Don't Get All Teary Eyed Over The Effects Miniatures  

If you're using photo documentation of the actual effects miniatures, then you must be cautioned that those models were, judged using IPMS standards - or other like static groups definition of symmetry or finish - were poorly built and finished!

I can assure you, most effects miniatures, upon close examination, look like hell. Such models are no where near museum display standard!

I build industrial, effects, and display models, and have been doing so for over two decades professionally. I know.

You, likely, do not.

I don't mean to be gratuitously harsh here. There is an explanation:

In days long gone, when the classically structured Hollywood studios performed almost all movie production tasks 'in-house', their miniature building shops would likely be staffed with union Carpenters, Set Builder's, Painter's, and an array of Apprentices from various other guilds. These people worked under a few experienced (and sometimes not-so-experienced) Supervisors.

The shop worked to very tight deadlines. Construction schedules were structured to afford just the time, man power, and assets required to produce miniatures suitable for filming, not long-term museum display, where the work would be subject to eye-ball examination and still camera documentation. No, the Fox miniatures were built to appear 'real' only to the uncritical lens of the motion picture camera!

The Fox miniature maker's built to get thing to look good to the camera, not the eyeball. Typically, effects miniatures poses such poor finish and symmetry as to make them instant losers if entered in a model building contest. Fact!

Further: The SEAVIEW miniatures were built with no thought as to eventual use. Who knew back in nineteen-sixty that those models would be called upon to give like service some three years later, reprising their movie role, but this time for the TV screen. Those miniatures were constructed to survive one movie. That's all. Who knew...?

I remind the reader that the Voyage miniature work was not performed by those who were inclined to lavish the tender loving care that you common hobbyist do with your simple little kits. The SEAVIEW miniatures were just jobs to be done by able-bodied craftsman, punching time clocks, doing the job 'just good enough'. The SEAVIEW miniatures were, after all, just a studio product, like everything else on the property.

So, Which SEAVIEW to Assign as 'The' Prototype?     Yes, yes, I know: no two miniatures of the SEAVIEW built for the movie, and later modified for the TV shows, were proportionate to one another.

That in mind, I decided from the start to go with specific arrangements I though 'looked right' from the various miniatures, documents, and movie sets.

The big seventeen-foot long effects miniature (the bow windows, scopes and masts, horizontal stabilizer fins, superstructure limber holes, and paint scheme); the eight footers (the sail bridge and radar mast wells); the studio plans (sail shape and sail panel lines); and a DVD copy of the movie (to identify location, form, and color of bridge detail items).

The Rich Knorowski drawings, lofted off the seventeen-foot miniature, I mentioned last installment, were used as source material throughout the build-up of the DeBoer fifty-seven inch long SEAVIEW kit.

For the scratch-built sail I would produce, I settled on the studio drawings as the 'canon' source of information, with some top-of-sail details observed on the eight-footers thrown in.

'Canon'. Now there's a word that has currently seen way too much usage by the usual board posting idiots - reduced to being just another 'buzz word'' to be thrown around as the usual suspects keyboard one another, carrying on with their predictable running gun battles; doing their best to demonstrate which get-a-life in Cultland has a clue.

But... "Here's the Pizza man! Time to shove my fat gut under the keyboard, log on to Cult's board, take a drag on my super-size diet Pepsi, the Trek Concordance at my elbow, it's time to show the world how knowledgeable I am as I type out Trek mythology and dub my writing, 'canon'!"

Freaks!

Now, before some of you purists out there get your panties knotted up in a bunch and feel compelled to scream at me that the panel scribing I did on the sides of the SEAVIEW sail master was overdone - let me assure you that several of the original SEAVIEW effects miniatures had just this feature. It can be argued that no such panel line work appeared on the SEAVIEW's superstructure or hull, so why just do it to the sail? Well, in rebuttal, I think I have the rational for why the sail is so prominently marked:

At the time the Art Director and his assistants were doing their research in support of their Voyage movie assignment, it is likely they examined numerous photos of (then) modern SSN's, the SKIPJACK class for example, and the sleek forms of the GUPPY converted diesel boats then in the American inventory.

I'll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that the SEAVIEW sail paneling resulted from what these guy's saw in a photo of a GUPPY-2A sail (the 'Atlantic plastic sail' as it was referred to in the fleet).

For those of you not in the know: The GUPPY-2A sail featured obvious panels with pronounced seams between them (in actuality, big sheets of GRP bolted to a metal framework). I suspect that it was this kind of background research that influenced the Art Director to illustrate the SEAVIEW as having a sail panel pattern similar to that of a GUPPY 'Atlantic sail'.


The only variance between the drawings and miniatures was the contours and size of the bridge and radar wells. I used the eight-foot miniatures sail as prototype there.

Part of the research material I used to assist me as I created the SEAVIEW model detailing items was gleaned from production stills. Such as this shot of the first season TV show. This is the set of the Observation Compartment - still configured as the 'eight-windowed' bow, reflecting the configuration of the SEAVIEW as it was built for the movie. Here I got confirmation of the geometry

and hole pattern of the girder supports that backed up the observation windows. Note the large back-projection screens used to present selected images to be seen through the 'window's of this wild set.

And I also studied photos of the effects miniatures as they were used to produce the effects shots. This one, showing the interior of the OC as seen from the outside. Though this photo was not much help determining detail it did affirm that this particular miniature (the big eighteen-footer) did not posses any raised edges around the four window frames -- just one of many features

worked out as I modified and detailed out the DeBoer fifty-seven inch long SEAVIEW model kit. Later, as I studied this effects miniature while it was in my custody for restoration, I observed this particular characteristic and others, unique to the big miniature. All of which was chronicled by Rick Knorowsky as he lofted off an exacting set of orthographic drawings from the miniature.

Shane Johnson some years ago produced a detailed set of 'interior arrangement' drawings of the TV SEAVIEW. I was consulted briefly as he refined his work -- here you see a preliminary version of his effort. Fred Barr, Paul Lubliner, Rick Knorowski, Gary Kerr and others have done much to research, refine and disseminate worthwhile drawings and other reference documents to assist

aspiring SEAVIEW model builders (and kit assemblers) to produce accurate display pieces of science fictions most famous submarine subject. These drawings are but just some of the many documents I have collected over the years; documents that were found to be most useful as I improved the DeBoer Hulls and Teskey SEAVIEW kits.

More on research as part 3 continues

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