MIKE KELT
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Summer 2002

Would you please describe the work you did on Star Cops?

There was 2 visual effects designer/supervisors on the show. I tended to concentrate more on the miniature work. We were involved right from the word go in designing, story boarding, directing, producing and editing, the model stuff in particular, as well as all the physical effects in the studio and on location.

What was the worst constraint you were under during the work on the show and what effect did it have?

In the early days the main constraint as is often the case is time. Money is also a constraint but in fact with that show we were fairly clever in the way we used the budget so it didn't prove to be a particular constraint as such in the end, but time is always a constraint.

How much influence did you have on the designs you created?

Complete control. Unlike the film business, in those days at the BBC at least, the term was visual effects designer as opposed to visual effects supervisor so anything that came under your remit was your responsibility to design as well as supervise and produce. So when it came to, for instance, the miniatures it was entirely down to myself and the rest of the team to come up with the look.

The model work is as often praised as the CSO work is criticized. What of your work were you most pleased and displeased with?

When we started the show it was decided for the first batch of episodes, which I think was the first three, that; firstly we would shoot on film to keep the quality up, secondly that we would shoot motion control, but thirdly that we would shoot a fair number of models against green screen and we would then hand them over to the video effects people to composite them together.
Now the problem with that was it was fairly in its infancy in terms of technology and there had been some previous questionable attempts at it at the BBC. However we thought we have been there before, we know what has gone wrong in the past, let's try and avoid it so we carried on. Unfortunately from the visual effects point of view once we have handed over the shots against the green screen there was a tendency for some people to then take those and what I would describe politely as play with them, which didn't relate to the way they were supposed to be used and in some cases made them look completely ridiculous. So from the second batch of filming on we did all the compositing on camera. Then hand it over completely finished miniature shot on film, which must be one of the last times that I personally have done that, but it worked tremendously well. All the filming was done at Peerless camera company and the guys there were superb often working into the small hours of the morning, to get shots.

There was a laid down schedule each day and you would have a number of shots to do. You would shoot matt passes first and you would send those off to the lab to be processed. While they were being processed you would shoot the beauty passes during the rest of the day. The matt pass would come back in the evening it would be bully packed with the beauty pass and you would shoot the backgrounds on to the film. So the whole thing was composited on camera, and some of the stuff was pretty complicated. Certainly some of it needed tremendous accuracy in the camera which luckily we had and those shots worked very well. That is the secret of why a lot of the shots worked, so I think a lot of the shots in the first few episodes one would be tempted to ignore, the ones with moving spaceships, although some of the stuff was done in later batches of filming and was done on camera. All the shots with space stations for instance was done as by packs on the camera, whereas the shots of the shuttle going up and down to earth, for instance, was done against green screen.

The other big thing we decided right from the word go when we were laying out the design of the thing was to try to shoot it for real in terms of lighting. Often the criticism of space model filming is that the things were to evenly lit. There we decided that there was one source of light and anything else had to be feasible in terms of reality, if it was near the earth it was fine as there was reflected light from the earth, but if it was in deep space there was virtually no reflected light, things disappeared into black, so we stuck with that. I suppose the interesting thing about the filming of the miniatures, in order to speed the whole process up, once we had finished painting the miniatures we sprayed them with invisible ultra violet paint or ink. That meant if we had to shoot the matt pass, we surrounded them with ultra violet lamps, and thats how we shot the matt pass without having to damage or touch the models.

The moon rover has been the subject of speculation. People who know more about these things than I do state a commercial remote control car was used in the model. Taking this model as an example could you describe the stages you would go through to create it?

It wasn't based on any model. It was built from scratch, obviously some of the parts that were used within it were off the shelf. None of it was based on a particular model kit. So it was designed from scratch, again the theory was like all the other spaceships etc. it had to be done for a practical point of view. A lot of research went in to the whole thing before even the designs were done.

