Rock Cut Architecture

Since I came across Petra and the idea of cutting and carving straight into the rock face I’ve been doing a bit more research on rock-cut architecture. Examples of this type of architecture can be found throughout the middle east, India, Italy, and China all dating back several centuries BC. Although a lot have intricately carved interiors, for a reference point what you see from the outside is too basic but I have picked out a few that have features or hint at forms that I can take inspiration from.

The Longmen Grottoes in China are basically a huge monument with thousands of rock cut niches with carved buddhas, so it’s only on the surface rather than caves within the rock. However it has the level of sophistication and detail in the carvings and imagery that I envisage the city of the Clayr to have, since they revere their elders and famous seers.

Figure 1 Carvings in the Longmen Grottoes ( Visit Our China 2013)

Another site of rock-cut architecture, in India this time, is the Ajanta caves. I think it’s relevant to my concept for similar reasons to the above.

Figure 2 The Ajanta Caves, India ( World Is Round, 2013 )

My vision for the environment that I am designing is to try and suggest a much more expansive area of rock-cut architecture than we see in reality anywhere across the globe. We know from descriptions taken from the book that the dome of the great library’s reading room sits several thousand feet above the valley floor, so this gives me an indication of the size and scope of the city. The other point to make is that all these existing examples are cut into the base of rocky slopes, whereas my city is spread across the steep slopes of the Starmount mountain both vertically and horizontally, so I’d just like to reiterate the fact that these existing examples are an inspiration and an idea that I will be taking further. It’s more about taking the method used by these ancient civilizations and bending it to how I interpret the Clayr’s way of life and beliefs and how my designs and ultimately my miniature can reflect this.

The Magic Camera Company

I have already written about Cinesite’s work on miniatures for the Harry Potter films, but I have since then researched more into the head model builder at the time, Jose Granell. Since the closure of the model  shop at Cinesite he has now set up his own company building miniatures for film; The Magic Camera Company, which is based at Shepperton studios and uses their facilities to also take on the filming of their miniatures. I’d like to quote some of their descriptions of the services they provide, because they cover some of what I see as potential advantages of using miniatures, such as working closely with an art department right from the beginning of a project (Magic Camera Company 2012):

“Construction

Model construction is an intricate and highly specialised process by a select group of the UK’s foremost model makers, working with a wide range of materials to product highly realistic models of all scales. This often involves working closely with production designers to seamlessly merge constructions into surrounding photography and ensure that the art direction is consistent with the look of the film.”

“Production management

We are experts in managing entire model units, from the early bidding and storyboard stages through to management of the construction crew, photographic unit and pyrotechnics.

Initially, we are often approached at very early stages of production, discussing storyboards and artwork with the director and production designer and continuing to do so throughout construction and unit photography. We also liaise closely with the digital effects providers and visual effects supervisors, to ensure the integration of their work will be seamless in the later digital effects stage.

We also appreciate that efficient production management is essential to the successful integration of the model unit with multiple production departments. These can include special effects technicians, camera and equipment suppliers, the model unit supervisor and the entire unit crew.

Creative supervision of the model unit is managed by our director of models José Granell. His expertise and knowledge of his craft are essential to the smooth outcome of every single production, and are responsible for consistently spectacular results.

The result of all this expertise is that the models team have been responsible for some of the most memorable and realistic visual effects sequences to come out of the UK in recent years.”

Already I have questioned, and would like to research, the backgrounds of model makers and digital artists. What is their background, training and method of working? How close is their working relationship with an art department/director?  Can this affect continuity of the look of a film? Already from this short description I am getting an impression of the way this particular model shop works in conjunction with an art department, but I plan to research this further by conducting interviews with practitioners on both sides, hopefully including Jose Granell and his team.

Here is a link to their showreel which also shows how live action green screen shots are digitally composited over the miniature work, a way in which the two techniques can combine to produce a final shot effectively:

http://www.magiccameracompany.co.uk/showreels.html

Independence Day

Independence Day (1996) is at it’s crudest a sci-fi film about alien invasion. It interests me because, being right at the cusp of CGI’s rise, it holds the record for most miniature modelwork to appear in one film. Due to the advances in CGI since the film’s release, most experts believe this record may stand forever. At the time, the model shop built more than twice as many miniatures than had even been used before, simply to save money and achieve the more realistic looking fire and explosions needed for the film. They built buildings, whole streets, monuments, even a 1:12th scale White House used for forced perspective shots and then blown up using 40 explosive charges.

