Breaking Bad - Tortuga Explosion

Q: You’ve done effects for big-budget movies like Lethal Weapon 4. How different of an experience is it to work on Breaking Bad?

A: On films I did some pretty big explosions. For Lethal Weapon 4, I did all the killing on the foredeck of the ship and all the flames in the barrels shot off the back. For TV one has to work a little quicker, be more assured. On Breaking Bad it’s not about bigger; it’s about better. Vince Gilligan (exec prod) is very mechanical — he could be an effects man himself. He wants to know what we’re doing and he knows how we do it. That makes my job easier. And more challenging, but in a good way.

Q: What was this season’s toughest special-effects assignment?

A: Blowing up the turtle with Tortuga’s head on it for Episode 7 was awfully complicated. We did a lot of tests to get it the way Vince wanted it. I’ve never tested an explosion that much. What looks like one explosion is actually nine separate explosions, quickly timed: First the head explodes, then the turtle, then a third mortar underneath the turtle to blow it into the air, the fourth to blow a mannequin out of the shot and the next five go off in front of the stuntmen to make them appear to be blown up. The whole thing went quickly — as fast as I could pull the switch to set each one off.

Q: You actually dealt with several heads this season, including crushing a man’s head under an ATM machine.

A: Every so often Vince tells us, “I want to see this effect without the cuts. Let’s do it as real and as scary as we can.” The part that sold the shot to the viewer was having a hole in a false floor we built. We covered the hole with a piece of sandblasting paper and painted it to look like the floor. That allowed the stuntman’s head to go down a little bit into the floor and not up into the base of the ATM. Even when people saw it happen on the set it scared them. The actor didn’t like it, but it was actually really safe.

Q: You started your career doing effects for movies like Escape From Alcatraz and  Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. How much has the business changed since then?

A: What we do hasn’t changed that much. We have some better tools to do things with, and some of the parts of it have gotten easier — like using CGI to get things out of the shot that we used to make the effects. There’s less guessing these days: Because we’re in Albuquerque and Vince is often in Los Angeles, being able to put everything on QuickTime videos and send them over takes care of communications issues. The producers can see it and sign off on it right away, so it’s much cleaner.

Q: Are there any other challenges to working in Albuquerque?

A: Albuquerque is a nice place to work, but it’s new to the industry so the infrastructure that we need to build so many different, weird things isn’t always there. Like nylon tubing or surgical tubing — they don’t have long lengths of that ready to go. The hardest part of my job is to envision what might be necessary for next episode and to have things ready.

Q: You were responsible for finally revealing the mystery of the pink teddy bear. What went in to that effect?

A: There was a full-on 300 foot crane out on the street with a camera pointing straight down — there was also a camera pointed sideways — and we dropped the bear down into the pool. Then we had an air cannon in the pool. We tested that with different shapes of cones and cylinders using different pressures to change the shape of the splash, and showed the results to Vince. He chose the one he wanted, and that’s the one we shot.

Q: What effect are you most proud of this season?

A: One of my better ideas was getting Walt’s spare tire to roll at the camera in Episode 12. We built a 30-foot ramp, painted it the same as the stucco on the motel so you wouldn’t see it and then dropped the tire down the ramp. What was amazing was that we hit the camera with the tire both times we tried it. One of the most important things I’ve learned is to make things as simple as possible. That gag in the wrong hands with the wrong approach would take forever, and it might still not work.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6W1QAbBtmI]

   Deep in the jungle of a remote island in the Pacific lives a new breed of mutant snake. Dr. Andrea Swanson (Krista Allen) and her research assistant Jake have been studying the species in a top secret military experiment to develop the ultimate anti-toxin. But when tensions rise with the Chinese military, Admiral Bradley Wallace (Tom Berenger) quickly evacuates the island. The only way home is an old, decommissioned submarine on its final voyage to its new home in Taiwan. Wallace decides to put Lt. Commander James O’Neill (Luke Perry) at the helm, a hardened pro facing forced retirement… and he is less than pleased to be “babysitting” his two new guests. But they’re not alone.

   Andrea was ordered to bring some of the experimental snakes back to the mainland – and worse, Jake has smuggled some of the deadlier mutated snakes on board, including a giant diamondback. When a Chinese vessel attacks the sub, the vicious creatures are released from their secure containers and begin to stalk the crew members one by one. Trapped two hundred feet below sea level with no way out, the sub’s skeleton crew find themselves attacked… in the galley, torpedo room, shower, and control room. The snakes are hungry and vicious… but nothing can prepare the crew for the terror that awaits them when the diamondback escapes its captivity.

   Growing in size and ferocity with each meal… the mutated beast is seemingly unstoppable. O’Neill and Andrea become unlikely allies in the fight to keep the deadly snakes at bay as Wallace worries about an international incident as they try to save the sub from the enemy vessels tracing their every move

Special Effects Dept:

Tom Martino (Death Racers, Dead of Knight) handles the special effects

Makeup Dept:

Nicole Alkire (Chrysalis, Charlie Valentine) is a makeup artist

Heather Ford (Road to Hell, Green Street Hooligans 2) is a makeup artist

Judi Lewin (Never Say Macbeth, An Accidental Christmas) is the key makeup artist

 Get the Silent Venom on DVD!!