I, for instance went to McDonald Douglas and sat down and said OK we are looking at space flight within the next whatever, what do you reckon will be happening. So there was a lot of research that went on. So when it came to the moon buggy the idea being that if you needed a pressure vessel the obvious thing is a sphere, so lets not get into stupid ridiculous star wars type shapes that don't make a lot of sense and the pack at the back with all the life support etc. and if you were charging around on the moons surface you would have to have some sort of articulated vehicle to get over the bumps and lumps, so it was articulated in the middle and it went on like that. I think the only compromise was the tyres. It wouldn't need to have tyres on it as such on the moon but for a practical point of view it really had to have something which it could run around on, so we just used tyres. But it was not based on any existing kit model.

Some of the bits were made from scratch, all the dressing, all the top of it was made from scratch, back formed etc. the suspension were built from suppliers who supply spare parts, so that was of the shelf, I am not sure what the make of the axle system was. But most of it was built very much from working out a drawing, designing it and then saying that is what we want. You can't buy something of the shelf if you are doing that.

It was built by Melvin Friend who was the technician on the job, he enjoyed doing it, it was a labour of love and it took him a while to build the main one. But it was quite amusing while we were filming we decided on a shot over the moons surface right at the last minute actually on the morning of the day we were shooting which we would try to drop into the schedule, which required a tiny moon buggy, about two inches across and two inches long through the back of shot just to make it a bit more interesting. So poor old Melvin was sent off and he did, within two hours build from scratch a moon buggy. It didn't have to do very much we just pulled it across the back of shot, I think on a nylon line. It didn't have to be very detailed but it was one of those shots which you screwed the most out of the situation you possibly could. You were all involved in trying to create something you hoped was going to work. I think from the visual effects point of view at least it worked.

What reference material did you use to create your models with realism being such a high priority for the show?

Well, as I say the research was done to a high degree and that varied from going into libraries, going in and buying books on space, people looking at the future of space. Like I said earlier I went to McDonald Douglas and had a look at what they were envisaging, the methods of getting up to a space station and their designs of the space station in which at that time they were involved on. So there was all those sources we used, then it was sit down and from all this stuff lets see what makes sense, that is perhaps practical from the filming point of view and also from a cost point of view. We slowly got to where we should be, because the time frame wasn't that much in the future, so it wasn't that difficult to say well the space shuttle probably won't have changed that much. We stuck with exactly the same space shuttle as it was and in fact still is, the only thing was we stuck two fins on it. I was amused in fact in the last week or so I was looking at something that was being proposed which was exactly that which was suitable to get up from the Earth to the outer atmosphere with two fins on. But that particular decision was done from a cost point of view because that model was available. We did a bit of change just so it wasn't exactly the same and we stuck with that.

With the realistic designs how in depth did they go in the layout and function of, for example, the moonbase? Was there a master plan for reference?

There wasn't. Moonbase went through two variations, we worked on one possible moonbase which we scrapped in fact, and didn't go through with. I always took the view that probably most of the moonbase was under the surface. Therefore there wouldn't necessary be a great deal on the surface and the only thing would be some protective enclosures as well as perhaps some landing lights etc. That then led on to if you are going to put some protective enclosure on the moon and you wanted to put it up relatively quickly and easily what would you do? Which then became probably some sort of inflatable structure. That's where we went with that.

It ended up with some lumps laying around on the surface. There was three what looked like inflated structures held down by sort of tension cables with the inflation bit pushed up between the cables and air locks to get into them. Bearing in mind that the moon is a third of the gravity of Earth that you would need nothing really to inflate it. That was where it went and any other structures that were there tended to be light weight and simple.

Was a similar design philosophy taken with other locations such as the Charles de Gaulle and the Ronald Reagan space stations?

The Charles De Gaulle was very much based on the proposals at the time for the space station. The only difference was a practical one as there had to be some sort of locking device to lock all these things together which didn't seem to be particularly in evidence with the research we were doing and so we developed that. Every pod had the same universal docking station on it. In theory locking any number together.

