Behind this ‘Quantum Leap’ missile model build by Creation Consultants Inc. A new excerpt from issue #15 of befores & afters magazine.
In the first episode of season two of NBC’s revival of Quantum Leap, the heroes of the story find themselves shot down behind enemy lines in 1980’s Soviet Russia. Their rescue is arriving by helicopter, but they soon learn that their rescuers are also about to be targeted by a surface-to-air missile (SAM) site.
To combat that threat, the heroes take a landmine they have found and strap it to the front of their truck, which they drive into the outside wall of a bunker that contains the power grid for controlling the SAM site dish. This severs power to the dish and the missile loses control, returning to the SAM site and blowing it up.
For this dramatic piece of action, Dave Asling’s Creation Consultants Inc (CCI) was called upon to design and build large photorealistic practical miniatures of the SAM site–including the bunker, dish, pickup truck and missiles–that would then be destroyed in a one-take explosion.
The SAM site was a very specific story point called out in the script, but it only ever existed as a single wall of live-action set. That’s where the miniatures came in. Indeed, as Asling told befores & afters, “the miniatures were multipurpose, providing production with the ability to shoot plates of a detailed location that we could then blown up for the finale, and also by providing design and texture reference for the digital SAM’s that they needed to create. They definitely got a lot of production value out of our work.”
Production provided Asling and the team at Creation Consultants with several points of reference for them to use in designing the miniature elements. The first was a YouTube video of an actual night-time Russian missile launch, in which the missile launches and then accidentally loops back to destroy its own base. The second was a single picture of the VLA dishes in New Mexico. The third was reference of the full-sized section of set wall plus the pickup truck constructed by production for the episode, and the fourth was from conversations with producer and showrunner Martin Gero, where he described the ‘beats’ that he wanted to see as the dish exploded.
“Looking at the VLA dishes, they’re very intricate constructions,” relates Asling, “but they’re also huge, they’re at least 80 feet in diameter. I had to make this thing work on a television budget and schedule, be highly detailed and also make it transportable–we were building the miniatures at our studio in San Fernando and then taking them 15 miles south to the Universal backlot to film them, so the dish had to be able to fit in the cube van and get there safely and in one piece, which can be a bit of a trick when it’s a breakaway model.”
Production had built a full-scale version of the outside wall of the SAM bunker with cast concrete detailing, practical light fixtures, weathering, and a large electrical panel. Several weeks before the miniatures shoot, they shot actor performances against the set wall at a location outside of Los Angeles. They also performed a stunt of a truck running into the wall and exploding with manually triggered pyro. This is what Creation Consultants had to match their miniature world to. “I built off of production’s build,” says Asling. “When I designed the bunker, I took the look that production had already established with their wall and I expanded on it. I went with the assumption that what we would see above ground was just a boxy utilitarian structure but that there was a lot more infrastructure going on below ground.”
Ultimately, Asling chose to build the miniatures at 1/10th scale. “That felt as small a scale as I could go to and still have a model where explosive fire would scale properly, and as large as we could go and still be able to be transport the model without it collapsing under its own weight. I designed the dish to be 50 feet in diameter in the real world, which made it a five-foot diameter dish as a miniature. The completed dish model was about seven feet tall when it was mated to the bunker. The SAMs were about four and a half feet long and could be tilted on their launch platforms to whatever angle might be required.
The design and build begins
Asling began his own build process by scouring the internet for period appropriate Soviet SAM system reference. He then jumped into design software Shapr3D. “It’s a 3D modeling program specifically designed for use with the iPad. Being someone who’s always worked with their hands, Shapr3D’s combination of hand touch and stylus interface is a natural for me. We designed the whole SAM system, the dish and the bunker in Shapr.”
This design work was the first step towards 3D printing, laser cutting, hand fabricating and CNC milling the various parts of the miniatures. Asling designed the dish in a very precise and very specific way so that he could be confident in how it would fit together and where it would come apart in the explosion.
“The best way to do that was to fabricate the dish from as many individual parts as possible,” he advises. “A dish is a deceptively complex bit of engineering. In the past and working with the same sort of deadline, you might have been limited to building the dish as one homogenous dish-shaped sheet of breakaway materials, scoring it to weaken it and then cutting it apart with pyro. But by using a combination of digital modeling and precision practical processes we were able to create a highly detailed, very precise and structurally sound breakaway model that would come apart in a very direct-able way.”
Asling continues: “I started by designing the dish in 28 segments, and then each segment was divided up into seven individual panels. Each of those seven panels was formed as a compound curve and tapered end to end, and each panel nested into the panels above, below and beside it on the dish face. Once I was happy with the overall design of the dish, we 3D printed one master of each panel and then generated two-part silicone molds of each panel so that we could replicate them in our breakaway resin.”
There was a @beforesmag about the miniatures of Quantum Leap.
Here's the @VFXLegion for the work we did.
"It's all practical."😏 pic.twitter.com/r1J9HPl85l
— I'm James. I cook. I VFX. (@jdhattin) March 17, 2024
Visual effects studio VFX Legion augmented and added to the explosion, too. Here’s their breakdown in the Tweet above.
“If we had built the dish in a more traditional way,” adds Asling, “with all of those curved, tapering panels needing to be cast in breakaway resin and then glued together, there would have been a very good possibility of the thing not fitting together once we started the assembly process. But by doing it the way that we did, we ended up with incredibly tight build tolerances. When we completed the final assembly of all of those parts of the dish, we ended up with just a single, very slight 2.5mm tapered gap on one edge of the very last panel that we were putting in. I’d have to say that it went together really well for us.”