To achieve the explosions from the (model!) spaceship, the city streets were built as a scale model, tilted 90 degrees and filmed from above with the explosions ignited below so they rise towards the camera through the streets.

Roland Emmerich also directed and came up with the concept of The Day After Tomorrow (2004) too, less than 10 years after Independence Day, which incidentally only used 1 miniature in the entire flooding scene in New York city, which was the hull of a huge ship crushing a bus! He also produced 2012 (2009), another film about the apocalypse, done entirely using CGI. I have found this a really interesting study into a series of similarly themed films each linked by the same director but using different approaches to achieve the final product, all within the space of just over 10 years.

The use of digital technology in 2012 means they can capture things like a moving car through an environment that is falling apart on screen. With a model, it would be filmed at a much faster speed, so the car would also have to move exponentially faster in order to look correct when the frame speed is slowed down. There are many examples why in that instance the destruction on the scale of 2012 could never be achieved through the use of models, it just comes down to choosing the right method for what you are trying to achieve, since both miniatures and CGI are simply tools to achieving the shot you want.

The Hobbit – No miniatures!

I’ve been reading up on The Hobbit since I saw it over the Christmas holidays because I couldn’t understand why the look of the film felt different even though it was directed by Peter Jackson, the same director as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The answer – all CGI and you can tell. I’m hopefully not biased because of my project, but even though I enjoyed the film it was niggling at me the whole time. Admittedly the most obvious CGI was in the creatures rather than the environments, apart from Gollum who I thought they had improved. I can’t help making a comparison between the character of Gothmog in The Return of the King, achieved through physical effects by using an actor in prosthetics who still looks more convincing than the white orc in The Hobbit. Peter Jackson has reportedly said that it was the flexibility of the shots you can get in a CGI environment, swooping over and through doors and closer up than you can achieve with a miniature that affected his choice. However that might also be the problem; in terms of achieving realism, if a camera can’t achieve it in real time then it’s going to look fake done in CGI because our eyes tell us that it can’t be done.

When producing The Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson said that he wanted it to feel real, like it’s an alternative history for our world that really happened and I love this idea. I think if you want to escape into another world it needs to relate to what you know not bring you out of that, and I personally felt I couldn’t relate to it; the world of the Hobbit, although the same location, felt like disney fantasy to me. I think this may be down to the higher frame rate that it was filmed with partly, which is a new tool that allows for 50fps, similar to how our eyes process what we see, which added to the surreal childishly bright and sharp look of the film.

Originally Guillermo Del Toro was set to direct The Hobbit before having to turn it down due to money issues. He is famously known for opting for physical effects over CGI, and had planned to use less digital work that Peter Jackson used for The Lord of the Rings, opting for animatronics and miniatures instead. Before he handed the reins over to Peter Jackson he did an interview with TheOneRing.net about his plans for the films, including his opinions on the use of CGI (TheOneRing.net, 2008) :

“I think green screen photography is exactly like CGI, it is a tool, I don’t think it should be overused. Things like ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ and ‘The Devil’s Backbone’ are incredibly dependent on location, we shot on location for more than half the time. Those locations can be enhanced by technology however, both digital and physical. What I would like to avoid is the recreation of the natural environments in CG, I don’t like doing that. The movie is essentially a journey movie, I think you need to use locations as much as possible.”

What I’m trying to do is keep the elements in place but allow you to feel a progression from ‘The Hobbit’ until ‘The Return of the King’. I believe ‘The Hobbit’ is a very crucial volume in The Lord of the Rings, it is a narrative that starts out very much in an innocent and golden way. It is permeated from England going through World War One, so there is a loss of innocence and a darker tone as the book and the film progresses. We’ll be doing that in the first film, taking you from a time of more purity to a darker reality throughout the film, but I think that is in the spirit of the book.

“What will differ from your films versus Peter’s?

