Disney's BLACK HOLE -- FX information?

[Christopher]

I just caught most of Disney's The Black Hole on TCM, which is the first time I've seen the film in many, many years. And I was really impressed by just how superb (and pervasive) the effects were for the time, and how well much of the FX work holds up even today. I've been looking around the Web trying to find more information about "The Making Of" the special effects, but there are only dribs and drabs available at Wikipedia, IMDb, and the odd interview with assorted Ellenshaws (Peter Ellenshaw came out of retirement to serve as production designer and FX supervisor, and his son Harrison was a unit director on the FX).

I'm wondering if anyone here can provide some more detailed info on the creation of TBH's effects. I know we have a couple of posters here who have worked for genre/FX-type magazines, so I'm hoping they can provide some insights.

Mainly I'm curious about the compositing process used. I seem to recall reading once (in a library book or magazine, not online) that this film (or some major Disney film, and I can't imagine what it could be if not this one) used an unusual but intriguing matte technique that, instead of a bluescreen, used sodium-vapor light as the color key. I think it also involved some special lens that interacted with the sodium light in a way that helped create the matte, but it had that property by accident and nobody had ever managed to make another lens like it. Something like that. I don't quite remember if that was really for this film or not.

But it didn't look to me like the mattes were done via bluescreen. There was a bit of a halo around the characters' heads when they were matted against the outside vista of the Cygnus, the starscape, and the black hole, but it looked softer and subtler than a bluescreen matte line and had a slightly greenish tinge. So I'm curious how it was done.

The matte work was really very good in this film. I was particularly impressed by a shot where the camera dollied right-to-left across the banquet table with the window to space in the background, and it revealed more and more of the outside vista of ship, hole, and stars. It even seemed like there was a bit of a perspective shift in the background as the camera moved, but maybe I just imagined it.


Meanwhile, on another subject: was that really Slim Pickens as the voice of B.O.B. as Wikipedia and IMDb say? Because I could've sworn it was Pat Buttram. And since the voice performers went uncredited, I'm wondering if someone made an incorrect guess about who it was.

 

[Kryton]

It was always Slim Pickens. He sounds just like he did around the same time when he was in "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure".

I don't have any answers about the F/X, but I did want to comment that even though they weren't necessarily scientifically accurate (even based on the science of 1979), there was always something very ... ... lyrical about them. Particularly in light of the tremendous score for the film (Barry sounding rather like Goldsmith, IMO).

The less said about the story/plot the better and the Disney-cuteness is quite evident (this was before the Mouse got brave enough to spin off certain features to other studio imprints), but I do remain fond of the film for its atmosphere and its ambition, even if it falls short of fully achieving it.

 

[Marc]

They did use some blue screening though. Years ago I can remember reading a book that had some behind the scenes on it. A production still of the sceen where they rush across the bridge (a traversing bridge, not a comannd bridge) before a asteroid smashed through the Cygnus was featured and showed the cast on the bridge being filmed against a blue screen.

 

[DWF]

Depending on how you saw it there's a "making of" extra on the most recent copy of the DVD and the visual effects were supervised by Peter Ellenshaw. And yes Slim Pickens was the voice of old BOB.

 

[Christopher]

It was always Slim Pickens. He sounds just like he did around the same time when he was in "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure".

Hmm, my references for his voice are Dr. Strangelove and Blazing Saddles. I guess by '79 his voice had gotten reedier? Darn, I was sure it was Buttram. I liked the idea of Mr. Haney as a robot.

I don't have any answers about the F/X, but I did want to comment that even though they weren't necessarily scientifically accurate (even based on the science of 1979), there was always something very ... ... lyrical about them.

Well, scientific accuracy in movie special effects is vanishingly rare. I was surprised that this film actually did a decent job with its scientific research. The script dramatized and fantasized the nature of a black hole, but at least they used real science as a starting point. I was surprised when Reinhardt was talking to Dr. Durand about how there might be an Einstein-Rosen bridge. That's the technical term for a wormhole, or for the notion that the gravity well of a black hole might theoretically lead to another spacetime. The term wasn't used in exactly the right way -- Reinhardt had already asserted his certainty that there would be a passage to "the other side," so saying "there may be an Einstein-Rosen bridge" is inconsistent -- but at least they bothered to read up enough on black holes to know the terminology. And I always respect it when screenwriters and filmmakers show that they've actually done research rather than just making crap up or copying from earlier movies/shows, even if they take creative license with the results.