The SAMs were also designed in Shapr3D (those Shapr models were ultimately shared with the show’s visual effects department which used them for creating VFX shots of the launching missiles). The miniature SAMs were crafted by CCI from two sizes of acrylic tubing, with hand fabricated surface details and 3D printed engine bells and nose cones.
The mobile bases that the SAMs sat on were crafted via a combination of traditional hand fabrication and 3D printing. “We’ve got a fairly large volume 3D printer that we use for a lot of the bigger parts,” states Asling. “Everything could have been made by hand, but when you’re creating multiples of something and you’ve already created the digital model, it just makes sense to opt for a 3D printed solution for certain parts.”
As mentioned, the digital Shapr3D dish model was used to generate the master files of each panel. “Then,” adds Asling, “we 3D printed one copy of each panel and made two part molds of each of those parts so that we could pour enough breakaway resin castings to create the entire dish surface. We backed our dish with webbed trusses that mimicked the trusses in the VLA dishes. A number of the trusses were CNC cut from 3mm aluminum because we needed to have something structural to support the break-away dish.”
Asling says that only about 20 per cent of the trusses that supported the dish were CNC cut aluminum. The rest were laser cut 3mm MDF that had virtually no strength to them at all. “We CNC milled 6mm thick aluminum rings with notches in them that our trusses would fit into, and then we bolted on our trusses using 3D printed brackets designed to look like riveted steel braces.”
The Y-shaped support yolk of the dish was a combination of structural steel, aluminum and a 3D printed exterior shell. “We welded 1 inch box steel into a ‘U’ shape and then welded that to 3 inch diameter steel tubing for a vertical mounting post. We created axles at the top of the U shape that lined up to the aluminum rings on the back of the dish, and we then fitted the assembly with a one inch diameter horizontal aluminum axle, so the whole dish could tilt and rotate as needed.”
The bunker below the dish was built as a one inch box steel frame with 15mm thick Baltic plywood bolted to the steel frame. This was to make the bunker as strong as possible. “We made up a couple of different panels that replicated the look of the cast concrete exterior of the full sized bunker set piece, and then we molded them in silicone, cast them in urethane resin and laminated them to the the outside of our bunker,” explains Asling. “We also replicated the exterior lighting of the bunker in miniature and we made two versions of the exterior electrical panel that we could swap out, one pre and one post-truck explosion.”
During the design and fabrication process, CCI needed to consider what would be breakaway and what would not. “The bunker, for example,” says Asling, “needed to be completely rigid, other than some specific elements that were designed to blow off. We planned for the front doors to blow out and we planned for rooftop vents to blow off, but the rest of the bunker was very, very structural. That’s why we went with a steel interior frame and the Baltic plywood shell. Besides having to support the weight of the dish, we wanted to make sure that the bunker itself wasn’t going to breathe or flex or do anything weird when the pyro went off.”
Asling was aided in the build process by a small but talented crew of artists at Creation Consultants Inc. “Rima Litonjua created the small scale landscaping elements and refined details on the missiles. Ben Record carried out the steel and wood fabrication for the bunker, created the brass bunker rooftop railings and did a lot of the assembly of the main dish. Sid Nicholson cast up hundreds and hundreds of dish panels and also built the truck.”
That truck was a 1/10th scale vehicle designed to replicate the pickup that production had used for their shots. Asling comments that this was particularly tricky because the actual full-sized truck had been custom-made. “They wanted it to look like a very specific model of Toyota that was never sold in North America. We had to then copy that very specific model of Toyota from a few on-set pics and build that at 1/10th scale so that it could be lined up with the live action vehicle. It shows up in several of the live action shots, and it’s one of those things where we really fussed over the detail on the truck, but then you never end up seeing our version that closely at all. Camera positions hadn’t been locked in when we were building the truck, so we had to assume that all of that detail might be seen in close-up.”
Once the fabrication of all of the various miniature elements was completed, everything was painted and weathered to reflect years of use in the field with little or no maintenance. Each of the almost 200 dish panels were painted individually so that they would each have variations in depth of color and paint fade, highlighting the aged character of the dish and the SAM installation.
Dressing the set
The completed miniatures were transported to Universal Studios for filming at the Falls Lake backlot location. In early production meetings with the client, Asling suggested that the entire miniature scene should be staged on steel deck risers, and it was decided that Quantum Leap’s in-house art department would oversee the steel deck assembly and the fabrication of the landscape bucks.
“Their art department had it all laid out for us when we arrived to set,” explains Asling. “They took the drawings that we had created for them and then generated their own working drawing so that they could mill plywood ribbing to create the background hill profiles. They then laid chicken wire, burlap and plaster on the ribs and sculpted the background hills. We then went in with sand, decomposed granite, landscaping powders and Rima’s miniature dried plant landscaping and dressed the 24ft x 36ft set. We were aiming to give it a feeling as if the military had come in and cleared the area, but then little bits of wild greenery were creeping back in here and there.”
To ‘light’ the dish and bunker, CCI made small halogen spotlights to position on the roof of the bunker aiming up into the dish and around the base of the SAMs to cast light along the sides of the missiles. Down-facing lighting was also installed on the exterior of the bunker. “I really love putting practical lighting into miniatures,” observes Asling. “I find it really helps sell the scale and bring it all to life.”
The lights themselves were small tungsten bulbs. “They’re really getting harder to find now,” notes Asling. “You have to scour the internet to find the ones you want to use. Though we often use LED lighting, there are times that I prefer tungsten bulbs. If we’re using tungsten, we don’t have to worry about the flicker that LEDs can generate when we’re shooting off-speed. We were also trying to match the look of the period appropriate lights that Production had used on the set. Also, because we were shooting outside at night, we didn’t have to worry about the tungsten bulbs overheating the miniature light fixtures.”
Grab issue #15 of the magazine for much more details on how the miniature was blown up, and more.