The only thing I will be pushing for more in these films that the other three are full animatronics and animatronic creatures enhanced with CGI, as opposed to CGI creatures themselves. We really want to take the state-of-the-art animatronics and take a leap ten years into the future with the technology we will develop for the creatures in the movie. We have every intention to do for animatronics and special effects what the other films did for virtual reality.

Another thing people will notice, at the beginning of the film will be the palette, that will be slightly different, the world will be the same but it will be a more ‘golden’ world, a more wide-eyed world. But by no means will we depart from the canon, we will take the three previous films as canon. When I become part of a world that I love, such as this, I really come with a lot of enthusiasm and hard work, and we know we are recreating and creating a world that is part of the mythos of millions of people and we will approach it as passionately and respectfully as it needs to be taken.”

I notice that the extensive use of CGI in Jackson’s interpretation for me did not keep continuity with LOTR as Del Tor had planned. Neither did it have any sense of darkness or danger as it progressed, perhaps to do with the sharpness of the colours in the higher frame rate, but also because I felt it had lost the authenticity that LOTR gets from the extensive and beautiful location work and the amazingly detailed miniatures.

Just as an after thought, I was actually listening to someone discussing The Hobbit yesterday after I had finished this post. She mentioned how she loves The Lord of the Rings but wasn’t sure if she had liked The Hobbit because it had a weird surreal fake quality about it and was missing the gritty realism of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I thought it was interesting that someone not studying film had picked up on all the points I had made myself, without understanding why.

I’d love to hear anyone else’s opinion on the film, since I seem to have such strong views on it myself!

The Practical Project

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks re-reading through the book several times, trying to pick up on all the information and hints about the glacier environment. I think I have a basic idea of what it looks like now, so one of the first things I did was to go to architecture section of the library and see if there was any architectural style that had any similarities to how I imagined the city. In this post I am going to try to follow my train of thoughts on the general look and feel of the city and how each feature is justified through descriptions in the book and my own conjecture.

The Clayr who live in the mountain are an ancient race spanning millennia so I looked at ancient architecture as a reference, like ancient Egypt. I also looked at structures carved from stone, because the city is in built on and in a mountain. When doing my research into existing architectural styles as a reference point to jump start ideas I came across Petra. Petra, meaning “stone”, is an ancient city in Jordan, believed to have been established as early as 312 BC, and it is cut straight into the stone.

Figure 1 Petra ()

For my project, the book tells us most of the structure of the city is delved within the mountain. The Clayr don’t like the cold and rarely go outside, spending most of their time in the geyser-heated halls bored into the rock, so I had to question what would you actually see from the outside? This concept of directly carving the mountainside was one solution to this question. It then becomes suggestive of a vast complex beneath the surface.

The Clayr live their whole life in the Glacier; the most important thing for them is to serve others by observing their visions of the future and helping others act upon them. I feel like the architecture should hint at this power and importance without appearing arrogant. Neither should it appear to be a fortress, because the book tells us they are well protected by the running water of the river, and openly welcome merchants etc into their halls for counsel and respite. The other reference I have drawn on are features of Romanesque architecture in Europe. By using hints of these features, that same suggestion of strength and beauty can be put across.

“Romanesque is an architectural style that dominated in Western Europe in the 11^th and 12^th centuries, and whose name means “from Rome.” This was a term coined in the 19^th century, reflecting that fact that Romanesque buildings, like those of the ancient Roman Empire, tend to display a strong sense of proportion and order, are solid and robust, and feature numerous rounded arches and vaults.” (Durham World Heritage Site 2013)

Figure 2 Examples of Romanesque architecture ()

I am making the assumption that if you live behind the walls of the mountain you would build many openings and windows to let in as much natural light as possible. The book also tells us that the most important figures in their society’s rooms are set along corridors that look out on a view down the valley, so we know that some of the city’s architecture can be seen from the surface of the mountain. I want to give a bit of character to all these openings since they will be a major feature of the model that reflects the nature of the Clayr, and I think series of semi-circular arches should be suggestive of their caring yet strong and steadfast nature.

