Alex Funke, you're a legend with your miniature and moco shooting! Would love to see a documentary about your career and work...

Some of the camera moves on those models were astonishing! Fully deserved Oscar, Mr Funke!

Yeah, Alex I tried to contact you to see if you had any photos from the miniatures shoot at Dream Quest. Great work!

you lucky bastard : D

Great VFK and great movie.

What made me start following them was that these stories are always from a human perspective and not a technical one. This is the kind of thing missing from modern movies, and even when you get a Blu-ray, there are barely any behind-the-scenes stuff or even commentaries.

They had more than 3 weeks to make all the miniatures for this film.

“We projected a total of 2,000 core hours but we forgot to account for RAM. This was before AWS was a thing.” Or something.

This was filmed a decade ago, so we probably have those stories ready by now.

Honestly this is the same decade for funny rendering and cgi stories. For instance when they swapped out the gorgeous models in the cult show red dwarf for cgi, it was done by 1 kid, with 2 rendering computers in his mums spare room, and it looks like it.

@@gocsa lmao true

Sounds like the most boring documentary ever made. "Here's some footage of people sitting at computers and here's some footage of some cg models on a screen the end"

Ron Cobb was a great designer. The miniature made by Ian Hunter was also fantastic. Sad that it was stolen from the studio...

@@piercefilm that sounds like an interesting story. Can you elaborate?

@@miniaredeluxe8444 I had a chance on that one shot of the ship landing, to try to imply what any flying machine does…it does not settle down as if on a track; it has to vector on its jets to stabilise as it settles down. I thought the effect was much more convincing than just flying in and landing with no “effort”

@@lampadophoros Mission accomplished! In truth, with all the wonderful work in the film, those two shots are what I remember most about the movie.

I have a Goldeneye segment here on my channel.

It's just to get started and get your foot in the door. It's a catch-22 to try and get into a union model shop. Almost impossible. So, you have to start somewhere by sweeping floors as a PA. I've heard about both good and bad experiences with unions. I never worked union. If the jobs paid too little I turned them down. If they were interesting I did them to learn, and be a part of something cool even if the money wasn't great. I don't think there are any more union model shops these days... so if you are union, you can't work on small low budget stuff that might be fun. Most people have moved on to become CGI artists. Unions might be better for that.

Unions are elitist.

@@piercefilm do you think model makers would make more money having a home shop and building models for home collectors?

@@piercefilm I remember a few years ago when I had alot of extra money I wanted someone to build me a studio scale or close to miniature of the blade runner spinner but it was impossible to find someone trustworthy enough for the quality or someone willing to do it in general.

@@HonkeyKong54 A lot of model makers are doing that now.

Interesting. Some miniatures were stolen from the set during production and listed shortly on Ebay a few years back. Would you know anything about that?

It's all here on my channel. It's like a TV show. I post new segments whenever I can. Hopefully more coming up soon. Since there must be around 20 hours of segments it would never fit into one film.

@@piercefilm thx for awesome work, each pice its gold for movie enthusiasts!

@@piercefilm this HAS to be made available on bluray one day, and or on Netflix as a regular spot, it's all so good.

@@piercefilm this is such amazing content, super appreciated!! Have you considered captioning the people so we know who they are?

It's only here on my channel! Free!

Yes.

@@piercefilm We ended up with the molds for that at Icons back in 94(?) along with a crate of other smaller, and not so small items from ID4. I painted another F-18 from that mold that was hung at our booth at SDCC in 95. Now being a commercial pilot, I wish I would have kept that F-18 hahah. Thanks for the reply, 'A mother know her own.'

These are all older interviews from 2010-2012. Just simple setups mostly by myself. No budget. No studio. It is what it is. You can scroll through all the videos. There are hundreds!

The audio for the dialog is stereo for some reason. When ever they turn their heads, you can hear it move in the stereo spectrum. You could just mono all these. I’m watching on an iPad with headphones so to fix the distracting spacial orientation of the dialog I just set the audio to mono in the iOS settings.

@@CinematicComposer I used stereo on purpose. If it distracts you then don't watch. Make your own videos the way you want.

@@piercefilm it’s a weird choice. I would recommend using mono for any human voice in such context (just like in films). Vocals in music however can benefit from stereo effects. By commenting on this audio issue, I am not taking away from the content itself, which is great. The interviews are great work!

Regarding the train shot (was shot number DA43, and you notice the train car is “43”). The teeny projector was inside the car, and the RP screen was flush with the inside of the window. And you notice that in the live shot inside, the guys were standing close to the window. So the apparent plane in which they appear in the projection is, in effect, locked to the window frame. No real need for a parallax shift. I think that the viewer (hopefully) is so taken in by the effect that there seems to be a parallax shift. Thanks

I looked at it again and I think you’re right - they’re close to the window and another apparent trick creating the look of perspective change is Arnold shifts himself to the left as the pullback starts and the man he was talking to then does the same.

Easier to look for R2D2's.

@@piercefilm Have you fellas ever considered trying to get in contact with Adam Savage and pick his brain for golden nuggets? The resulting (3 hour🤞) video will have the potential to blow up a couple of Google’s servers and triple the subscriber count of your already awesome channel, in the same amount of time it took to shoot the high speed footage of the White House miniature model being blown up for the “Independence Day” movie! 🍿

If you shoot the miniatures outside it can be too windy or rainy. It will often look very real due to real sunlight etc, but a film crew costs money every day. Especially a motion control camera and crew! Motion control requires multiple passes that can't look different because a cloud a covered the sun. No one can guarantee the weather will be perfect on the day of the shoot. California was chosen for it's good weather, but if you need hours to set up a shot and then you need to take it back down due to wind etc.... going over budget might cost you your job not to mention blow the budget.

@@piercefilm Didn't Georges Méliès have glass ceilings and walls at his Paris studio to solve the weather issue?

Well…..Dick Tracy was not shot by DreamQuest. But most certainly the minis in TR were, exclusively. The shooting of miniatures has nothing to do with sound stages. Usually we start with some giant empty warehouse and divide it, by black plastic curtains, into smaller stages. At DQ we actually had purpose built stages, but still endless plastic curtains. Of course, one begins with darkness. Then we add light as appropriate to the shot and the miniature. If you are aware that you are looking at a miniature, then the minis crew has not done their job well. As for lenses, DQ used exclusively Nikkor stills lenses, mostly in the 24mm to 35mm focal length. We shot on the Vistavision format, same size as a slide frame, 24mm by 36mm. Indeed, shooting on 65mm is interesting, but it is very impractical, for the slight increase in resolution….and since you are going to see the movie in the theatre in a dupe quite far from the original, the extra cost and practical limitations do not necessarily favour 65.

@@mattperson7293 Glass ceilings don't solve the changing light problem.

@@lampadophoros Plus, as I am sure you know, not all films by any means are going for a totally naturalistic look. Controlling the lighting to fit in with the tone of the rest of the film would often be pretty impossible on an exterior set.

These interviews are mostly 10 to 12 years old and done with no money. It is what it is... Remember, you are watching them for FREE(!) No one is forcing you to watch them.

The transport spaceship was a cool Ron Cobb design. Beautiful model that, unfortunately was stolen during filming... I wish there were more shots of it approaching.