An Evening with John Erland…
…turned out to be one of shattered illusions. With a few slides and some video footage, he managed to turn Imperial Cruisers into small plastic models some four feet in length. Han Solo’s magnificent Millenium Falcon became a balsa wood model with bits from plastic tank, motorcycle and battleship stuck to it.
In a bizarre reversal of the movie makers art, steaming tropical jungles became table tops filled with small plastic trees, and massive explosions on the Death Star were revealed to be actually occurring in a car park. The land speeder in the Tatooine desert was seen in another Californian car park, and the giant sand crawler was in fact about half a metre high.
John currently works for Apogee productions, a spin-off company formed when George Lucas moved Industrial Light and Magic from San Francisco to Los Angeles following the success of Star Wars. He has been involved in special effects for Never Say Never Again, Spaceballs, Coming to America, BattleStar Galactica, FireFox, Star Trek, Star Wars, Quantum Leap, Dune, Automan, My Stepmother is an Alien, China Syndrome and countless commercials.
He is now heavily involved with technical aspects of the motion picture industry and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and is involved in research into new film emulsions, formats, and environmentally friendly film cleaning and preservation techniques.
John Erland was in Perth working on a series of interactive special effects exhibits to be seen at SciTech in July this year. It should be well worth a visit.
[From March 1993]
