SCALE MODEL NEWS

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL and we hope 2020 brings you as many models and kits as you might wish for. And if you enter model competitions, well, we hope you win a few prizes! These pix share several things in common. They are science-fiction subjects, and all date back for decades – truly a look at the futures of yesteryear. Well not quite, as the Star Wars subjects are all from a universe that was 'far far away, and a long time ago.' Mind you, the fantasy machinery created by the creatives under the direction of George Lucas look as futuristic as anything from other sci-fi franchises, such as Star Trek. The British interloper starred in the TV series Blake's 7, and this particular model shows something that was in the future when the first Star Wars movies were made. And that's 3-D printing, now a commonplace way to make models, even if it hasn't replaced traditional kits just yet. Click here for more Blake's 7 at SMN And click here for more Star Wars.

The US movie effects company ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) is coming up to its 40th birthday, due in May 2015. Formed in May 1975 by George Lucas, ILM has made groundbreaking special effects (SFX) for many big-name movies, including the scenes from Star Trek: Heart of Darkness  seen in the video above. However, the most influential of ILM's movie's has to remain the original Star Wars trilogy, starting with 1977’s Episode IV: A New Hope . The biggest difference between then and now is that in those early days, moviemakers made physical models for almost all SFX scenes - computer generated imagery (CGI) was in its infancy, and the amazing movie trickery today's audiences regard as normal lay decades in the future. Even so, Star Wars broke new ground in adventure science-fiction, for the spacecraft attack sequences looked absolutely convincing, and ILM created leading-edge technology to make them so. For example, to film the attack on the Death Star, cameras flew along a b...