Of course, there wasn't anything earlier to copy from, really. The only earlier depiction of a black hole in TV or film that I can think of was in a 1977 episode of Space Academy, and that was just a black circle with lights whooshing into it. To the best of my knowledge, TBH was the mass-media debut of the depiction of a black hole with an accretion disk, the "swirling down the drain" effect that's become the standard film/TV portrayal of a black hole ever since.

But yes, the FX in this film were beautiful, and Peter Ellenshaw's production design was fantastic too. I think his spaceship designs, based on these light, open lattice structures, were prophetic. If you look at realistic proposals for future spacecraft designs, they often have lattice structures like that, since you want to keep mass to a minimum and don't necessarily need a lot of structural strength to support a ship's frame in microgravity.

Particularly in light of the tremendous score for the film (Barry sounding rather like Goldsmith, IMO).

A little like Goldsmith, but I always think of it as sort of my personal benchmark for John Barry's style, because it was (I'm pretty sure) the first Barry score I was familiar with. Anyway, I have mixed feelings about the score. Intriguing main theme, nice motif for the Cygnus, but I hate the corny "heroic" music that plays during the rescue/battle scenes toward the end. It doesn't follow the action, so it feels tacked on, and it seems to clash with the rest of the score.

The less said about the story/plot the better and the Disney-cuteness is quite evident (this was before the Mouse got brave enough to spin off certain features to other studio imprints), but I do remain fond of the film for its atmosphere and its ambition, even if it falls short of fully achieving it.

There was a plot? I was too busy looking at the purty pictures...

As for the cuteness, it could've been worse. I've always had a certain fondness for V.I.N.CENT, though mainly because Roddy MacDowall was playing him. (Although I'd forgotten that his dialogue consisted mostly of quoted aphorisms. That got a bit tiresome.) At least the "cute" robots were also tough, with a lot of firepower. That helped offset the cuteness.

 

[RAMA]

Look up some earlier issues of Starlog magazine. I recall early articles on the film and interviews with Ellenshaw.

RAMA

 

[DWF]

I love this quote fron VINcent.

There are three basic types, Mr. Pizer: The Wills, the Won'ts, and the Can'ts. The Wills accomplish everything, the Won'ts oppose everything, and the Can'ts won't try anything.

This page should answer some of your questions about the visual effects though.

http://chrisrozee.50megs.com/black_hole/making/

 

[Christopher]

This page should answer some of your questions about the visual effects though.

http://chrisrozee.50megs.com/black_hole/making/

Thanks, the Art Cruikshank interview is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

It sounds like they did use bluescreen after all, which is surprising, since it looked better than bluescreen mattes. Now I wonder what movie that sodium matte thing was from. Maybe Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Or maybe it wasn't a Disney film. Dang, I wish I had a photographic memory...

This surprised me a bit in the interview:

Now, there were a couple of shots where you see people riding in an
air tube outside on the Cygnus. In that case we used the
sixteenth-inch scale Cygnus and we made the air tube a half-inch
scale, which turned out to be four inches. Now, four inches
allowed me to put that camera lens through and... as we went
through we removed the portions of the air tube. The people ride
on the air tube and it's whisking by at a tremendous rate of speed.

I was assuming the tube framework going by was cel-animated. It had kind of a rough, flickering quality to it. But I guess that could be a consequence of shooting the thin metal loops of the air tube against a bluescreen -- the loops might've partly blinked out or been rough-edged from the mattes, and that could've given the sense that it was something hand-drawn, I guess. That plus the jerky, strobing quality of the loops rushing by at high speed.

Cruikshank also reveals that the models were shot in stop motion, which is unusual, though it's consistent with the staccato quality to the shots of the probe racing past the camera.


Anyway, the Palomino has an interesting crew, doesn't it? Arthur Petrelli, Norman Bates, Weena, Quinton McHale, Cornelius, and, uhh, a guy who isn't Tom Paris but might as well be.

 

[J.T.B.]

It sounds like they did use bluescreen after all, which is surprising, since it looked better than bluescreen mattes. Now I wonder what movie that sodium matte thing was from. Maybe Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Or maybe it wasn't a Disney film. Dang, I wish I had a photographic memory...

As it happens, there was a short segment on this on the documentary about Disney live action features that was on TCM last night. It was Mary Poppins. 20,000 Leagues was all painted mattes, I believe.

The Black Hole was conspicuous by its absence in the documentary, BTW. They went from Freaky Friday straight to Tron.

I saw TBH again a year or so ago, not having seen it since original release. I agree it looks pretty good. I thought some parts looked blue-screeny, like the zero-g Palomino interior early in the movie. Very much agree on Barry's score being used kind of unevenly later in the film. Like a lot of haunted house movies, the set-up suspense is better than the resolution. And the ending... Even as a 9 year old kid it was really unsatisfying.