The Ronald Reagan was a bit of a fantasy as nothing like that had been thought about. They very early on in the shooting schedule started off with the idea that everyone would be weightless in every scene but it was pretty clear that that wasn't terribly practical. So when it came to the newest station there had to be a reason for the gravity to be in place. Hence the huge arms that stuck out on either side rotating around the central shaft. So that determined the design of it, there had to be a rotating living area at each end of the shaft with a central bit that had lots of pods on it. The pods had the same design as the Charles De Gaulle so they could all lock together and you could add them on and take them away etc.

That model in fact, was four metres across because the arms were four metres across, the actual pods were really quite small. It only just fitted into Peerless studio and when we shot it the pod was rotating past the camera. It was about two inches from the lens and it had to hold focus from there to about four metres away to the end of the arms. I think it just missed the walls as it went round.

There was a shaft, the whole thing was mounted on a fairly substantial rig that was attached up over the top and down to the floor and the shaft was rotated. So the central cluster of pods didn't move, the shaft went up and engaged with the arm and that went round. It had to be motion controlled just to drive it. I think we did a total of four exposures on it because you put the space station in, one pass the stars in, one pass you put the planet in with it's atmosphere and there was a forth pass on at least one occassion where the space ship had to go in.

Where there was a matt pass which you shot first on the space ship and sent that to the lab. You would then have shot the background which would have been the moving space station, the stars and then again winding the camera back and putting the planet on.

The planet itself was motorised, the planet was a curved surface but the projection of the Earth was actually a real view from space and that was projected onto the curved surface. The projector was motorised so it was panning across very slowly so you got the impression the Earth was rotating. Then all of that which then formed the first triple exposured background was backpacked with the matt pass of the spaceship or the Hermes shuttle as we called it and that whole shoot was put together on the camera like all the rest.

Were you given a sort of idea of numbers of occupants for the space station?

It was never discussed to be honest. I suppose in the back of my mind there had to be a number of people doing all the various jobs not just the ones you saw. So you would have people in the background telecommunication, maintenance people etc. But I never really tried to put a total number on it but it was more than just the people you saw on shot.

What was your view on the whole series and how it was subsequently axed after one series?

I think that one of the main problems probably was that you had a fairly long episode, each was an hour. There was thirteen of them. So thirteen hours worth of story telling and trying to squeeze that into the time frame to make it like they were doing, in the studio etc., it was very much treated as any other quick turn around drama. But it was much much more complicated than the normal drama and therefore you could never I think get the real feeling for it that would have been possible with a bit more time. They could have done a lot more, they could have spent some time making sure that the feel inside the space station right. I always looked at these things and thought that the amount of power inside the space station must be fairly limited and yet inside the space station it always seems to be as bright as possible. It just didn't seem quite atmospheric enough. I also think that to some extent that again because of the time frame involved trying to get a really subtle performance out of people and direction and all the rest of it, just became difficult. When you are up against timed schedules and the lights of the studio are going to be switched off at ten o'clock, which was always the case, if you hadn't finished a scene by ten o'clock you had lost it. So the pressure was on at all times to finish within a time frame you had in the studio therefore the subtleties of performance and lighting got put to one side to some extent to serve this great ogre of the clock. I think that is where the budget was really tight, there just wasn't the ability to do things the way you would like to have done them. I am sure there must have been frustrations through the rest of the crew, in the things they would have liked to have done but the time just wasn't there to do it.

I suppose the one good example of that was the flying, when the thing was started they decided they would be trying to have the characters weightless and there was lots of ways of doing that and there were lots of meetings discussing what the practicalities were and how would it be done. To try and get this feeling across, which would have been different from every other show of this type that had ever been done. There was an attempt to start with to do that, but it inevitably it is a horrible time consuming process. I don't think anyone had really appreciated how time consuming and tricky it would be. So it soon had to be just chopped and not done that way at all. There were some clever ways of doing it too, which were quite amusing.

