Supervised by A. Arnold Gillespie with matte paintings by supervised by Warren Newcombe, this movie features a whaling vessel the Nathan Ross, built at 1/6 scale and a whale hunt with miniature whales shot in the tank on MGM's lot 3.
The whales were built at 1/4 scale and were about 16 feet long ( nearly 5 metres). The director of the movie, Richard Thorpe did not like the look of any particular species of whale so they made a composite creature using all the features he liked from various whales. The effects department then dubbed the whale Thorpy Dick.
The model creatures were pulled around the tank using cables motivated by powerful winches. Underwater ramps supplied the diving and surfacing action. A specially rigged tail section was employed for the miniature process plate where the full size boat gets up ended. At one point a cable jumped off its pulley and cut the whale in half. The camera was shooting, depending on the shot, at 72 and 60 frames per second.
Source: The wizard of MGM, Memoirs of A.Arnold Gillespie published by Bear Manor Media.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Most Popular posts in the last 7 days
-
Tora Tora Tora stands out as a prime example of the art of model ships in the cinema due largely to the scale of the the work undertaken and...
-
John Brosnan in his excellent book,Movie Magic (McDonald and Janes 1974), quotes from an interview Andrew Sarris conducted with the film'...
-
Won oscar for best Special Effects (1955). Probably the most recognised submarine shape ever, fictional or otherwise, was the Nautilus des...
-
Supervised by Derek Meddings at his best, this is one of my all time favorite model ship movies which boasts possibly the largest ship minia...
-
A model of a pre World War One German battle-cruiser the Blücher features in the really brilliant miniature ship work of Derek Meddings. My ...
-
This is part 1 Part 2 is here , Part 3 is here , Part 4 is here and Part 5 is here . In my view, one of the great model ship movies of th...
No comments:
Post a Comment