatures on the 'chess set' aboard the FALCON, though most of the Walker shots in EMPIRE are realized with traditional stop motion (the stuff with the animals being ridden in Empire is 'go-motion' where there IS motion blur being added by the camera in additon to the work of the animators in conventional stop-motion work.)

Edited November 7, 2017 by KH Martin

[Phil Rhodes]

Some of the best stop-motion (well, "go-motion") work is probably the ED-209 for Robocop, which is almost convincing.

 

I must admit a certain soft spot for really well-done motion control. Witness the battle sequence from Star Trek VI which was probably done at the zenith of the technique. Yes, principally black backgrounds are better, and the whole thing is helped by superb conventional cinematography, writing and even performances, and I'm not sure whether it was composited on a very early digital system or done on optical printers - I suspect there's at least some cel animation in there for the torpedo hits either way.

 

 

It is presumably possible for CG to look like this, but I have not seen it. For instance, I suspect that the classic orange torpedo flares are real optical effects, and the slight reveal of the cloaked Bird of Prey when it fires, which is nothing more than an additive composite of the orange light cast by the torpedo, is subtle and realistic. The cloaking effect looks very much like a dissolve to a pass of the model shot through rippled glass, but that's not the point - it's a well-designed shot, using the disappearance of the spacecraft to beckon the eye over to the planet on the right side of frame. The use of a real pyrotechnic destruction is the icing on the cake, to the point where at least one subsequent movie recycled the shot shamelessly, without even flopping it.

 

Modern audiences might consider it pedestrian, but the result of that sort of thinking is something like the space battles in Star Trek: Nemesis, which look like a Playstation game by comparison.

 

But it's not just about technique. The feeble Star Trek V, for which ILM was not available to do the effects, was also an optical show and the comparison is just as stark. Like all these things it's a combination of time, money and knowledge.

P

[George Ebersole]

The Dykstraflex was programmed to move WHILE the exposure was underway, so it wasn't a traditional move-then-shoot stop motion setup; it was specifically designed as a continuous move so there'd be motion blur, as if they were shooting a moving object in realtime, so as to NOT give that staccato effect. (EDIT ADDON: I'm talking about the original film; I don't know how the recreated opening shot from SW that was made for an IMAX film years later was accomplished; maybe that one WAS done with conventional stop-motion, though if so I don't see how they could have gotten the sense of speed as well as scale, unless that shot wound up strobing like crazy.)

 

The only traditional stop motion dimensional animation I'm aware of in the film are the creatures on the 'chess set' aboard the FALCON, though most of the Walker shots in EMPIRE are realized with traditional stop motion (the stuff with the animals being ridden in Empire is 'go-motion' where there IS motion blur being added by the camera in additon to the work of the animators in conventional stop-motion work.)

 

Well, maybe whoever was narrating it got their signals confused. But I found this clip, and to me it doesn't look like go motion.

 

https://youtu.be/GHFhp594RlU?t=81

[George Ebersole]

 

Some of the best stop-motion (well, "go-motion") work is probably the ED-209 for Robocop, which is almost convincing.

 

I must admit a certain soft spot for really well-done motion control. Witness the battle sequence from Star Trek VI which was probably done at the zenith of the technique. Yes, principally black backgrounds are better, and the whole thing is helped by superb conventional cinematography, writing and even performances, and I'm not sure whether it was composited on a very early digital system or done on optical printers - I suspect there's at least some cel animation in there for the torpedo hits either way.

 

 

It is presumably possible for CG to look like this, but I have not seen it. For instance, I suspect that the classic orange torpedo flares are real optical effects, and the slight reveal of the cloaked Bird of Prey when it fires, which is nothing more than an additive composite of the orange light cast by the torpedo, is subtle and realistic. The cloaking effect looks very much like a dissolve to a pass of the model shot through rippled glass, but that's not the point - it's a well-designed shot, using the disappearance of the spacecraft to beckon the eye over to the planet on the right side of frame. The use of a real pyrotechnic destruction is the icing on the cake, to the point where at least one subsequent movie recycled the shot shamelessly, without even flopping it.

 

Modern audiences might consider it pedestrian, but the result of that sort of thinking is something like the space battles in Star Trek: Nemesis, which look like a Playstation game by comparison.

 

But it's not just about technique. The feeble Star Trek V, for which ILM was not available to do the effects, was also an optical show and the comparison is just as stark. Like all these things it's a combination of time, money and knowledge.

P

 

 

Well, to me "2001 a Space Odyssey" still has the best SFX model shots. Star Wars was able to refine the technique to tell a more dynamic story. And I always wondered why the original Star Trek series didn't have 2001 like model shots of the Enterprise and everything else she encountered. The models for the feature films look better, but I think still suffer from the TV image syndrome of the director or production crew feeling the need to light every inch of the ship, giving it a kind of model-like look.

 

I didn't much like Robert Wise's STTMP feature for the story and somewhat static film, but I think the model shots in that film beat the subsequent model shots in the sequels.

[Phil Rhodes]

I'm surprised anyone who's into 2001 thinks the first Trek is static! Both are too slow for me, although I like 2001 very much in other ways. It could just be at least half an hour shorter.