The Milpitas Monster was produced in the early 1970’s by the community of of Milpitas, California, and directed by Samuel Ayer High School photography teacher Robert Burrill. The result is a one-of-a-kind of cinéma vérité monster flick that oozes entertainment. The roles of the Mayor, the city council, the police and file departments, the garbage collectors, and the High School students and faculty are enthusiastically played by themselves.
The monster, spawned by pollution, terrorizes the city of Milpitas by stealing its garbage cans. The Milpitas Monster’s environmental message addressed the booming populations of nearby Silicon Valley communities, whose nearby landfills gave Milpitas a smelly reputation.
Kozy Kitchen restaurant miniature built by Duane Walz
The competent miniatures (including a particularly fine miniature of the Kozy Kitchen restaurant) and the monster suit were constructed by students and parents from Samuel Ayer High School. Stephen Wathen contributed polished character animation with his stop-motion effects of the monster.
The Odorola portable monster detector
I’m impressed with the talent and enthusiasm behind this 16mm amateur production. The bizarre tale of garbage, teenage “hoodlums,” George the loveable homeless alcoholic widower, and a 50-foot tall monster is just too charming to criticize. And everyone looks like they’re having a great time.
KTVU channel 2 Creature Features horror host Bob Wilkins in his cameo appearance as monster expert Dr. Lindford of the U.S. Pollution Control Board
Lost Zeppelin (1929) is a tough movie to watch today. It’s slow-paced and awkwardly performed. Like most early talkies, the technical limitations of early sound-on-film technology place a heavy burden on the narrative. The first “all talking” film, Lights of New York, was released just the year before, and this early sound production still shows some rough edges.
Yet regardless of its vintage, Lost Zeppelin’s marvelous miniature effects still capture the wonder and romance of the golden age of airships. The story is influenced by the gripping real-life drama of Italian aeronautical engineer and Arctic explorer Umberto Nobile, who in 1928 was rescued after the crash of his dirigible Italia on his second expedition to the Pole.
Airship designer and Polar explorer Umberto Nobile. Credit: Library of Congress.
The zeppelin effects are still impressively realistic, enhanced by some smart static mattes like the Explorer over water at 0:58, and the spectacular launch from Washington, D.C. at 0:28. Scenes of the crashed Explorer at 4:41 were achieved with matte paintings, and much of the zeppelin in-flight was most likely wire work, although I’m not sure how the layers of storm clouds at 1:56 were achieved — double exposures? Glass paintings?
Set Decorator George Sawley was later nominated for an Oscar for 1950’s Destination Moon. Effects are by Kenneth Peach, who continued in Hollywood as an accomplished cinematographer and director of photography on projects as varied as King Kong (1933), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), The Outer Limits (1965) and H.R. Pufnstuf (1970). He continued working in television into the 1980’s.
My edit of Lost Zeppelin is set to “The Zeppelin”, from James Horner’s masterful score for The Rocketeer. But that’s another movie for another entry.
BlueSpill’s server logs show a lot of people searching for Flesh Gordon, so here’s another clip to compliment Jim Dansforth’s masterful Beetle Man sword fight: Flesh Gordon’s final stop-motion sequence, featuring the Great God Porno (also known as the Nesuahyrrah).
Like the Beetle Man swordfight, the armature for the Nesuahyrrah came from Pete Peterson, who built it for his test reel The Las Vegas Monster.
The Great God Porno is among the most inventive stop-motion characters from feature films of the era. Not just a lumbering monster, he’s one of the few stop-motion actors with dialogue and a distinct personality. That Flesh Gordon is an X-rated sex romp makes the talent that went into animating the Great God Porno even more remarkable.
The Great God Porno is never actually called “Nesuahyrrah” in the film, although it’s often refered to by that name in books. If anyone knows the story, I’m curious to learn where the nickname originated (but I do know what it means — just spell it backwards).
I originally posted the scene complete and unedited, but someone at YouTube actually found it offensive and yanked it. This edited version should prevent damage to impressionable minds.
