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

Making of miniatures

Following ILM's style, USFX commissioned the development of a motion control camera to electronics engineer Zach Bogart, who had previously built animation stands for Colossal and had founded ZBE in 1980 after participating in the development of motion control systems for Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind of the Third Kind (1977).

Bogart designed a versatile system that could be controlled in six axes (rotational motions of roll, pitch and yaw, and horizontal and vertical motions of surge, sway and heave) and called it Classiflex.

The production of miniatures to be shot with this camera was also started by chief model designer Mark Stetson, who had joined Douglas Trumbull's Entertainment Effects Group (EEG) for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and moved to USFX after working on Blade Runner (1982).

“Blade Runner” preview

He started working on the XS-1 and X-1A models first. As reference materials, he used scale drawings drawn by the XS-1 designer and the model actually used in the wind tunnel testing of the X-1A, and created three different sizes of miniature XS-1 and X-1A models. The largest model was for motion control filming, and was made of fiberglass with a total length of 1.2m, and was meticulously crafted down to the smallest detail. However, the full-scale model made by the main art team was rather crudely made, and he ended up erasing the details that he had worked so hard to create.

At the same time, Frank Morelli, who was hired as the other chief model designer, began work on the capsule for John Glenn's Mercury 6 (Friendship 7). He borrowed a 1/3 scale model owned by NASA and made a mold from it. Then, as with the X-1 series, a fiberglass model was made for the motion control.

Stetson also built a fireproof aluminum and plaster model for the re-entry scene, which was expected to involve some kind of pyrotechnic effects, though the method of filming had not yet been determined.

Selection of special effects techniques

The main production team began filming in March 1982. However, the location shoot at Edwards Air Force Base continued for a long time, and the director spent more and more time away from San Francisco. Meanwhile, the USFX staff was anxious about the dilemma that they could not start the actual shooting until Kaufman decided on the image of the flight scenes in "The Right Stuff".

The problem is depicting aircraft flying through the atmosphere: the ILM style works well in space, but when it comes to aircraft, it just doesn't feel natural.

A clear example is Firefox (1982), directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, which was produced by Apogee, the company that was formerly the special effects team behind the first Star Wars. In this film, miniature fighter planes shot using motion control were composited into real sky footage. However, sky footage shot from an aircraft is inevitably shaky. This shaking is quite complex, consisting of the movement and vibration of the aircraft as well as the shaking of the camera itself. Therefore, even if a model shot using motion control is composited into this, the movements of the two never match. (*4)

Another problem is the blending of composite edges (matte lines). The matte (also called mask) film used in optical compositing is a high-contrast film (hereafter referred to as high-con) that is binarized to pure black and colorless transparency. In other words, there are no intermediate gradations at all. As a result, the motion blur that accompanies intense movement cannot be expressed, and the subject stands out from the background as if it had been cut out with scissors. (*5)

Also, for bare metal (unpainted) aircraft such as the X-1A, B-29, and NF-104A, the color of the background itself becomes the color of the aircraft. Therefore, if the blue sky and white clouds are not reflected in the aircraft, it will not look natural. It is nearly impossible to express this bare metal with normal blue (or green) screen compositing. For this reason, Firefox used a newly developed technology called reverse blue screen (*6). Upon hearing this information, the USFX staff also conducted experiments, but they did not get any results, so they quickly abandoned this method.

*4 Even with the development of image processing technology, such as stabilizers and motion tracking, this problem is difficult to completely solve. In other words, it is impossible to place a reference marker to trace the shaking and movement of the screen. If the target building or the sun is in the image, it is possible to detect optical flow to some extent, but in the case of a fast-moving sea of ​​clouds, it is completely helpless. One solution would be to equip the camera shooting the background with a gyro sensor, acceleration sensor, barometer, geomagnetic sensor, GPS, etc., which would allow the spatial coordinates of each frame to be calculated. However, this method cannot be used if the image is from a library of footage shot in the past. This means that it is a primitive method of manually aligning the positions.

*5 This issue was also raised in The Empire Strikes Back , in the depiction of snowspeeders fighting on the snowy planet Hoth. So ILM created a matte with motion blur using normal black-and-white film, not normally used for compositing, rather than high-con. However, the black density was insufficient, and the background was visible when the film was released in theaters. Naturally, Lucas was dissatisfied with this, and redid the compositing work digitally for The Empire Strikes Back: Special Edition (1997). The only version that can be seen today is the digitally composited version.

*6 In Star Wars, the design of the spaceships was based on matte white, taking into consideration blue-background compositing. However, the MiG-31 (a Firefox fighter jet) that appears in Firefox is painted metal black. If this is filmed with a normal blue (or green) background, the background color will be reflected on the surface, causing holes in the matte. To prevent this, Apogee engineer Jonathan Elland developed reverse blue-back (also called reverse bluescreen) compositing. In other words, a miniature is filmed with normal lighting against a black background, and then a matte shot is taken with the same camera trajectory as the first. During this process, the miniature is sprayed with fluorescent paint and illuminated with black light, so that the miniature itself glows red and becomes the matte material. Incidentally, red is ideal as a background color for matte compositing (it has fine particles), but it is not suitable for photographing people (because skin tones contain a lot of red), so blue or green is often used instead.

Changes in special effects techniques