Aside from influences from existing architecture taken to give the right feel to this new fictional architecture, I feel like because they are so revered by others, both outside the Glacier and within, there should be a number of carved figures. They would stand as a warning and a symbol of solidity, as if they are watching over the world; a symbol of their role as seers. It would also represent this reverence for past important figures.  The way the Clayr live a life of solitude in their own company reminds me of a monastery or convent, simple and yet adorned with carved stone figures

The Practical Project

So far I’ve spent my time researching when miniatures have been used throughout history and their applications in film, looking at examples like Skyfall and the Harry Potter series which gave me an insight into methods and materials used in industry. For my physical research I want to take what I have learned from this and apply it to physically building a miniature and testing some of the theories of why a model can have advantages over a CGI environment.

When I was younger I read a series of books written by Garth Nix which was full of descriptions of fantastical places, so after re-reading the Abhorsen trilogy I chose the “Clayr’s Glacier” environment as my potential miniature, which is an expansive city on and within the mountainside, burrowed deep into the rock. In choosing I had to take into account which of the places in the book would be considered to be developed into a miniature in industry, and be able to justify my choice.

At this point I should probably give you a synopsis of the plot of the book and how the Clayr and their home fits in with it. In the “Old Kingdom”, across the dividing wall from Ancelstierre (which resembles the world we live in, with all our technologies etc) there is magic and the dead can rise and cause havoc. The Clayr are an ancient race of people gifted with visions of the future, existing in the Glacier for millennia. They live their whole life in that environment and serve their country by watching for future events and making steps to change or support what they see. The “sight” is the most important thing and their purpose in life, and they are a strong and proud people because of this.

If this book was really being adapted to film, the producer and art director could justify the choice to produce a miniature of the Clayr’s Glacier for filming, because it is such an expansive city and surrounding environment, which includes the approach along the river as well as the city spread over the mountainside. It is a fantastical place, so the exterior couldn’t be filmed on location, and they probably wouldn’t build the whole thing for budgetary reasons. However, one option would be to build a miniature of the exterior, and build certain elements at full size for live action filming, and a real location used and adapted for interiors.

I found the Alex Funke quote, “I think to be a good modeller you have to be a born story teller. If you know the story you’re telling, if you know how old a building is, if you know what it’s history is and who’s lived in it, and who lives in it now then there’s many things you can do the explain that visually.”” to be very poignant, and so I have started to conceptualise the environment by logically thinking about who the Clayr are as a poeple, how they would live and how they would have built their home. This is really helping me to develop my ideas and by rooting every feature in logic I am hoping to give the model another level of realism.

David Neat – Model making: Materials and Methods

Recently I read David Neat’s book about materials he uses in model making, and methods of producing moulds and making casts. I also follow his blog which is an up to date source on materials and his experiments with them. Whilst doing my research on current films that have used miniatures I have been noting down if a material or a method is commented on to get an idea of the industry standard. In this post I wanted to get some of these down, particularly the descriptions and traits that David Neat talks about in his book and on his blog for future reference.

CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS

PVC-“foamed PVC” – comes in many thicknesses from 1mm to 18mm, depending on the brand, like Foamex or Foamalux. Easy to cut, can be sanded without fuzzing like cardboard does. Has a shiny exterior layer and a lighter less-dense inner. Does not absorb moisture, or warp in sunlight or heat. Glueing with superglue makes a nearly unbreakable bond.

Styrene – similar to polystyrene like you get in packaging. Versatile, can make fine and delicate forms. You can get thicknesses down to even 0.13mm. It can be scored and snapped to make a clean break, and cuts with a knife fairly easily, although not as easily as PVC. You can get styrene in various other forms alongside sheets, like rods and strips etc. It can be glued with superglue, but there is also a special solvent for the material which is super thin and can be brushed on in sections and onto hard to reach places. ABS- “acrylonitrile butadiene styrene” – a tougher form of styrene for load bearing properties and more heat resistant in case the model spends time under hot lights. Negatives are that it is not easy to cut or form.

Acetate – for windows or mimicking water. Also can be printed on with texture to represent fabric, like curtains or gauze. Polypropylene – used for similar purposes. Both cloud with the use of superglue, which is a draw back.

