Special Effects Technician

A&E: Can you tell me, what are we looking at?
Special Effects Tech: This is what we term a pinewood paddock tank, and it's been around here for a long time. It was built in the late '40s. I think it was built for Sinking the Bismarck. Pretty famous film. And since then it's been very busy, actually. It's been used for the Bond films and we used it for Cutthroat Island, and various other sea pictures. It gets pretty busy.

A&E: Why are you using these small model ships. Why do you need to make ships to scale?
Special Effects Tech: The hero ship in Horatio Hornblower is a 74-gun ship. It's a double ledge. There aren't any around anymore. There are no real ones we can go and film on (though someone's probably going to prove me wrong.) So, we've got to use models. This is a scale which is acceptable to us. You know? It's as small as we dare go, to try and solve the problems of scaling to get the sea to look right with the boats that we've got.

A&E: How do you make the water in this tank look like the water on the ocean?
Special Effects Tech: Well, to get the water in scale and looking like the ocean, we're using wind machines of varying size. We're using small electric fans, which are over here on the right hand side of the tank, and then we've got bigger airplane engines, which give us a wilder wave and a more of a storm. And if we want to go bigger than that, we've got wave machines which will give us waves of about a half-a-meter high. So, our ships can go through and be in real big storms.

A&E: Now, why is the back of this tank in green?
Special Effects Tech: The back of the tank is in green because we're going to composite most of this stuff. We've got plates which we're going to put behind these scenes. We're shooting so many different places on this movie, so we're going to various islands in the Caribbean where we want to see islands and sometimes we want to see maybe a volcano in the background or whatever. We can't afford very much time to paint the backing, so this is the way we're going to go. Someone goes out and has a nice job of going to the Caribbean and shooting all the plates and we have got the job here of moving the boats in foreground. So, the foreground, which we're shooting, is going to be superimposed onto a background, which is shot previously or even after we've done this.

A&E: Who makes these ships? Who makes the models?
Special Effects Tech: We make them here, but some of the ships were built in Russia. The first episodes of the series started in Russia, and I think a Russian shipyard was given the job of building these ships. And, they've done a very fine job too.

A&E: How many guys do you have with you? They spend a lot of time in the water. What's that like?
Special Effects Tech: It's cold. (Laughs) It's cold. But there's quite a lot of things to do here. Operating all these wind machines and the wave machines, and then there's propelling the boats. You've got to fill the sails with wind, of course. There's a lot of things to do.

A&E: Let's talk about explosions, okay? That's the fun F/X stuff, right? How do you do the battles scenes?
Special Effects Tech: Well, we shot a sequence here in a tank where we've got Hornblower going out in a launch. As he's being rowed out, cannonballs are dropping to his left and his right and eventually sinks the launch. Now, we are going to put a gun in the background, and we've got a little model plume as if it's a small cannonball dropping in. Now, that really isn't good enough for what we want. So we're going to do a live-action size explosion and then we'll take it to the post house and they reduce it and put it into the movie afterwards. It gives a lot better look at it, a more of a realistic explosion.

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