--Justin

 

[Gary Mitchell]

Of course, there wasn't anything earlier to copy from, really. The only earlier depiction of a black hole in TV or film that I can think of was in a 1977 episode of Space Academy, and that was just a black circle with lights whooshing into it. To the best of my knowledge, TBH was the mass-media debut of the depiction of a black hole with an accretion disk, the "swirling down the drain" effect that's become the standard film/TV portrayal of a black hole ever since.

There was a first season episode of Space: 1999 that dealt with the moon being on a collision course with a black hole- "The Black Sun". The effects for the black hole were interesting-looking but were 2 dimensional. There was no "swirling down the drain" effect. I found some of it on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8XT_6gX72M

 

[DWF]

Of course, there wasn't anything earlier to copy from, really. The only earlier depiction of a black hole in TV or film that I can think of was in a 1977 episode of Space Academy, and that was just a black circle with lights whooshing into it. To the best of my knowledge, TBH was the mass-media debut of the depiction of a black hole with an accretion disk, the "swirling down the drain" effect that's become the standard film/TV portrayal of a black hole ever since.

There was a first season episode of Space: 1999 that dealt with the moon being on a collision course with a black hole- "The Black Sun". The effects for the black hole were interesting-looking but were 2 dimensional. There was no "swirling down the drain" effect. I found some of it on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8XT_6gX72M

Yeah there was another one in the Gerry Anderson pilot The Day After Tomorrow. And one in the Dr. Who story The Three Doctors.

 

[Christopher]

It sounds like they did use bluescreen after all, which is surprising, since it looked better than bluescreen mattes. Now I wonder what movie that sodium matte thing was from. Maybe Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Or maybe it wasn't a Disney film. Dang, I wish I had a photographic memory...

As it happens, there was a short segment on this on the documentary about Disney live action features that was on TCM last night. It was Mary Poppins.

Can you fill in any details about the matte technique?

Like a lot of haunted house movies, the set-up suspense is better than the resolution. And the ending... Even as a 9 year old kid it was really unsatisfying.

Back then, I usually read the novelizations of movies before I actually got to see the films themselves, sometimes years before. So the version of the ending I became familiar with first was the one from Alan Dean Foster's novelization, where they all get disintegrated in the black hole but somehow connect through Kate's psychic link and live on as disembodied consciousness. I think I like the film's ending better. I'm content to dismiss the heaven-and-hell imagery as hallucinations or symbolism and assume that the probe successfully made it through to another space-time continuum.

Funny, though, I don't actually remember ever seeing the part of the ending where they come out the other side. I always thought it ended with the Hell scene. I'm wondering if something was cut from the version I saw on TV ages ago. Or maybe I just turned it off in disgust at that point.

There was a first season episode of Space: 1999 that dealt with the moon being on a collision course with a black hole- "The Black Sun". The effects for the black hole were interesting-looking but were 2 dimensional. There was no "swirling down the drain" effect. I found some of it on Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8XT_6gX72M

The fact that this was the first film to do the swirling effect is further evidence that they actually did their homework. To someone who'd only casually heard of the idea of a black hole, they'd just picture what's in that Space: 1999 clip or the Space Academy episode: just a big black circular void. But clearly the producers of TBH did enough research to learn about accretion disks.

Although their depiction of an accretion disk had its own inaccuracies that unfortunately have been perpetuated by all the subsequent depictions that have copied this one. For one thing, there wouldn't be a "drain" or a dark void visible in the middle, since the material closest to the center of the disk would be blindingly incandescent. For another, there'd be bright jets of matter shooting out perpendicularly to the disk in both directions, as material from the disk gets accelerated outward by the hole's magnetic field. (Much like this image.) Third -- and this is the big one that's almost invariably gotten wrong -- a solitary black hole wouldn't have an accretion disk. In the middle of empty space, what is there to accrete? A BH would only have an accretion disk if it's in a binary system and is pulling in matter from its companion star, or if it's a supermassive BH in a galactic core. Or maybe a tenuous one if it's in a dense nebula or something.

Realistically, a solitary black hole in empty space would just look like a sort of optical "pucker" in the starscape, due to the gravity lensing of the light from stars behind it. Up close, it would look like a black circular void, but there'd be a ring of distorted starlight around it. That would be a pretty interesting-looking effect, I think, but unfortunately hardly anybody making SF films or shows does research anymore; they just rip off earlier pop-culture images. So we invariably get the big swirling accretion disk when there shouldn't be anything to accrete. And because of that pervasive pop-culture image, a lot of people seem to think that the swirly disk is what people are talking about when they say "event horizon." (At least, that's the only way to explain the common misconception that the starship Andromeda in the show of the same name was "trapped in the event horizon of a black hole" rather than near the event horizon.)