Styrofoam – used as an insulation material so easy to get hold of from builders merchants. It is a rigid foam that can be carved and filed for solid forms like rock or a thinner piece can be textured effectively.  It is so easy to cut and carve because of it’s fine-celled and dense nature. You can get a smooth surface by covering in polyfilla and sanding. Needs to be sealed first before using any spraypaints or glues, you can use polyfilla to bond as well. Weta Workshop used styrofoam for their rock sets and bonded and filled gaps with expanding polyeurathane foam, which ends up a similar consistency and can be sanded and carved in the same way.

Reticulated foam – used to make scale trees and other foliage because of it’s network of filaments left over from the bubbles made in the foaming process.

Metal mesh – larger versions can be used for shaping terrain. Smaller “impression mesh” can be moulded because the holes will expand and extract easily.

Kappa-line foamboard – a foamboard made from  a polyeurathane foam, with a paper layer over the top which can be pealed off and the foam carved or sanded. It also takes impressions well, and will glue easily because it does not dissolve.

MOULD MAKING AND CASTING MATERIALS

MOULD MAKING

Before I write about mould making and casting materials, I thought I should give quick descriptions of what a prototype, mould and cast is. The prototype can be anything that provides the shape that you want multiple casts of, so it can be a found object or you could sculpt your own form. The mould would be made using this. By building up a wall, and placing your prototype inside, you can pour your chosen material into the block to create a mould. The cast is the multiple forms made by pouring or painting into or over the mould.

Silicone rubber – best for a flexible mould and to capture intricate detailing. The most widely used professionally. Varies in setting times, hardness and and application methods. The harder varieties are heat resistant, which is good if the casting needs to be baked to set it, like when you use sculpey. Silicones come in two parts which need to be mixed together in the correct quantities in order for it to set properly, which can take any time between a few hours and several days, You can add a thickening agent to the mix of pouring silicone which means you can brush it onto a surface as well as pouring it into a mould in it’s normal pouring form. You don’t need to worry about trapped air, since the setting time is so long they will naturally emerge from the denser material on their own. A cheaper version could be Gelflex, but it makes a less durable mould and cannot pick up as much detail. It’s setting time is mostly under an hour for small forms, or a couple of hours for something bigger which is an advantage over silicone rubber. It can also be melted down again and resused, however it needs to be heated to 140 degrees before it melts, so any prototype would need to be heat resistant to that temperature too. Mostly though, silicones are unaffected by any materials used for the prototype or casts.

Gelflex – is a cheaper way of making moulds. It’s other redeeming features are the speed that it sets, which takes only a few hours maximum, depending on the size, as opposed to the silicone rubber which can take days. It can also be melted down and reused. However, the moulds cannot pick up much detail and doesn’t hold it’s form so you can only make limited casts from a single mould.

Plaster – mainly used as a cast making material because it is so rigid and inflexible, which would mostly be unsuitable for a mould.

CASTING

Polyeurethane resin – used for anything detailed or delicate. Comes in two parts to be mixed, but once mixed stays in liquid form for a very short time. It can be removed from the mould in as little as 15 minutes, but will not be totally set at this point so it can be doctored or trimmed until it sets properly, which can take a few days. This resin can be painted with enamel or acrylic paint straight onto the surface, but the result will be better if a primer is used first.

Latex – to create surface texture by painting layers of latex onto a negative mould of the texture.

Weta Workshop on The Lord of the Rings – Take 2

Alex Funke , Visual Effects DOP, Miniature Unit for The Lord Of The Rings trilogy- “I think to be a good modeller you have to be a born story teller. If you know the story you’re telling, if you know how old a building is, if you know what it’s history is and who’s lived in it, and who lives in it now then there’s many things you can do the explain that visually.”

The Two Towers:

Helms Deep – The first miniature ever built for the films was the 1:35th scale Helms Deep for The Two Towers. It was planned to be used for wide shots, so it encompasses the whole environment of the mountains where the fortress is set. It was also used to help with the animatics and planning the battle using 1:35th scale toy soldiers.

Figure 1 1:35th scale Helms Deep (The Two Towers: Special Extended DVD Edition, 2003)

To create the rock effect they hung crumpled tin foil in huge sheets to get a reference. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the modellers built a huge 1:4 scale version that you could crouch down and walk around. This was actually built at the location of the live action filming, which was a disused quarry. You can see how the model fits with the surrounding rock below.

