How that final airship explosion in ‘The Rocketeer’ was (almost) a major disaster.
Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer—which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary—concludes with a stunning fiery Zeppelin explosion. While the downing of the Nazi airship in the film was certainly spectacular, it’s an effect that was very nearly its own disaster in the making.
Here’s what happened, as recounted to befores & afters by The Rocketeer visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston, who oversaw Industrial Light & Magic’s work on the film.
To capture the explosion, ILM’s Model Shop built a 36-foot-long miniature of the Zeppelin. “It was beautifully done,” outlines Ralston. “It had all the correct interior framework such as the steel work that would’ve been in it. We shot it out at Hamilton Field, a decommissioned U.S. Air Force Base, at night. We had these high speed film cameras, about five or six of them. It was all rigged with explosives.”
“The one thing that was done that, in hindsight, was a mistake was that it was all set up for a radio signal as the connection to set the explosives off,” continues Ralston. “Well, it all went off the wrong way. In fact, we think it was a signal from somewhere else that triggered it. All I remember is being so upset and angry that I just stormed away from the whole thing and left.”
When asked if this was because he was concerned with the safe operation of the explosion, Ralston says, “Well, no! We followed all the proper safety procedures. It’s because we didn’t get the shot!”
In response, ILM rallied. “The Model Shop at breakneck speed rebuilt the thing,” marvels Ralston. “Because they already did it once, they had all the parts for another one. In the meantime, I was desperately trying to figure out some more controllable way to get some shots, and nothing was really making me happy.”
Ralston explains that there was another smaller model of the Zeppelin that ILM was using to accomplish other shots in the film, such as views of it soaring over Griffith Park Observatory. “I wanted to figure out, how can I use the same old tricks, like pyro explosions against black or blue or something, and fake some stuff with some animated skin wrinkling on the surface of this thing. But I knew it just wasn’t going to work. So off we went, back to Hamilton Field, and we did the whole thing over again.”
This time, the explosion went off without a hitch. “Those are the fun things that can happen out shooting these movies,” mentions Ralston.
A significant amount of the other visual effects in The Rocketeer, of course, involved making stunt pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) fly, thanks to his discovery of a hidden rocket pack. For Ralston, the approach to the visual effects started with referencing the work of ‘Rocketeer’ comic creator Dave Stevens on whose work the film was based. “What we were going for was trying to make it feel like it was part of the real world…ish. I mean, when it gets too real, it’s just boring. So we wanted to have some fun with it, because this was supposed to be a fun film. We could take some liberties in style and animation. But we still wanted to have a sense of that era. It was laid out to be a fun romp, more like a fantasy version of that time period.”
ILM relied upon a number of effects techniques to pull this off, including stop-motion animation of a miniature Rocketeer puppet, other miniatures, matte paintings and optical compositing. The 1991 film also saw ILM utilize some of its then-new digital visual effects firepower for a small number of wire removals and digital composites.
Full-scale shots of Campbell and other actors on wires and against bluescreen were filmed for many scenes that required flying or in-air moments. But, as Ralston notes, “once you start getting into the physics of hanging somebody, you’re limited in what you’re going to get. So the more acrobatic stuff had to be a stop-motion puppet. Sometimes we have miniature backgrounds, and sometimes full size backgrounds. It keeps you guessing, too. I think it keeps throwing you off, because you’re not going to see the same rubber stamp on every single shot.”
Two stop-motion puppets around 18 inches tall were built by ILM, complete with internal armatures, sculpted helmets and rocket packs, and clothing. The stop-motion flying scenes were filmed against bluescreen using motion control. Ralston recalls that Johnston—who had worked at ILM himself on several landmark effects productions—wanted to imbue some fun into the flying shots. “He wanted to show how awkward Cliff was when he first started to learn. Eventually, he gets to figure out how to work this thing and how to maneuver himself more accurately. But in the beginning, where he’s falling out of the sky and he’s almost going to crash into the ground and he goes through the laundry hanging on the line, the stop-motion had to mimic the same thing that we wanted to achieve, without going so cartoony that we lose a sense of the human being that it’s supposed to be.”
Those stop-motion animated elements were then combined with hand-animated rocket fire, and background plates, in the optical printer, a task made somewhat more challenging by the fact that most scenes were featured in bright sunlight. “Sometimes,” says Ralston, “if I could get away with it, what I had the compositors do was let the character go slightly transparent. That would blend it into the surrounding coloration, and take a little bit of that awful curse of a bluescreen matte line off of it. We had done the same thing with the snow speeders flying around on The Empire Strikes Back.”
As mentioned, some digital visual effects techniques were relied upon. Ralston recalls there had been a few early discussions about more CGI and digital being part of the visual effects mix. “It was an interesting time at ILM. We were just creeping into this world of digital odds and ends. But I didn’t want to make a digital puppet or a digital figure, because it was too early for that. All I wanted to do was try to utilize as much of the wire removal on some of the work as possible, or help some of the shots out a little bit with digital or matte lines.”
Indeed, The Rocketeer featured only 19 digital composites by ILM (in terms of other ILM films also released in 1991, Hudson Hawk had 13 digital composites, 12 were done for Hook, and 57 were utilized for Terminator 2: Judgment Day).
Ralston’s next film at ILM would be Death Becomes Her, where advancements in CG-rendered skin, and more digital compositing, heralded an accelerated push into the digital realm. Ralston reflects on that optical to digital transition era as a time in which he took some chances with the new technology, including on The Rocketeer and Death Becomes Her. “However,” he says, “it was a balancing act on my part, to not go too far one way or the other, and use the technology when it really would help the shots only.”
Aside from the latest in both optical and digital effects techniques, ILM and Ralston had another secret weapon on their hands during the making of The Rocketeer. As they always do, collecting reference proved crucial in depicting airship scenes as accurately as possible. Some of this came from a close source—ILM grip Richard ‘Dick Dova’ Spah.
“Dicky’s dad was the photographer on the Hindenburg, and he was in it when it exploded,” sets out Ralston. “The footage you see as it’s getting ready to take off and all those beauty shots inside? That’s him. Dicky brought all this uncut footage into ILM that was on these reels. We just watched all the stuff he shot. I mean, his dad barely made it out alive. He jumped out with all of his film equipment. Now that’s a photographer for you. That’s a dedicated person.”
Get more old-school ILM stories in my book, Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation.