When I was twelve, the cover story of CineMagic #23 teased me with photos of an extraordinary mechanical animation rig synchronized to an Apple IIe home computer. Tron was already in theaters, and I had healthy interests in computers AND animation. But, poring over the article’s black & white reproductions, I struggled to imagine the two technologies merged.
I immediately recognized the clip when BoingBoing linked to Jim Leatham’s recent YouTube post. It looks better than I imagined – colorful, energetic, and considerably more sophisticated than I expected from an Apple II. Jim also posted scans of the original CineMagic article on Flickr.
The setup to film the computer animation is a remarkable DIY marriage of an 8-bit microcomputer and 16mm stop-motion animation. These photos, scanned from my well-read copy, illustrate the mechanical genius of Jim’s rig. It consists of a 16mm Bolex camera, an electric motor, photodetectors, a 45 rpm single, a 33 1/3 rpm LP, and an external black & white computer monitor. It’s set up in a closet eliminate ambient light; the board games are a nice touch.
An Apple IIe can’t display graphics fast enough to make a movie — such power came only recently to PCs. As Jim Leatham relates in the video’s voiceover, each frame, stored on floppy disks, took about 2 minutes to render on screen. Jim’s computer synchronized the camera, color wheel, and monitor to photograph each individual frame, and the rich color palette was expanded by multiple exposures. The result is a vibrant and fluid abstract animation.
Bolex 16mm camera
Electric motor, connected with a chain drive to the camera’s shutter mechanism and a 45rpm record. The computer sends a signal to the motor, which opens the shutter and rotates the 45rpm record.
Stickers attached to the 45rpm record act as sensors for a photocell. The stickers are oriented so that, when a sticker is detected, a signal is sent to the computer that the shutter is closed. The computer stops the motor.
33 1/3 LP. Holes cut in the LP are covered with color filters. A motor, controlled by the computer, rotates the LP until the correct color filter is in front of the lens. Stickers along the edge of the LP, like the 45, are used by a photosensor to detect when the filter is in position and sends a signal to the computer to stop the motor.
A 9″ white-phosphor monochrome monitor displays the animation frame to be photographed. Multiple exposures are made for frames with more than one color. The entire setup is synchronized and computer controlled.
Last week, NASA JPL’s Cassini spacecraft imaged the first close-ups of Saturn’s moon Iapetus, including this breathtaking view:
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Wow! Iapetus, of course, was the location of the third monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke marked the occasion with an eloquent video greeting to the NASA JPL team.
I thought for sure that I had seen these icy mountaintops before. Actually, I was recollecting this special effects sequence from the 1984 film version of 2001’s sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact:
In this clip, cosmonauts and astronauts aboard the Leonov, en route to the adrift Discovery, explore Jupiter’s moon Europa with a space probe after detecting possible organic material. 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a visually rich but preachy cold-war revisiting of Kubrick’s classic, with effects accomplished by Richard Edlund’s Boss Films (the firm’s first outing after Edlund left Industrial Light & Magic).
Let me clarify: While Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey placed the monolith on Iapetus, orbiting Saturn, Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation relocated it to Europa, orbiting Jupiter. Why? Because Kubrick wasn’t satisfied with the effects to reproduce Saturn’s rings. So, even though I’m comparing two separate planetary bodies, they share a common creative origin.
Modelmaker Jarek Alfer sculpted a fittingly freezing, rugged, and alien landscape of Europa on a 40 foot wide by 25 foot deep plywood tabletop, built with plaster, styrofoam, and wax.
The most effective shots of this sequence are displayed on video monitors, an effect achieved with a groundbreaking frame-accurate video animation system. The video footage was synchronized with film’s 24 frames per second, fed into monitors on the Leonov set, and shot with practical lighting along with the actors. The low resolution is kind of a cheat: A sharper image would reveal more imperfections in the miniature. Yet in this context, the low-resolution video sells the shot. It looks awfully close to the faint, interlaced images of moons and planets that we’re used to seeing from space probes.
Long shots of Europa’s surface were accomplished with a large-scale model and shot on 65mm VistaVision.
Almost by coincidence, Richard Edlund’s Boss Films showed us in 1984 what we couldn’t actually see until over twenty years later.
