Rodger Young Original Large Size Model

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Rodger Young Original Large Size Model

The battle cruisers in Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi film are straight from the covers of pulp sci-fi. Brash, fun and unfettered by NASA consultants, the Rodger Young is a thundering war horse with some serious firepower and heft. Models for the film were created mainly by Thunderstone team at Sony, but also Boss Film and ILM. The sizes of the models created by the Thunderstone team at Sony, with model-maker George Willis, varied from 6 inches to eighteen feet, and twelve were nineteen inches long. The model we have is one of the two large size versions made for the film. One was created by the Thunderstone team, and the other by Boss Film, and it is the latter that is in our collection.

The miniatures at Thunderstone took a year and a half to create. Unusually, due to limitations in the availability of computer compositing, it was decided to make multiple models to represent the entire fleet rather than run multiple passes on the same models. Model-maker George Willis, who work on Mickey Rourke costume for Iron Man 2, says "At the time they were making all these big-budget action films, and there weren't enough computers in the world to do the animation. There were computers that hadn't been made yet that had been bought in advance to be working on these films... the Starship Troopers art department came to the model shop with a bunch of storyboards and said 'Which of these shots could you do in some way other than computer effects?'. They were budgeted out. Just the rendering time that was required to do these shots was a huge obstacle. With the amount of computers they had and the ones they were able to get, there was no way they were going to be able to finish Starship Troopers in time for the release date. So part way through the project as we were building the spaceships for Starship Troopers, Sony at the time had its own model shop, which was called Thunderstone. They were doing Starship Troopers and Contact at the same time. There were three main versions. There were two that was eighteen feet long, and then there were two that were nine feet long." Our model has been retored and still has the lights, electronics and fiber optics attached.

For shots where the ship fills the screen, something with a little more detail was needed. The 18' model was created for this purpose. The high detail allowed the camera to get in really close without betraying the model's actual size. Boss Films created an 18' model of their own, using the Thunderstone molds, to do the shot where the Rodger Young grazes an asteroid.

The model in ScienceFictionarchives.com/Starfix Museum collection is the one of Boss Films, made by model makers Bruce Macrae and Greg Jein. The head painter was Bruce Hazumi.