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Ed Helms

By JULIE HINDS  Detroit Free Press

   Normally, I’d be excited about “Land of the Lost” opening Friday, just because it stars Will Ferrell.

   He is, after all, the comedian who’s always eager to abandon his dignity and bare his no-pack abs for a laugh. If I ever feel too stressed out, I can picture Ferrell as Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman,” his life in a shambles, his beard a scraggly mess, plodding along a hot sidewalk as he chugs from a carton and says, “Milk was a bad choice.”

   But the more popular a funnyman gets, the less Hollywood is able to resist sticking him in a big, bloated summer blockbuster. And that’s exactly what “Land of the Lost” seems like on the surface. Will the special effects in this update of Sid and Marty Krofft’s trippy 1970s Saturday morning series overwhelm Ferrell? Can he really compete with dinosaurs?

   What intrigues me is another movie coming out this week, “The Hangover,” just because it stars Ed Helms.

   Helms looks more like the assistant manager of a credit union than a movie star. He hasn’t had a breakout role yet, but he’s finding a niche playing ordinary guys who are pushed to the limit by life’s obstacles and yet still attempt to plaster on a confident smile. He is us, or we are him, as we cope with frightening new economic realities.

   The genial Helms honed his skills on “The Daily Show,” where his earnest inquisitiveness and deeply weird streak made him a perfect correspondent for the fake news show. But he’s really hit his stride with his co starring role on “The Office” as Andy Bernard, the ambitious, desperate-to-be-liked Cornell alumnus.

   Andy has anger management issues. His nerdy hobbies include a cappella singing (his college group was called Here Comes Treble) and playing the banjo. He had a disastrous romance with the icy control-freak Angela. He tried to strike up a bromance with Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton boss, Michael Scott, who’s probably the only other character who yearns as deeply to be accepted.

   Andy is like a modern Barney Fife, only without Sheriff Andy Taylor to guide him. The more he tries to smoothly disguise his simmering rage, the more you laugh and ache for him. And when he does drop the smiling facade, it’s always interesting. “You’re so gratuitously creepy,” he tells Creed on one of “The Office” Webisodes at NBC.com

Hit ‘em where it hurts, Andy, in the vocabulary.

   If Ferrell’s pompous cluelessness fit the early 2000s like a glove, Helms and his buttoned-down anxiety are right for this very moment in time. I have no idea if “The Hangover” is going to be bleak, ridiculous, brilliant or, hopefully, all of the above, but I do want to know how the Helms character loses a tooth. And I don’t really care what Ferrell does to fight off the prehistoric beasts.

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Ghostbusters 3

–Geoff Boucher, L.A.Times

   I just visited with Dan Aykroyd over at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip for an interview for an upcoming feature in the Los Angeles Times. We talked about a wide range of topics, but I didn’t want to wait on this update about the third “Ghostbusters” film, which is moving forward after so many years.

   Aykroyd said Sigourney Weaver is on board now, as are the original squad of ectoplasmic specialists — Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. Murray’s presence was the pivot point in making a third film happen. He holds a one-fifth controlling interest in the property rights and has been seen as the most reluctant to return to the paranormal comedy. Aykroyd said that is true but that it’s more nuanced than the public portrayal of the situation.

“I don’t put not making the third movie on Billy. We can’t do that. I’ve been very busy. Harold’s been busy, Ivan’s been busy. And a third script really didn’t coalesce properly. And Billy, you can’t blame an artist for not wanting to do the same thing again. He did two of them, for God’s sake. Although I’m the biggest cheerleader as the originator of the concept but I’ve never begrudged Billy not doing a third movie. I never said he held it up or that he refused. Hey, listen, he’s an artist. You can’t force somebody into it. I’m sorry he never read my third draft because I thought it was pretty good but, look, now we’re at a point that there’s a story that he can accept and that’s going to work, and I think we’re going to be in production fairly soon. We could be in production by winter.”

   The script is by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, the writing team behind the upcoming Jack Black/Michael Cera movie “Year One” (directed by Ramis), and Aykroyd is enthused about its premise of a new generation of Ghostbusters taking over the duties of the aging team. Aykroyd said he wishes Ivan Reitman would return to direct the third film in the series but that he’s “too busy as a mega-producer” to take it on; his second choice is Ramis, who, of course, co-wrote the first two “Ghostbusters” films with Aykroyd and has numerous directing credits, most notably “Groundhog Day” and “Analyze This.” “He has a lot of things going on, but it would be wonderful to see him do it.”

   Aykroyd says he believes the movie will move forward but that he has also learned that “at any second everything could blow up.” The details of story are still in play, but Aykroyd said he’s hoping for a five-member “new generation” team with several female members. “I’d like it to be a passing-of-the-torch movie. Let’s revisit the old characters briefly and happily and have them there as family but let’s pass it on to a new generation.”

   Who does Aykroyd think would be good in the jumpsuits? Aykroyd mentioned two names, Alyssa Milano (who is a voice in the upcoming “Ghostbusters” video game) and Eliza Dushku. “I think they’re amazing,” he said. “And I’m excited about the whole idea of getting this done.”

Get the Ghostbusters T-shirt!

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