Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition) — page 81: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

FILMING “WAR OF THE WORLDS” This was indeed puppetry on a huge scale! Here is another trade trick on how we made the triple-lensed scanner: It was actually thick plastic with hexagonal holes cut in it. Behind these, rotating light shutters gave a flickering effect. But in creating the flicker we got into fresh trouble. We got a strobatach effect, the sort of thing you see in a movie of wagon wheels in which the turning spokes seem to go faster, then slower when they are in conflict with the camera shutter speed. Our answer was to very carefully regulate the shutter speed behind the head. Those vicious-looking fire rays ema- nating from the machines were burn- ing welded wire. As the wire melted, a blow torch set up behind, blew the wire out. The finished result looked highly realistic. Before we ever started shooting the picture, more than one thousand sketches were prepared by - Nozaki supervised by Art Director Pereira, working in close collaboration with Director Byron Haskin. These showed their conception of how combined live action and special effects, or each of them separately, would look. Originally, they were rough sketches but by the time we were ready to be- gin shooting in January, 1952, de- tailed drawings were completed and inserted at the proper places in the script to guide Director Haskin, Cameraman George Barnes, A. e ie and the rest of the crew. It isn’t customary to detail so care- fully what each scene and camera setup will look like but in a science- fiction film of this type, it is vitally necessary to hold down costs and pro- duction time. Nozaki’s drawings were especially valuable in the extensive sequence showing the evacuation of Los Angeles 79 and the attack on the city by the Martian machines. Both live action and special- and optical-effects were extensively mixed in these SOnIDICS scenes. In addition to shooting the down- town section of Los Angeles in real life, we created it in miniature on a Paramount sound stage. Miniatures are becoming a worse headache with each picture made. I’ve learned that even the bobby- soxers can spot them in most films these days. We absolutely had to maintain an aura of credibility and authenticity for our story. This tends to give those expensive ulcers to special-effects men and producers you read about. As a result we built miniatures more carefully than ever before. We strove for lifelike authenticity by making them larger. Our Los Angeles City Hall miniature, for example, was eight feet tall. Quite a few experts told me that they couldn’t distinguish between the miniatures and the real thing which really made me feel proud. A check was made with Civil De- fense Authorities before staging the evacuation scenes in order to incor- porate the latest techniques for such an emergency. Automobiles, rather than tuxedos, were the requirements for the nine hundred extras hired for the sequence. We wanted a traffic jam. One of the scenes turned out to be unrehearsed real life. During the film- ing we heard one day that there had been a crash on the new Hollywood Freeway which had caused a bad traffic tie-up. A camera crew was rushed to the spot like a newsreel staff and caught the scene. We needed a deserted city. Ours was Los Angeles at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. Its normally clear streets at that hour were enforced by QO EComichbooks.co im