The Filmumentaries Podcast

Brad Fiedel wrote one of the most recognisable pieces of music in film history, and he did it on a drum machine, a sequencer and a keyboard chained together with a computer ribbon cable, before MIDI was really a thing. The famous lurch in the rhythm is him hitting a button by hand and deciding the wobble was better than the fix. Years later Henry Mancini rang up wanting to record it with a big band, and the man writing the lead sheet couldn't work out the time signature.

There is a lot more to Brad than Terminator, and that's really what this conversation is about. He grew up inside his parents' school of the arts on Long Island, his dad a jazz musician, his mum a modern dancer who studied with Martha Graham. He spent years improvising live for dance classes, which turned out to be exactly the muscle a film composer needs, though nobody told him that at the time. He nearly signed to Columbia. He played keys for Hall and Oates in 1974 and jammed with the band that became the E Street Band. He was working with Arthur Miller and Vanessa Redgrave before James Cameron ever called.We get into temp tracks and why he never did his best work against one, when a scene is better off with no music at all, the direction Cameron gave him on the canal chase in T2, and the moment after the True Lies sessions when a small voice told him he was finished. These days his regular gig is writing musicals with first graders in Santa Barbara, and he's very clear that he gets as much out of it as they do.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

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Episode 152: John Goodson (Part 1)

John Goodson is a model maker and digital artist who spent more than three decades at ILM. His credits span The Rocketeer, Star Trek: First Contact, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Rogue One, and most recently The Mandalorian and Grogu. In this first of two episodes, I talk to John about his lifelong obsession with spacecraft and model-making, how he got to ILM, what the model shop was like at its peak, and the craft philosophy that has defined his career. In this episode:
Growing up obsessed with Lost in Space, Star Log, and the making-of books that shaped his ambitions
Writing letters to ILM at age 14 — and getting politely told to stop
How a childhood friendship and a homemade recreation of the Battle of Hoth eventually led to his first visit to ILM
The advice that sent him back to finish school — and why it was the right call
Getting hired for one week on Body Wars and spending the first three days hiding in the model shop hoping nobody would notice
What the ILM model shop culture was like at its peak, and what he absorbed from Bill George, Lorne Peterson, Larry Tan, and the rest of that team
The 18-foot Titanic model for Ghostbusters II and learning to just start building
The 33-foot Hindenburg for The Rocketeer — eight months of construction, a night shoot at a decommissioned Air Force base, kerosene running out of the holes, and a cherry picker at 25 feet
The pasta trick, pancake syrup, and other unexpected materials that found their way into ILM shots
Watching the digital wave arrive and feeling like parts of the machine were being taken away
The transition to digital model-making and eventually finding his footing with Mari
What it felt like to return to physical model-making for The Mandalorian — and what was hardest about working without the model shop around him
The mechanical language of spacecraft: why weathering works, what Star Crash got wrong, and the disposable camera exercise that taught a kit-bash class to see the real world differently
How the Razor Crest started as a 3D-printed assembly that couldn't survive construction — and what he did about it
Part two is coming soon...

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

Ian Hunter has spent four decades building miniatures, supervising visual effects and thinking like a filmmaker on some of the most demanding productions in Hollywood. In this episode, he traces a career that began in a garden shed with a punched-up piece of German black velvet and ended up — via James Cameron, Tim Burton, the Coen Brothers, and Christopher Nolan — on some of the most iconic screens in the world.

Ian grew up surrounded by art. His father painted oils and acrylics, played music and did pastel portraits, and encouraged his three sons to make things — even when those things destroyed the materials he'd given them. The moment that really clicked, Ian recalls, was being handed a model kit as a kid and taking to it immediately. That creative instinct only grew stronger. In high school, he and his brothers were making Super 8 films, scratching laser effects onto the film with a pin and blowing up overloaded resistors for explosions. One of those films required them to fake-rob a local bank — and the encounter that followed, with the surprisingly enthusiastic vice president of the Monrovia Wells Fargo, led to a meeting with the mother of Rick Baker, whose work Ian had recently encountered in a traveling special effects exhibition and been completely floored by.