Figure 2 1:4 scale Helms Deep

It was used as a background in live action shots, aswell as being used for forced perspective shots so that along the wall action could take place with a “distant” tower in the background. At the end of filming live action with the 1:4 scale model, they blew it up as part of the narrative, catching the real time flying of debris.

Barad-Dur – is the tower where Sauron, the evil entitity in Tolkeins’ story, lives. This miniature was huge, standing at 26ft high, it was built in stages because it wouldn’t fit inside the space. You can see the bottom  section below, that grows out of the surrounding base rock.

Figure 3 Tower of Barad-Dur (The Two Towers: Special Extended DVD Edition, 2003)

Peter Jackson wanted close up shots of the tower, and you would normally build at 1:10th scale for this. However, this would make it over 20 meters tall, so they settled on a smaller 1:166th scale. There must have been some step and repeat process involved, but as you can see the tower was designed not be uniform, as if generations of orcs have heaved up blocks and added their own sections to the tower, so it is unbelievably complex and detailed for 1:166th scale. For fabrication they would use hot-wire tools to create the forms in the foam.

The Black Gates – a mechanical miniauture that needed to move so they could film the gates opening. The motors were driven by the motion control when they were filming. Done at 1:30th scale, and again filmed up close, the model builders needed to use micro-detailing to make sure everything looked real. Again, it was about creating links between architectural themes of all the locations in the film, and creating a backstory that the detailing of the miniature can reflect. In this instance, the orcs have taken over what was originally built by the same race that built Minas Tirith, so there are elements taken from both architectural styles put together to tell this story.

Fangorn – is a forest location. The location scouts couldn’t find a suitable looking real location, so the live action was built using a set that showed just the base of the trees, and just a small section. This meant that any long shots of vistas of the forest had to be built and filmed in a miniature environment.

Figure 4 Fangorn Forest (The Two Towers: Special Extended DVD Edition, 2003)

Again it was a large miniature so it could be filmed close up again. The trees were about 5ft tall and the whole environment stretched over 60ft square on wheeled bases which could be put together in different combinations to make more than one view which in turn makes the series of shots look like a realistic forest stretching for miles into the distance. The trees for this miniature were built with the trunks utllising real gorse branches, which look very twisted and old, which is the look for Fangorn.

Osgiliath – Is a city built by men, but destroyed in the conflict between men and the evil in Mordor. It was built at two different sizes, 1:50th scale and 1:10th scale. The smaller scale was used for wide aerial shots, and layered up to make the city seem more expansive since the model only covered about a third of what the city really would be.

Figure 5 The filming of Osgiliath (The Two Towers: Special Extended DVD Edition, 2003)

Because the model needed to look much more expansive than it was, it was filmed in heavy smoke to give the illusion of depth. When our eyes look in the distance things appear to loose detail and seem vague, like the smoke achieves in middle photo above. `The third image shows the use of space lights in the same environment. These are ambient, they give off a soft light that doesn’t have a direction. The key lights are then used to give the direction of light. Snorkel cameras were used to get shots from eye height whilst giving the camera and rig plenty of space to make the pass.

The 1:10th scale was mostly used as a backdrop for the live action shots. The set for the live action was just a narrow strip, and everything behind is the 1:10th scale miniature. From the 1:10th scale they created in-camera the shot where a domed tower is destroyed by a catapulted rock. Not only did they build the tower, but also the concrete rock that is thrown, and the catapult to throw it, so that the aciton could be caught in real time instead of creating it all digitally. All the buildings were built im full, and then knocked around to give it the look of an abandoned place in the middle of a war, which is easier to do than trying to build a ruined building with the holes and cracks already there.

Isengard – Is a really interesting one, because it involves water, so I looked at how this was physically achieved. The set is flooded by the breaking of a dam, and it all needed to be caught on camera, so the whole environment again was built in order to do this. There was 2 huge tanks of water behind the dam structure, and when the time came the bolts on the tanks were blown and released the water.

