Because my brain is random, the other day I was discussing the beautiful white castle (at least I thought it was pretty) that appeared briefly in the fantasy movie, Krull, which was a 1983 British-made movie in the same vein as The Dark Crystal. Some of you who read my blog may have seen it. But I googled pictures of "the white castle" and found some production paintings and the actual black and white pictures someone took of the set for it (which made it very real at that point). It never occurred to me that they actually built the thing. I'd always assumed it was just a fancy matte painting or some kind of special effect. But yeah, they created a whole "miniature" for it...only it wasn't all that tiny. There's a truck in the foreground to give it some scale.
Above is the very cool production painting. The final product looks a lot like this as seen below.
And you can see that the facade of the castle was about twice the height of an actual truck. That's kind of cool, and I imagine that building on that scale may have enabled more detail to be put into the finished piece.
For the balcony section of the white castle in the movie, they actually built a pretty large set piece at Pinewood Studios. Above is what it looked like prior to actors using the set for actual filming.
And then the final product as it appeared in the movie is shown above. I imagine it was quite a bit of work to get it all realized for the film. At least, quite a bit more than I originally had imagined. Just a little bit of silver screen magic, right?
It is amazing what they build for the movies.
ReplyDeleteEverything was miniatures and models at the time. The Death Star trench was a pretty large constructed piece, and the Death Star itself was a model. Which they blew up for that scene in the movie. It was a dicey thing because they didn't have the funds to recreate it if the shot had failed.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I didn't like Krull, even at 13. It was great right up until the ending, which I thought was one of the stupidest things I'd ever seen. I still think that.
A lot of work for a mediocre movie. Now days they'd just use computers for the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteI remember Krull. The part where the cyclops got crushed in the door frightened the **** out of me at the time :D.
ReplyDeleteSome of the work they put into building minature models like this is amazing. For those into Harry Potter, there's a whole minature model of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter studios that they used for the films - only that's not so minature either. It's phenomenal is what is it...
I am in awe of the creative people behind these kinds of sets and scenes. Hence I'm one of those movie nerds who pay attention to the best Oscar for art direction. That painting even looks to me like a page torn from an old classic book illustrated by N.C. Wyeth.
ReplyDeleteLove KRULL. Many wonderful things in that movie with a fantastic score by James Horner.
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