“The Right Stuff” High tech = not real! The result of the efforts of the special effects staff who achieved overwhelming reality.

“The Right Stuff” synopsis

October 1947. Legendary test pilot: Chuck Yeager becomes the first to break the sound barrier with the X-1 rocket. October 1957. Soviet Union successfully launches Sputnik. Confronted with the fact that he was far behind in the space program, President Eisenhower of the United States selected astronauts to help realize the Mercury program. Seven pilots with excellent qualities = "The Right Stuff" came together. What awaited them, who became heroes who flew out into the unprecedented space, was the danger that bordered on death and the conflict as human beings.

Director Philip Kaufman will be adapting the non-fiction book "The Right Stuff," which focuses on the test pilots who attempted the supersonic barrier and Project Mercury, which was the first manned space flight from the United States.

At the time, complex composite images using motion control cameras and optical printers were in vogue, but Kaufman took a step back by demanding low-tech work from his staff, going back nearly 30 years, and even employed independent experimental filmmakers to create the special effects scenes in a completely new way.

The result is an incredibly realistic image that looks completely dated even when viewed today.

Index

• Jordan Belson's appointment
• The American special effects industry at the time
• USFX is established
• Making of miniatures
• Selection of special effects techniques
• Changes in special effects techniques
• In-camera studio special effects
• Friendship 7 re-entry scene
• Outdoor photography of aircraft models
• Shooting in more open areas
• Representation of outer space
• High-tech does not equal realism

Jordan Belson's appointment

Director Philip Kaufman, who wrote the script himself, persuaded producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler and the production studio Rudd Company to base himself in San Francisco when he started production. He hated working in Hollywood. He set up an office and studio in an old building on the waterfront that was once a can manufacturing company warehouse, and began planning the shoot.

In fact, he had something in mind all this time. That was the project for the theatrical version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture , Star Trek: Planet of the Titans, which was canceled in 1977. This work already had a setting of a huge cloud moving through space, which would later become the prototype of "Vage". And what Kaufman was thinking at that time was to ask Jordan Belson to create this cloud.

"Star Trek: The Motion Picture" preview

Belson is an experimental filmmaker based in San Francisco, who in the 1950s produced the multimedia show "Vortex Concert"(*1) at the Morrison Planetarium and the Brussels World's Fair , which used the dome. In the 1960s, he released a series of abstract films with motifs of the spiritual world, such as Indian philosophy, yoga, and Buddhism, and became a guru for hippies.

He was extremely secretive and never revealed his techniques, so his specific techniques remain a mystery to this day.

Kaufman contracted Belson to make a 16mm test film for "The Right Stuff". This was because the producers and the Rudd Company could not understand the abstract imagery Kaufman was trying to create. In any case, Belson's heavenly light-like images are difficult to describe in words. Then, after a sample of the surreal images experienced by the astronauts was completed, the studio's higher-ups finally gave the go-ahead.

Belson then installed a 35mm camera on his own optical system for the first time, but unlike the 16mm cameras he had used up until then, it had a lot of vibration, and he had a hard time getting it to be accurate enough for a feature film. In addition, the perspective and angles of the screen that Kaufman wanted exceeded the limits of his system, so he rejected it more than 15 times.

"The Right Stuff" movie footage

And after more than two years, the beautiful footage was finally completed. The parts he was responsible for were the iridescent clouds that Chuck Yeager saw when the XS-1 (X-1 after 1948) broke the sound barrier, and the rear-projected background; Yeager's subjective shot of the moment the X-1A recorded Mach 2.44; the pale atmosphere at high altitudes when he reached the stratosphere in the NF-104A ; the fantastic aurora-like lights seen by the crew of Project Mercury; the clouds on the surface of the Earth during John Glenn 's Friendship 7 flight, and the space fireflies surrounding the capsule.

*1 It has a different meaning from today's term "multimedia" and refers to a live show that combines video, lighting, surround sound, etc.

The American special effects industry at the time