PROFILE
DOUGLAS TRUMBULL, VES: ADVANCING NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE FUTURE OF FILM By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Douglas Trumbull TOP: Douglas Trumbull, VES
26 • VFXVOICE.COM SUMMER 2018
As a child, Douglas Trumbull, VES constructed mechanical and electrical devices such as crystal-set radios and loved watching alien invasion movies. Unknown to him at the time he would follow in the footsteps of his father, Donald Trumbull, who was an early pioneer of motion picture special effects. “By the time I was born he was in the aerospace industry and never mentioned much about The Wizard of Oz except that he had something to do with the lion’s tail, the apple tree and rigging the flying monkeys,” Trumbull says. Initially, his career ambition was to become an architect; however, Trumbull’s portfolio filled with illustrations of spaceships and alien planets caught the attention of Graphic Films which made technical films for NASA and the U.S. Air Force. During Trumbull’s early tenure at Graphic Films, there were three different projects being made for the New York World’s Fair in 1964 with the most interesting one being To the Moon and Beyond, “a 15-minute journey from the microcosm to the macrocosm,” describes Trumbull. Among the audience members at the New York World’s Fair were Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick who were collaborating on 2001: A Space Odyssey. “They asked if Graphic would be willing to do some preliminary design development. I was working on lunar bases, pods and spacecraft designs.” The production shifted to England, so Trumbull cold-called the filmmaker resulting in him and his wife moving to London. Adds Trumbull, “The big problem with the HAL readouts was that they required so many 16mm rear-projected movies shot in 35mm on an animation stand. You needed 10 times as much readout on 16 screens simultaneously as the length of the shot. “Bruce Logan [ASC], Con Pederson and I built our own animation stand with a zoom lens. The motor running the camera drove the motion of the artwork with a little shaft that came down off of it. I would say, ‘Take this cell, put it on for 10 frames, put a blue gel on there and flicker it.’” The inception of what became the Slitscan Machine used for the Stargate scene came from a colleague on To the Moon and Beyond. “John Whitney was the pioneer of leaving the camera shutter open while you move things around under controlled situations so you can create a controlled blur, and repeat the moves. Jim Dickson and I adapted the camera with a shutter outside of it and a bellows gizmo that I built. Wally Veevers assisted a lot with the mechanical engineering of what we called the Slitscan Machine.” An electron microscope needed to be simulated for The Andromeda Strain. “I devised this whole methodology for linking up a 35mm Mitchell camera to a real microscope,” recalls Trumbull. “I found a Zeiss stereo microscope with a zoom lens and came up with the idea of the microorganism being a tetrahedron-shaped molecule illuminated by a strobe light and shot with filters so that it glows. It was going to be
a small two-and-a-half-inch hexagon of plexiglass mounted on a metal rod connected to a motor. The motor was going to be in this yoke and be upside down, inside out, backwards. “Jamie Shourt worked out this program that put this thing in one position, fired the strobe, closed the camera shutter, wait, put the thing in another position, open the camera shutter, fire the strobe, and add all six sides of the tetrahedron onto one frame of film with separate exposures. The idea was these things would start folding on their edges and multiply the number of flash exposures on each frame. He wrote this program that would go on into infinity. We just had to stop after too many hours and no sleep.” For his directorial debut, Silent Running, the three-time Oscarnominated visual effects supervisor experimented with computerized motion-control photography. “My father-in-law told me about these things called computer-controlled stepper motors where the shaft is broken into 200 segments. If you put a square wave pulse in there it will move one segment. If you can make a series of pulses, then the motor would run under automated control. I bought a stepper motor and a driver board. I figured out a way to record square wave pulses on my stereo tape recorder, play them into the motor, and repeat exactly the playout.” The front projector system was scaled down in size by using a slide projection lamp, 35mm Arriflex camera, a beam splitter mirror on a whirl head, and 4 x 5 plates. “As long as you planned ahead and had projection plates matching the scenes that were going to be shot, then you could shoot all day long with it. Sometimes we would shoot 15 process setups in one day. Everything shot in the domes, out of the windows and behind the spaceship were front projection. There were no post-production optics. It was all shot in camera.” Close Encounters of the Third Kind made great use of a cloud tank. “Steven Spielberg wanted the UFOs to come out of the clouds,” recalls Trumbull. “We bought a big aquarium tank and rented a manipulator arm from Atomics International. I put the manipulator arm in the tank so I could be outside behind the camera painting clouds.” Music plays a pivotal role in the finale where humanity makes contact with the alien visitors. “Spielberg wanted music to be a universal language of communication which I thought was a beautiful idea. I knew a woman who taught the Kodály method of visual hand signals that relate to musical notes; she came in and trained François Truffaut on how to do these hand signals to the notes that John Williams wrote way ahead of production which would become the theme of the movie. Those five notes are built into the score and are obliquely related to ‘when you wish upon a star.’” Benefiting from the research and development conducted for Close Encounters of the Third Kind was Blade Runner. “We had learned about taking a photograph to a place that would acid etch that image into a thin sheet of brass so it had incredible detail,” remarks Trumbull. “You could light it from behind, put in smoke and it looked great. The acid-etched brass was used a lot in Close Encounters and in Blade Runner to build this infinite forced-perspective miniature of Los Angeles [which was based on an oil refinery]. It was an expansion of the lighting, smoke and
TOP: A shot taken at the 1964 New York World’s Fair of the pavilion screening of To the Moon and Beyond in Cinerama. MIDDLE: Trumbull details the Moon Bus featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey. BOTTOM: Trumbull is part of a group discussion with Stanley Kubrick on the 2001: A Space Odyssey Centrifuge set.
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