 

[EnsignRicky]

Damn. And all these years I thought it was filmed on location.

 

[Blip]

Anyone know where I can find a copy of Barry's score? I've been trying to do so for ages...

 

[Christopher]

Anyone know where I can find a copy of Barry's score? I've been trying to do so for ages...

Oh, I think there was something about that on Wikipedia... Here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole#Soundtrack

Highlights of the score, as conducted and composed by John Barry, were released on an LP by Walt Disney Records in 1979. It was the first-ever digitally recorded score for a film, although using digital equipment different from what is used today. Because of the early low digital bit-rate used during recording, the soundtrack has never been issued on CD, although it is rumored that such a release is in the works. In the meantime, a CD-quality version of the soundtrack can be purchased and downloaded through iTunes.

 

[J.T.B.]

As it happens, there was a short segment on this on the documentary about Disney live action features that was on TCM last night. It was Mary Poppins.

Can you fill in any details about the matte technique?

Not much. It showed Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in front of a screen, and then off to the sides the sodium vapor lamps were shining on the screen, which made it look orange to my color-blind eyes. The camera apparently had a prism that split the light to expose two separate strips of film. One was regular color film, the other was a b&w stock that was sensitive to the sodium vapor color band, so the film was exposed except for where the actors blocked the orange light. The exposed b&w could then be used for the matte and was a very good fit because it was shot simultaneously with the action. They didn't say but I have to assume the elements were combined in an optical printer.

They also said the technique came from the Rank studios in Britain, and was refined by Disney effects expert Ub Iwerks. Van Dyke said that it was a real pain to set up and shoot.

Back then, I usually read the novelizations of movies before I actually got to see the films themselves, sometimes years before. So the version of the ending I became familiar with first was the one from Alan Dean Foster's novelization, where they all get disintegrated in the black hole but somehow connect through Kate's psychic link and live on as disembodied consciousness.

Well, any kind of additional information would have helped.

Funny, though, I don't actually remember ever seeing the part of the ending where they come out the other side. I always thought it ended with the Hell scene. I'm wondering if something was cut from the version I saw on TV ages ago. Or maybe I just turned it off in disgust at that point.

With the angel flying down some kind of hall and then the crew are in space again? That was always there.

There was another Disney movie within a year or two called The Devil and Max Devlin, which had a hell scene that reminded me very much of the one in TBH, as a kid I wondered if they had re-used some of the hell "scenery."

--Justin

 

[Christopher]

Can you fill in any details about the matte technique?

Not much. It showed Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in front of a screen, and then off to the sides the sodium vapor lamps were shining on the screen, which made it look orange to my color-blind eyes. The camera apparently had a prism that split the light to expose two separate strips of film. One was regular color film, the other was a b&w stock that was sensitive to the sodium vapor color band, so the film was exposed except for where the actors blocked the orange light. The exposed b&w could then be used for the matte and was a very good fit because it was shot simultaneously with the action. They didn't say but I have to assume the elements were combined in an optical printer.

Oh yes, the special prism was the thing I was thinking of when I said "special lens," I think. It was really a fascinating technique.

And the light from excited sodium vapor actually is a yellow-orange color, so you're not far off.

They also said the technique came from the Rank studios in Britain, and was refined by Disney effects expert Ub Iwerks. Van Dyke said that it was a real pain to set up and shoot.

Thanks for the info. Dang, now I'm curious to see Mary Poppins so I can see what the matte shots looked like. Though it's not a film I'm curious about in any other way.

Back then, I usually read the novelizations of movies before I actually got to see the films themselves, sometimes years before. So the version of the ending I became familiar with first was the one from Alan Dean Foster's novelization, where they all get disintegrated in the black hole but somehow connect through Kate's psychic link and live on as disembodied consciousness.

Well, any kind of additional information would have helped.

Except that Foster's ending isn't really reconcilable with the film's ending at all.

 

[Leandar]

Has this movie been released at all on DVD? I'd love to get this movie in my collection someday!

 

[DWF]

Has this movie been released at all on DVD? I'd love to get this movie in my collection someday!

Yes it is on DVD but I don't tink they cleaned it up any. It looks good on an HDTV though.

 

[Christopher]

Has this movie been released at all on DVD? I'd love to get this movie in my collection someday!

Yes it is on DVD but I don't tink they cleaned it up any. It looks good on an HDTV though.

The DVD edition is digitally remastered, as most DVD releases are.