Figure 6 The flooding of Isenguard (The Two Towers: Special Extended DVD Edition, 2003)

The circle of Isengard is a different miniature, filmed separate to that of the dam and layered up for the final shot. Of course there is a huge amount of CGI in these shots as well, with digital orcs, ents and actors all over the environment.

The Future Factory Lecture

I went to a lecture today on new and innovative materials, headed by a representative of Materio which is a company supplying a database service advocating the use and development of such materials. I think it’s important to be aware of potential new materials and how they might be useful for your own craft, like rapid prototyping which is already being used in model making. I thought some of the materials, the process of making them, and their potential applications for the future were worthy of mentioning even though they are not key to the development of my field of study.

The speaker put emphasis on the fact that nothing is “new”, it’s just that something is being used in a new way never thought of before. Our world is still made up of the same elements as it always has, but we are experimenting and finding new applications and combinations to create “new” materials. There are no good or bad materials, but how they are manipulated demonstrates a good or bad use. There is also no natural or artificial material in her opinion, it is just that some basic elements are transformed and manipulated more than others. She used the example of how even a wooden chair is not cut straight for the tree in that form. Even materials we think of as totally natural are manipulated.

A lot of the materials she spoke about were answering how to utilize by products and waste materials from agriculture and various other practices. This brings up the hot topic of renewability and sustainability and ways in which we can help save the planet. Mushrooms can mimic leather, poo can create paper, and almond shells can make a fabric. Probably the most sustainable material and one which uses no chemicals in it’s creation is wood bread, literally made by following the recipe for bread but replacing the flour with wood flour! It even looks like bread, but has similar properties to MDF once baked.

Some of the new materials have the potential to have a profound effect on current medical practices. Titanium foam is strong, durable, elastic and compatible with the human body, allowing it to be used as a bone replacement, so that bones can actually re-grow around them. This theme of bio-mimicry, or taking inspiration of nature and how it is self sustainable can teach us all a lesson. Nature has no waste and works in a continuous cycle. We should learn to use what we have available to us within our immediate surroundings. This is why Apple manufactures it’s products in China; they have the raw materials to work with, instead of shipping them to the USA for example.

In terms of other applications for the rapid prototyping technologies I’ve previously talked about, Michael Hansmeyer has utilised rapid prototyping to laser cut and stack the pieces to create his columns, which have over 6 million faces and are unbelievably ornate.

Another technology that stood out for me because I never imagined it could be possible is tactile films; the idea that you could touch a screen and your senses tell you that you are touching another material entirely. It plays on the idea of how realistic something can be without actually being real, and how technology and CGI has come so far that our eyes, and even our sense of touch, can be potentially tricked into believing something fake.

The Model Unit

The Model Unit is a visual effects company headed by Mike Tucker. He worked for the BBC from the early 80’s, moving into visual effects in the early 90’s, and finally setting up his own company the Model Unit in 2004 when the BBC’s in-house effects company closed down. The Model Unit has mostly worked on miniatures for television. These include a variety of documentaries for the BBC and Discovery Channel. The models for these documentaries have often needed to be historically accurate, as often these places don’t exist anymore. This is another use of miniatures, alongside the fantastical and fictional locations I have so far looked at. The images below are of a miniature environment for BBC1’s Krakatoa – The Last Days as an example of this. As the culmination of the documentary, this village was destroyed by a tsunami, so it was built by The Model Unit at 1:4 scale in order to interact as realistically as possible with the water in the tank at Ealing Studios where the filming took place. They also built interiors of the volcano with lava floes and textured rock, and a lighthouse. Alongside their work in television, they also built a model tube station to flood for the feature film Atonement (2007).

Figure 1 Krakatoa – The Last Days BBC1 ( The Model Unit n.d)

They have also built model replicas of real places, such as when an alien ship crashes into Big Ben in an episode of the BBC’s Dr Who. Again, these are instances where explosions and natural phenomena are involved. Obviously they couldn’t destroy the real clock tower, but they did build the top section to destroy, then composited this footage against shots of the real Big Ben, which are carefully matched in terms of lighting and angles before filming both shots. Mike Tucker is the only crew member to work on both the original Dr Who and the new revived version, and the Model Unit is still providing models for the BBC drama today.

Figure 2 Big Ben, Dr Who BBC1 (The Model Unit n.d.)