More photos and a bit of explanation here.  Link via my good buddy Phonetic Control.

I can’t get enough of these videos.

Grok that.

A buddy of mine is a toy designer and he made these little beauties.
Both models work just like other RC flight vehicles. They charge off the remote control and should offer 5 minutes of flight time on a single charge. The dual-rotor design is said to be easy to use, though the demo units we saw were not flight ready. These are designed only for indoor use and feature a ring around the blades so the vehicles will bounce off of walls rather than crashing spectacularly.

Both Star Wars remote flight vehicles will be available this fall for a retail price of $39.99.

Want.

Den of Geek has a pretty nifty list of their choice of top 50 movie special effects shots. I don’t agree at all with the ordering of the list, and they missed quite a few classic shots, but all in all they did a good job of summarizing. It’s interesting to read a little snip of what it took to make the shot too.

29: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – Entering the airlock without a space-helmet.

The pioneering rotoscoping and miniature work of Douglas Trumbull, Wally Veevers and Les Bowie often overshadows one of the most effective zero-gravity shots ever filmed – and, unlike on Apollo 13, the film-makers had no need to hire NASA’s ‘vomit comet’ to obtain it. In the movie Dave Bowman – Keir Dullea – is forced to re-enter a spaceship without a space-helmet, and does so by depressurising his lungs and blowing the explosive bolts of his EVA vehicle, which is pressed hard to the airlock. The shot was accomplished by positioning the camera directly beneath the pod and airlock set and ejecting a roped Dullea from the prop pod with an accompanying puff of propane. The angle hides the support wires, and the lack of any sound (until the cabin repressurises) is what really sells the shot. Arguably the ejection of the oxygen in one blast might have moved the pod away, but that’s perhaps an unreasonable quibble. There are too many other SFX shot contenders from 2001 to even begin to list them here.

• Add new comment