Tomorrow Never Dies 1997

Uniformly excellent miniature work on display here supervised by John Richardson. The model workshop was supervised by Brian Smithies and Rick Thomson with miniature photography by Paul Wilson. The miniatures were shot in the Rosarito tank in Mexico built for the 1997 Titanic movie.

The catamaran Stealth ship was built in the UK and shipped to Mexico in containers. It had a couple of outboard engines mounted inboard to power it.

The frigate miniature was built in Los Angeles by Bob Wilcox and Tad Krzanowski and was 50 ft (15.24m) long.

The opening of the film features some shots of miniature mayhem featuring a missile launcher and the odd truck or two. There is also a shot of a model Jet exploding. A model BMW was also constructed for a quick shot of the car flying off the roof of a car park before cutting to a full size one crashing into a shop.

This film is an example of miniatures done right, totally believable and realistic, faultless execution from the construction to the photography.

Information on the visual effects for this movie is scant, it didn't get a mention in Cinefex which is a shame. There are a few snippets of information In the John Richardson book "Making Movie Magic".
I would really like to know more about the models and the filming. Apparently there is an article in Eyepiece the Journal of the British camera technicians vol18 no:6 from 1997 in which Paul Wilson, the miniatures director of photography, details some of the methods and challenges of the model shoot, particularly the ships. I have not been able to locate a copy but would very much like to, so if anyone has access to this journal I would like to read the article.

Source: Making Movie Magic by John Richardson The History Press 2019 ISBN 978 0 7509 9123 0

Against All Flags 1952

The technicolour is turned up to eleven particularly in the matte painted shots which also suffer from some very apparent bounce in the ocean plate.

This photograph was acquired from an old image library and at some point has been re-touched using photographic re-touching paint.

It's also interesting to note that traveling mattes have replaced what used to have been more commonly rear screen projection composites in the shots of the pirates looking at the miniature ship action. Unfortunately there are very obvious matte lines around the actors.

Errol Flynn broke his ankle 5 days short of completing the shoot. While he was recovering, the ship set from this film (and possibly the miniatures) were used to shoot another film "Yankee Buccaneer" during a period of 5 months before shooting was resumed on Against All Flags.

Fitzcarraldo 1982

Despite the director Werner Herzog maintaining that everything in the film was shot for real there are a couple of model ship shots in the film and they are very well done.

There must have been a miniature river rapids set built along with the scale model of the steamship.

Unfortunately there is no credits for the miniature sequence.

        UPDATE 27 June 2015

Berton Pierce, who made the wonderful documentary about the legendary modelmakers of blockbuster movies "A Sense of Scale", contacted me through the comments section. He has a couple of photographs he took at an exhibition in Germany that featured the miniature ship from Fitzcarraldo and here they are below. The first one is a behind the scenes photograph of the miniature shoot that was displayed alongside the model at the exhibition. Although it is a bit blurry it does show the scale of the model with people in the scene.

 Berton's documentary can be purchased from Amazon and I thoroughly recommend it. He has produced a valuable record of a now dying art and even more than that, he has made an entertaining film that is chock full of my heroes talking about the subject I love...miniatures.

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