After drifting away from an aerospace course at Cal Poly Pomona and working in an acid bath plastics factory, Ian answered a classified ad looking for model makers — and on the strength of a modest portfolio, was hired the same day. His first feature was The Abyss. He and fellow model maker Jim McGee built the flooded engine room of the Montana submarine with almost no direction beyond James Cameron's bare-bones description, and shipped it to South Carolina having never seen a frame of the live action. The production was not without its disasters — Ian found himself entangled in the notorious wax crane fiasco, and talks about the valuable early lesson of knowing when to call something out before it goes wrong.

From there, a friend pointed him toward Boss Film, Richard Edlund's company in Marina del Rey, where a chance encounter with departing model supervisor Mark Stetson changed everything. What was supposed to be a one-week favour on a music video turned into six years. Working with Stetson took Ian from being a junior model maker building things in isolation to visiting sets, talking directly with directors, and understanding that miniature work only succeeds when it becomes invisible — just more shots in a movie, telling the story rather than showing off the technique.

Among the projects from that period, Ian talks at length about Total Recall — including the behind-the-scenes chaos of a scale miscommunication on the final day of shooting, a scene involving a little person that nobody had accounted for, and the moment he glued a Coke can to a model building because they were running out of time. That Coke can, dressed up and shot from the front, made it into the finished film. So did one in Waterworld. And Inception. And Interstellar. And, after the story apparently got around, director Fede Álvarez greeted Ian on Alien: Romulus by asking exactly where he was planning to hide it.

Ian built the suburb for Edward Scissorhands — deliberately making it more bland and mundane than real life — and talks about one of his proudest in-camera shots: the final view through the bedroom window and out over the snow-dusted neighbourhood, achieved with a 1:24 scale model and real snow shakers on the night. On Batman Returns he built the Penguin's zoo, and describes receiving one of his all-time favourite compliments from Tim Burton — who, after watching a pyrotechnics test, asked simply: "Where did you shoot this?" Not realising he was looking at a miniature. The zoo also gave Ian one of his best examples of a happy accident: a polar bear sculpture that was supposed to explode but instead toppled slowly sideways with flames coming out of its feet. Tim Burton loved it. The entire subsequent engineering challenge was figuring out how to recreate the mistake.
On the X-Files movie, Ian and his partner Matthew Gratzner built a collapsing federal building on a tight budget, referencing Oklahoma City bombing photographs for the detail of damaged concrete and exposed floors. The late Roger Ebert reviewed the finished film and said the sequence should have been cut — because it was too reminiscent of real tragedy. Ian reflects on that as a marker: they'd gotten past the technique and into the emotion.

The conversation turns to Christopher Nolan, with whom Ian has worked across multiple films. Ian describes Nolan as collaborative but definitive, someone who discusses a shot in depth and then tells you exactly what he wants. He talks about the liberation Nolan offered on Interstellar when he told the crew to stop following the previs — pre-vis is just a guy at a computer on a Friday trying to get the shot out the door, Nolan told them; if you can see a better angle, do that instead. The result was that the miniature crew started shooting faster, and a number of shots that had been planned as digital moved across to the physical side. Ian also describes the meticulous sun-angle calculation that went into matching the Inception hospital sequence — setting up models in a parking lot at a precisely calculated skewed angle to hit the exact quality of light that had been captured in Calgary on a specific date.

On First Man with Damien Chazelle, Ian had drawn storyboards before the first meeting proposing a documentary approach — cameras attached to the spacecraft, nothing sweeping or cinematic, everything either very close or very wide as if shot from another ship. Chazelle walked in and described exactly the same idea. They spent twenty minutes together going through the sequence, working to an animatic cut to music, and Ian went off and shot it. That shorthand — that moment of being in sync before the conversation has really started — is something Ian describes as central to how he has survived in an industry where so many practical effects houses have not. He's a model maker, yes. But more than that, he's a filmmaker.

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

In this episode I chat with visual effects supervisor, second unit director and digital pre-visualisation pioneer David Dozoretz about a career that traces the entire arc of how modern filmmaking shifted from analogue to digital — and how, somewhere in the middle of that shift, pre-vis went from a curious side experiment to a fundamental part of how films get planned and shot.

David talks about growing up in Phoenix, falling in love with cinema the day his sister snuck him into the projection booth at the Cine Capri during The Empire Strikes Back asteroid sequence, and how a chance encounter with a Lucasfilm coffee-table book in a university bookstore set him on the path to ILM. He arrived at ILM in 1991 as an intern, became known as "the computer nerd in the art department and the art nerd in the computer department," and ended up bridging the gap between the two as digital began to take over.

