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I forgot I had these pics..

Back in.. 2009? 2010? I forget.. I had the good fortune to work on a movie maybe about three of you watched, and none of you enjoyed, called 10000BC. It was one of Roland Emmerich's brain farts.. Either way, I was working for four weeks in the Namibian desert dunes just outside Walvisbay on the following. A 1:24 model of the Pyramids at Giza, Sphinx, ancient Cairo, section of Nile and (unseen) slave village and cultivated land. The whole site was 120x90m, making it the largest miniature set ever made. The site was bracketed by four 25m tall towers which housed servo controlled cable drums for the camera, which was known as the spydercam, because it was apparently made for the Spiderman movies. Half of all this never made it to the final cut (Apparently Karen Goulekas, the VFX supervisor, HATED miniatures.. She also tried to get the miniatures crew completely cut out of the credits). The models were filmed and then augmented with digital people and mammoths (yeah, I know..). The VFX department laser scanned the entire site to ensure their digital artists could make the characters actually appear where they should be.

The Pyramids were built in Germany by Magicon, then shipped to Namibia as a giant kit, then assembled and finished by them and a local crew of muppets (like myself). Awesome set, awesome talent, awesome opportunity, horribly town, awful movie..



























Yes, that's me.. Gives you a sense of scale.. yes, I'm wearing a jacket because it got bloomin cold out there. Anyone who's been to a desert can attest to that. The day would go: 06:00, iced over set. 09:00, getting toasty, 11:00, short sleeves or shirts off, 13:00, getting breezy, 15:00, getting very breezy (this caused merry hell with the camera rig, 18:00, huddles together like penguins waiting for a ride back to the hotels, 19:00, shower with brown run off, 21:00, drink! Rinse and repeat..













The insides..









Camera stuff..








..and some of the locals:

Great photos Mick. What a waste, to think they could've been re-purposed as Filmore Faro's trash compound for that inevitable Dredd fan-film.

Fascinating.

That beats my day job hands down.

10000 BC was mostly pants but I got fun out of imagining that it was a prequel to Stargate.

Cool- I saw that. It wasn't much cop- I think I remember thinking it wasn't as bad as I'd heard, but not great either, but it looked like magic- except the cgi sabertooth cat(s? were there more than one, I forget) Don't remember thinking the pyramids and wotnot looked like miniatures though, so you obviously did your job well.

You have a cool job and I am jealous.

SBT

Quote from: Tiplodocus on 09 December, 2012, 11:23:34 PM
Fascinating.

That beats my day job hands down.

10000 BC was mostly pants but I got fun out of imagining that it was a prequel to Stargate.

Apparently there was an early draft that did tie it into Stargate, and in my (and a lot of other peoples..) opinion that would've made it a helluva lot better immediately..

Quote from: SmallBlueThing on 09 December, 2012, 11:24:32 PM
Cool- I saw that. It wasn't much cop- I think I remember thinking it wasn't as bad as I'd heard, but not great either, but it looked like magic- except the cgi sabertooth cat(s? were there more than one, I forget) Don't remember thinking the pyramids and wotnot looked like miniatures though, so you obviously did your job well.

You have a cool job and I am jealous.

SBT

Thanks! But after that I'm not going to go back to Namibia for a loooooong long time.. Bit of a shit hole..

That's some pretty smart stuff there.

QuoteApparently Karen Goulekas, the VFX supervisor, HATED miniatures..

How is this possible?

She wanted to CGI the whole thing.. I believe she was a big part of Digital Domain. Ultimately there were only about a dozen guys on the credits, so Joachim Gruniger, the unit's H.O.D., eventually put a full page thank you to the entire crew in Cinefex, adding everyone's name, which was damn decent of the chap.

There were many, many things wrong with that film, but the pyramids weren't one of them.  Gorgeous work, thanks for sharing - there is literally nothing I like better than seeing the miniatures from a flick like this. 

Fantastic pics, Mike.

I want your job. Even though I don't have the talent to do a fraction of what you do.

I empathise with you on the desert climate. Either too hot or too cold. No happy medium.




V