Marshall, Will and Holly get up close & personal with stop-motion dinosaurs in the ambitious 1974-1976 kid’s TV series Land of the Lost, thanks to an ingenious video compositing technique.
The sheer volume of dinosaurs that crowd episodes of Land of the Lost is impressive, considering the expense of stop-motion effects at the time. Unprecedented is the tight interaction between actors and dinosaurs. In many episodes, dinosaurs and actors mingle and even physically interact with each other.
The technical challenges of economically animating dinosaur effects for a low-budget weekly children’s TV series were solved with a unique marriage of chroma-key video compositing and filmed stop-motion animation. In the early 1970’s, the techniques of mixing dinosaurs and actors on the same screen were well established. The most common techniques included rear-projection (like Ray Harryhausen’s Dynamation technique, where puppets were animated in front of a translucent screen), or mattes pulled from a bluescreen background (sometimes it was green, or even magenta). These film-based techniques were highly refined, but required detailed planning and time-consuming execution that wasn’t practical for a weekly television series.
This production photo of Phil Tippet animating an ED-209 puppet for the 1987 movie Robocop illustrates a traditional rear projection setup. The stop-motion puppet is placed in front a translucent screen. Projected behind the screen is previously shot background film with actors. The rear projection is incrementally advanced for each frame shot. For budgetary and schedule reasons, techniques like this weren’t suitable for Land of the Lost.
For traditional stop-motion composites, actors are filmed first, pantomiming their reactions to unseen creatures. Land of the Lost’s chroma-key mattes turned this process upside down. Uniquely, the animation was completed first, on film. Later, the show’s actors were videotaped in front of a bluescreen, and directed to respond to the existing animated footage. On a video editor, a chroma key filter extracted the actors from the blue background, replacing it with the footage animated on film. Gene Warren, Jr. (now at Fantasy II Film Effects), who with his father Gene Warren Sr., Harry Walton and Pete Kleinow animated the dinosaurs in the series, reflected on this technique in Filmfax magazine #114:
We did the effects before the live-action was shot. It never had been done that way, and it probably hasn’t been done since. To do the video compositing it had to be done backwards… The characters had to match what the dinosaurs did. It was a hellof a lot of work, but also a lot of fun, and creative.
Chroma-key, still common in television production (TV news weather forecasters are chroma-keyed in front of weather maps) is explained on Wikipedia.
The chroma-key matte technique proved fast and flexible, and permitted a wide variety of camera setups. Vast landscapes shot from many angles, including many high-angle shots that would be too costly to shoot on full-size sets, are common in Land of the Lost. But chroma-key mattes weren’t without problems. The integration of the actors with the miniature sets isn’t entirely convincing; actors don’t cast shadows, and the limitations of video resolution surrounded them in a (ahem) bluespill halo. A significant technical hurdle was synchronizing the 24 frames per second film footage with video running at about 30 frames per second, which causes some interlaced ghosting between frames on the animated footage. And since video resolution is significantly lower than that of film, it was unsuitable for use in cinema. Nevertheless, Land of the Lost remains visually distinctive thanks to chroma mattes.
Technical achievements aside, Land of the Lost’s character animation is competent. The dinosaurs are distinct characters (with names like Grumpy, Dopey, and Torchy), not merely decorations. Gene Warren Sr.’s Excelsior Animated Moving Pictures studio, best known for its work in television commercials, carried out the show’s special effects, with animation by Harry Walton, Pete Kleinow, and Gene Warren, Jr. Wah Chang designed the dinosaurs, injecting a fantasy element common to his designs (the dinosaur’s long, narrow necks and oversized heads are distinctly Chang). Hand puppets were used for close-ups and physical contact between human and dino, shown at 0:04 and 0:53 in the video.
As a boy, this show terrified me. Excelsior’s dinosaurs and their chroma-key matte technique, in spite of its visual limitations, was clearly effective enough to terrify small children. Today, Land of the Lost retains a visual style that’s all its own.
These standout clips are from two of the finest Popeye cartoons – Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor (1936) and Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves (1937), both from the unparalleled Fleischer Animation Studio. A striking effect in these cartoons is the uncanny three dimensional backgrounds behind the cartoon character, achieved by the Fleisher Studio’s exclusive Rotograph device.
