Writing over at Lucasfilm.com, Pete Vilmur looks back 40 years to 1984 and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the exhibit set up on display at Lucasfilm headquarters in San Francisco that delved into storyboards, the publishing program and more. Here we look at the Nikonflex which filmed the iconic mine car chase that helped win the Oscar for ILM at the 1985 Academy Awards.
With this year’s 40th anniversary of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Lucasfilm historians recently created an exhibit of memorabilia from the 1984 film at their San Francisco headquarters, displaying various marketing and production materials, consumer products, promotional tie-ins and other items associated with the film. This special edition of “History in Objects” will focus on a handful of items in the display.
“No, Indy, It’s Left Tunnel!”
For Temple of Doom’s thrilling mine car chase, Industrial Light & Magic model builders created an elaborate series of scaled-down tunnels with tracks for miniature mine cars and stop-motion puppets to be animated one frame at a time. In order to film the chase from the point of view of Indy and the others, ILM needed to devise a way for a camera shooting motion picture film – in this case, in the sideways Vistavision format – to fit through the narrow passages. Their solution was to modify an existing Nikon single-lens reflex camera to shoot the footage one frame at a time while atop a special camera cart built just for the sequence. The Nikonflex, as it came to be called, provided one of the most innovative and memorable sequences in the film.
