1985’s The Goonies may not have been a blockbuster in the financial sense ($125m worldwide), but in terms of fan adoration it’s certainly reaped in the profits across the four decades since its release on 7th June 1985 (29th November in the UK), and amongst the many treasure of Richard Donners film (starring Sean Astin as Mikey, Josh Brolin as Brandon, Ke Huy Quan as Data, Corey Feldman as Mouth, Jeff Cohen as Chunk and Martha Plimpton as Stef) is some gorgeous and innovative work from ILM. Writing over at ILM.com Clayton Sandell shines a light on that work and chats with modelmaker Bill George about building One-Eyed Willy’s ship, the Inferno.
The ILM Model Shop built a highly detailed scale version of One-Eyed Willy’s sailing ship, the Inferno. Under the supervision of Barbara Gallucci, Bill George led a model-making team that included Randy Ottenberg and Chuck Wiley. ILM had plenty of previous experience with model spaceships, but building a wooden pirate galleon was something the crew had to learn from scratch.
BILL GEORGE, CHIEF MODELMAKER: I was really happy to be put on the project leading the construction of the miniature pirate ship. We wanted to do a good job and do something impressive that would get people talking. We put more into the model than we needed to. The production provided blueprints, which were amazing. We read books on building miniature ships and had the opportunity to do research and learn. We went to San Francisco Bay to study the Balclutha, which is a vintage wooden sailing ship. We studied all the details, the belaying pins, the rigging, the wood texture and wear. We wanted our model to look as authentic as possible.
We started with stanchions, very much the way you would build a boat. Those were covered in thin sheets of balsa wood. One of the big technical challenges on this was the rigging and the sails. Randy’s main focus was the sails. And, of course, there were no computer graphics that were advanced enough to do CG sails at that point. So the decision was made to make them out of a very, very fine silk, which would blow in the wind, and the silk was also great because it was transparent and pure white. Once again, we did some research. We found that we could use coffee and tea to stain the sails so they had a little bit of a warmer, aged color without stiffening the fabric. At the time Goonies came along, ILM had established itself as the visual effects house of choice for very successful films. Then there were all these films that Spielberg was producing, including The Goonies and Explorers and Back to the Future [1985], and all of them kind of funneled through ILM. It was a really exciting time because there was a whole diversity of interesting projects coming in.