Max Fleischer was the technical genius behind the Fleischer Studio (his brother Dave directed their classic Popeye, Betty Boop, and Superman cartoons, among many others). Some of Max’s innovations became mainstays of the special effects toolbox, like the Rotoscope, which has a digital equivalent still in use today. One of his most unique inventions was the Rotograph, a device capable of stunning depth effects in animated cartoons.
Imagine that you are the passenger of a car driving along a straight country road. Looking out the side window, you’ll notice that objects seem to pass at different rates, depending on their distance: Mailboxes next to the road flash by, trees in the middleground pass by more slowly, and distant mountains hardly seem to move at all. This parallax effect is precisely what Max Fleisher sought to replicate with the Rotograph.
A Rotograph is essentially a miniature set, built in forced perspective, and placed on a circular platform that can be rotated incrementally as each frame is photographed. For each shot, an animation cell is mounted between the camera and Rotograph, integrating the cartoon character into the set. This patent drawing illustrates the Rotograph’s main components:
The camera (1), supported by lights (2), photographs an animation cell (3) mounted on a glass “bed” in front of the pivoted platform (4). For each shot, the animation cell is replaced, and if background motion is required (for a walk cycle, for example), the platform is incrementally rotated.
The Rotograph achieved shots not possible with other attempts to introduce dimensionality in animated cartoons, like Disney’s multiplane animation stand. The Rotograph set could be dressed with models and sculpted landscapes for a unique blending of 2D animation with 3D environments. Lighting effects that would be impossible to reproduce accurately through drawing alone were easily acheived on the Rotograph set.
The Fleischer Studio utilized the Rotograph for special episodes of their most popular cartoons. By the end of the 1940’s, the studio abandoned the Rotograph, bowing to its expense and changes in the film industry. Regardless, the Rotograph produced animation that is visually arresting even today.
I can’t get enough of King Kong. I even watch the monkey suit movies. But the “real” King Kong is stop-motion, the breath of life that gave Kong his powerful personality in 1933.
In 1972, David Allen animated this legendary Kong sequence for a Volkswagen commercial. And he nailed it.
Kong stands atop the Empire State Building, exactly where he belongs. Kong looks beautiful. The face is that of the Kong I love, the doll-sized 1933 version, and he’s as ferocious and innocent as I remember. And it’s in color!
The collected stop-motion animation sequences from Sam Newfield’s 1951 feature Lost Continent. Edward Nassour was the animation supervisor on this film, and may have animated some of the sequences himself - there isn’t much information published about the making of this film. As far as I know, this is one of two stop-motion features with Edward Nassour’s involvement (the other is The Beast from Hollow Mountain, from 1956).
In Lost Continent, a group of scientists and military men voyage to a mysterious plateau in search of a lost rocket, where they discover a lost world teeming with dinosaurs. The plateau scenes are tinted green to emphasize the eerie prehistoric jungle, and perhaps to mask some seams. Lost Continent enjoys a terrific cast, including Cesar Romero, Hugh Beaumont, and Acquanetta.
The dinosaur effects in this 1951 feature are strictly tabletop animation – the stop-motion puppets are shot in front of a painted backdrop with miniature set pieces. I don’t think there’s a single rear-projection setup or matte in the picture. The arthritic inflexibility of the Triceratops in battle (3:00) makes me wonder how the dinosaur models were built. Too much sponge in the body, perhaps? On the tabletop diorama, they look like toys.
The scene of the charging Brontosaurus at 0:41 in the clip echoes the vastly superior Stegosaurus charge in King Kong, as does the hapless explorer stuck in a tree.
There’s nothing impressive about these dinosaur effects, but they’re interesting in context with Ed Nassour’s next stop-motion project, the much more ambitious The Beast from Hollow Mountain.
I am fascinated by unique and original applications of animation and special effects from the optical era. These clips are my collected favorites. None of them look "real", but are no less interesting to look at. The artists behind them succeeded in creating visually irresistible moments.
"Bluespill" is the technical term for the unsightly blue fringe that can mar a bluescreen composite shot. It occurs when too much blue light is reflected off the screen and onto the subject.
