Jonathan Mock

No problem! Looking at the video clip and the finished shot, I'd guess they never got the wave tank to work and ended up shooting the wave separately and comped it into the wide shot of the miniature of the harbour. And credit to the VFX guys, while the buildings were photo cut out, those stills show how convincing the minature was. Sorry for resurrecting this thread again but the Bluray release has piqued my interest.

Don't know if anyone has ever seen this?

Hi Everyone, Apologies for reviving an old thread here, but "Meteor" has been a favourite "bad" movie of mine since I saw it as a kid and over the years I've piecing together stuff on the visual effects, primarily to find out just why they were so bad, so finding this thread has been illuminating, as was seeing the size of the Hercules/Peter The Great models (which explains a lot about why they looked so bad). I'm grateful that some howlers that even I've missed have been pointed out - the lamp shot, that's genius! I can remember a piece in 200AD comic at the time - and this may just be PR spin - that the producers actually junked a lot of the original VFX shots and had them redone. If true, I'd love to know just how bad they must have been in comparison to what they were replaced by! Reading through the comments about the budget and time restraints for the miniature crew, I take the point that they were facing an uphill struggle, but I can't shake the fact that Brian Johnson and co had probably less time and money each week on "Space 1999" but still managed to light and shoot their miniatures in a way that still stand up well even in the digital age. Sure, the Meteor crew were not helped by models that were a fraction of the size needed (they were almost model kit size) but - and without wishing to cast aspersions on anyone who may have worked on the film - there just seemed to be a lack of "feel" for how to deal with miniatures, even down to basic stuff like weathering the models a bit more to add a sense of scale. As has been mentioned, there are some good shots - the wide shots of the two missile platforms in orbit look excellent, some of the flood stuff is about as as good as it got in 1979, the matte paintings of New York after the strike at least show a modicum of care, and the final explosion is pretty neat. The rest... One thing that did amuse me on a recent viewing was the comparative scales of the comet and Orpheus - the former is several hundred kilometres wide, the latter 20 or so miles, but when the comet is seen heading towards Oprheus, the rock is huge and the comet tiny! If we ignore the fact that the astronauts were told, and even acknowledged, there would be an impact (then acknowledge surprise with "its gonna hit!"), when you work out how far away they were supposed to be (15,000 miles - but they can still see a 20 mile wide asteroid with the naked eye) and it takes the fragment of Orpheus around 15 screen-seconds to travel 15,000 miles to hit the Challenger 2... that's around 3,600,000 mph! Plus at one point Malden boasts that "nobody in their right mind would think of putting the most important emergency striking power under the busiest city in the world" when showing Connery to their command centre. So you build something meant to withstand a nuclear attack under the first target on the list? This is why I love the film! Take care everyone.