I remember one occasion were we decided we can't use wires to hold people up, which was one of the first things we tried, because of the problem of the wires, the time setting it up and the amount of time people can stay in the harness etc. So we will have the people acting as though their weightless, which you can imagine. Some of it was very good and there was one shot in the space station control room, where they were all acting away and some of them had put themselves into awkward and ridiculous positions,the thing which made it work was the camera had been put upside down so you start to loose your sense of what was up and down anyway, and during the shot the camera slowly rotated through about ninety degrees. So you did get the impression that it was weightless and I think if they had done that from the beginning and carried that on through the series I think it would have made a huge difference to peoples perception of the series but practicalities came down to it and in the end I think they decided it just wasn't practical and the whole thing was going to be based much more on moonbase instead of in spaceships and space stations. In their view they could avoid the problems of weightlessness. I think at that point it became just another show because it was just people in corridors, and fairly boring corridors at that. So I think the stuff on moonbase for instance was a bit tedious.

You said thirteen episodes, nine were shown and there's been talk about a tenth called Death on the Moon.

Oh, thats probably just my memory , I certainly remember there was supposed to be another one but it never happened. I can't remember why, but a lot of these things at the BBC go unnoticed. You would have started the series before they had written it all so it was still being written as you were going along, so I suspect to some extent that they decided that they would drop one. We certainly never started any model work for it.

What is likely to have happened to all the props and models created for the show?

A very good question. I don't know really, I certainly don't have any of them. They tend to get picked up so that if there was another series they would have them. They would all have been crated up and put into a visual effects store at this time. I've got a feeling the moon buggy was put on show in the foyer but I don't know what would have happened to them.

A lot of the deep space spaceships were all deliberately based on geodesic shapes so they all fitted together so they could lock onto a frame so that you could reuse bits of models too. Using different pods to build the next freighter, but they probably got thrown away at the end of the day. I left the BBC immediately after that show, but I had to go back as it won best special effects at the royal television society's first visual effects award. When I went to pick up the award I remember I wasn't at the BBC anymore which was a relatively odd feeling.

Was there any particular reason?

Frustration really at the inability and the lack of will to push the boundaries. It was a really good place to learn to do the business, because it did everything from miniatures to pyrotechnics. There has never been and I suspect there never will be a better training ground. It is not the same nowadays. But once you have got to a certain level the challenges were being frustrated because there wasn't the budget, the time or there just wasn't the will to move it forward. I felt if I wanted to move on and do more interesting things then I would have to do it somewhere else.

Star Cops must have played a part in that because that was pushing, as far as the miniatures were concerned, what the BBC was prepared to do. It was probably pushing it beyond what the BBC was prepared to do, and because we were so autonomous we could just go on and do it. We got some fairly good deals to be able to do it. I think I sort of looked at it and thought right I've done that, what is next? Well I'm not sure. So the time had come to move on.

If Star Cops was remade now how would the effects differ?

I suspect that a lot of the miniature stuff and possibly all the miniature stuff would be done on the computer. It would be very unlikely that the spaceship stuff would be done for real. It would certainly be composited post production, it would not be composited on the camera. The technology has got to the point where it is possible and far preferable. The shots on the moon of something like the moon buggy,would still be done for real on models, possibly bigger models if they had the budget. I doubt it would change greatly, but I think the miniatures would be the biggest thing. I guess it would be shot in high definition now if it was a BBC project and therefore the quality would be interesting. You would definitely consider shooting miniature work on high definition which I don't think has really been done as yet. I would be very interested to find out how that was like and was it up to the job. The days of building miniatures have not gone but they are vastly reduced.

If the BBC released a DVD version would they redo the CSO?

I very much doubt it. I suspect if they did release one they wouldn't bother. When you get to the point of releasing a DVD it is for commercial reasons not artistic reasons. So they would just take the shots as they came and put them straight out, I am sure. Whether they would do a bit of tweaking which would be possible to improve things I don't know. But they certainly wouldn't go back to the original elements and recomposit them.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I think all the visual effects team were proud of what they did on it. It was a serious attempt to do miniature work much better than it had been done before. In a way we hoped it would set a standard for future projects.

Many thanks to Mike Kelt for kindly giving this interview

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