We get into his first feature — the original Jurassic Park — his year-long apprenticeship in the legendary ILM art department alongside Doug Chiang, Ty Ellingson, Harley Jessup, Mark Moore and Stefan Dechant, and the time he had to split a $1,400 piece of 3D software into two $700 purchase orders to get round ILM's general-manager sign-off threshold. It's a small story but it tells you everything about the era — digital tools were arriving faster than the institutions running things knew what to do with them.

A big part of the conversation focuses on the early years of digital pre-visualisation. David did the first major digital previs sequence in mainstream cinema — the train and helicopter sequence in Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible, the work John Knoll asked him to do that's now credited as one of the reasons the sequence got greenlit. From there he went on to spend four years working with George Lucas on The Phantom Menace, building the entire pod race in previs (a 25-minute version that almost no one has ever seen got whittled down to the 9-and-a-half-minute final), establishing his now-famous three rules of previs (no textures, no motion blur, no shadows) and then immediately having to break all three of them to convey the sense of speed and floating in the pod race itself.

There are some lovely George Lucas stories too, including the time George walked into the editing room and reacted to David's droid-factory post-vis with "honestly, I was a little worried about that one — looks like it's gonna work," and the moment when George trailed off mid-sentence trying to describe a desert landscape and David — a 21-year-old kid — finished the thought with "John Ford?", which David thinks is the moment Lucas decided he could trust him. Later in the conversation we move into David's own company, Persistence of Vision, and his work on Titan A.E., Behind Enemy Lines, JJ Abrams' Mission: Impossible III, the 2009 Star Trek reboot (including the previs realisation that Vulcan being orange meant the costumes — originally designed to evoke 70s NASA — had to be completely redesigned) and Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, where David served as second unit director on the first digital stereoscopic film and the production was effectively beta-testing the cameras Jim Cameron was building for Avatar.

We finish on Zafari, David's 52-episode children's animated series rendered almost entirely in Unreal Engine — one of the earliest large-scale uses of real-time rendering in mainstream animation, which saved 30% of the production budget — and on a wider conversation about AI, the future of filmmaking, the importance of human authenticity, and David's lovely closing thought: study the art and history of cinema, study the drawing, not just the pencil. The tools will keep changing. The language won't.

Topics covered
Growing up in Phoenix and the Cine Capri projection-booth moment during Empire
Discovering The Art of Special Effects book and the road to an ILM internship
Joining the ILM art department in 1991 alongside Doug Chiang, Ty Ellingson, Harley Jessup and Mark Moore
Bridging the art and computer departments as digital arrived at ILM
The $1,400 / two-$700-purchase-orders workaround for buying 3D software
Working on the original Jurassic Park as his first feature
Doing previs for the Star Wars Special Editions (the dewback shots, Mos Eisley fly-bys)
John Knoll asking him to previsualise the train-and-helicopter sequence on Mission: Impossible
How that previs is credited as one of the reasons the sequence got greenlit
Joining the new Skywalker Ranch art department under George Lucas
Four years on The Phantom Menace and the 25-minute version of the pod race
The three rules of previs (no textures, no motion blur, no shadows) — and breaking all of them to make the pod race work
George Lucas reacting to the droid factory post-vis ("looks like it's gonna work")
The Jake Lloyd head-turn morph that saved a reshoot
Why pod racers go 500 mph in some shots and 2,000 mph in others
The cinematographer who declared previs "shit" — and was overruled by the studio
Founding Persistence of Vision and the move from Lucas to wider Hollywood
Titan A.E. and the Don Bluth / Gary Goldman Phoenix animation studio
Behind Enemy Lines and pre-vising aerial action
Mission: Impossible III with JJ Abrams — the Shanghai building swing and the windmill helicopter sequence
The Star Trek reboot orbital skydive — and how previs forced a costume redesign because Vulcan was orange
Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D as second unit director, using Jim Cameron's pre-Avatar cameras
Zafari, Unreal Engine, and saving 30% of an animated TV budget through real-time rendering
The shift from analogue to digital to 3D to real-time to AI — and what stays constant
Dennis Muren's wisdom on authenticity at the Jurassic Park wrap party
Why a human premium will remain in an AI-augmented filmmaking world
George Lucas, John Ford and the moment a 21-year-old earned a director's trust
The advice David gives to young filmmakers: study the drawing, not just the pencil
Support the Podcast

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you'd like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: patreon.com/jamiebenning Watch on YouTube Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: youtube.com/filmumentaries

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links

In this episode, I chat with creature effects artist, puppeteer and digital pioneer Craig Caton-Largent about a career that arguably traces the entire arc of modern visual effects — from foam latex and animatronics to motion control, performance capture and full CG animation.

Craig talks about growing up on a sheep and cattle ranch in Washington State, being captivated by the 1960s Batman TV show and then Planet of the Apes, and teaching himself prosthetics from Dick Smith's Monster Makeup Handbook. After tracking down Dick Smith's address in Who's Who in America, he wrote a letter that led to a year of mentorship over cassette tapes and ultimately introductions to Rick Baker, Stan Winston and Tom Burman.

We get into his first job on Charles Band's Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, working on the Olympic alien for the 1984 closing ceremonies, sculpting barnacles on Cocoon, building Spock's seamless silicone ears on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, undulating menacingly under shaving cream on Larry Cohen's The Stuff, and puppeteering Slimer's mouth on the original Ghostbusters. A big part of the conversation focuses on Jurassic Park, including the design evolution of the T-Rex, the helicopter convention moment that led to the McFadden motion base, the logistics of moving the full-size animatronic across the San Fernando Valley at night, and Craig's work as the Raptor puppeteer, including the now-legendary "head tilt" at the kitchen window that earned an on-set "It's like Alien, I love it" from Spielberg.

We also talk about Craig's twenty-year stint as the caretaker, or "doctor", to the original ET puppet, including the time the LAPD turned up at his garage door thinking he was running a crack lab while he was actually repainting ET.

Plus the story of how Stan Winston handing him a couple of SGI machines led, almost overnight, to him becoming one of the eight co-founders of Digital Domain alongside James Cameron and Scott Ross. Later in the conversation we move into Craig's animation career as a final layout artist and character TD at DreamWorks and Disney, with credits on Tangled, Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Turbo, and stories from working with Guillermo del Toro at DreamWorks. We finish on Craig's current role as Creative Director of the 3D Animation and Visual Effects department at the New York Film Academy in Burbank.

Topics covered
Growing up on a Washington State ranch and falling in love with Planet of the Apes
Famous Monsters of Filmland and Dick Smith's Monster Makeup Handbook
Cold-writing to Dick Smith and a year of cassette-tape mentorship
Arriving in Hollywood at the start of the "golden age" of effects
First feature work on Metal Storm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
The closing ceremonies of the 1984 LA Olympics and Ron Cobb's alien
Sculpting barnacles and cocoons for Cocoon (1985)
Seamless silicone Spock ears on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
The Stuff with Larry Cohen and "undulating menacingly"
Puppeteering Slimer's mouth on Ghostbusters
Designing the T-Rex around helicopter flight simulator technology
Working with McFadden Simulation on the T-Rex motion base
Moving the full-size T-Rex across the San Fernando Valley
Building a 70lb Steadicam-rigged Raptor insert head for Jurassic Park
Using parrots as reference for bird-like Raptor movement
The kitchen porthole head tilt, and Spielberg's "It's like Alien" reaction
Using Kermit the Frog's voice on set as the Raptor performer
Twenty years as ET's "doctor", and the LAPD crack-lab incident
ET's arm in a rifle case at JFK a week after 9/11
Motion capture experiments and blood-spread effects on Interview with the Vampire
A flying logo on an Amiga, and becoming a co-founder of Digital Domain
Working with Stan Winston, James Cameron and Scott Ross
Moving into animation: character rigging at Disney on Tangled
Final layout and virtual camera work at DreamWorks on Rise of the Guardians, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Turbo
Lunches with Guillermo del Toro in the DreamWorks canteen
Pre-vis on the Total Recall remake with Len Wiseman
Teaching the next generation at the New York Film Academy, Burbank
The unique "intergalactic award" Spielberg gave Craig for puppeteering ET

This podcast is completely independent and made possible by listener support. If you’d like to help me keep making these episodes, you can join my Patreon community here: https://patreon.com/jamiebenning

Watch more on YouTube:
Check out the Filmumentaries YouTube channel for behind-the-scenes clips and extra content: https://youtube.com/filmumentaries

All my links