#peter ellenshaw

[70sscifiart]

Concept art by Peter Ellenshaw for the 1979 film 'The Black Hole'

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Winter in the Wood, Pooh and the Magic Tree - art by Peter Ellenshaw (1999)

[humanoidhistory]

Peter Ellenshaw concept art for The Black Hole, 1979.

[tomoleary]

Peter and Harrison Ellenshaw “City Beneath” Original Concept Art (Walt Disney, c. 1980s)

“This concept art was from a planned (but never produced) feature film from Walt Disney titled, City Beneath. The picture was to tell the story of a city of elves living below San Francisco who are responsible for maintaining the city's world-famous Cable Cars.”

[thevaultofretroscifi]

U.S.S. Palomino concept art by Peter Ellenshaw

[curatorofthisdigitalmorass]

The Black Hole (1979)

[thewaltcrew]

Behind-the-scenes footage of the reshoot of the squid sequence in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)

A soundstage with a tank was built specifically for the movie. It was used for underwater miniature shots, but most importantly, this was where the famous squid sequence of the movie was filmed. Building the soundstage alone cost $300,000, but costs would continue to climb once the studio realized it would need to shoot the sequence all over again.

The screenwriter Earl Felton originally described the scene as such in his script: "THE NAUTILUS breaks the surface in the red after-glow of sunset, the ugly body of the squid silhouetted against the horizon, its long tentacles writhing."

Peter Ellenshaw, matte artist: I reckoned it would be very dramatic if--and I was doing sketches on the film quite a lot--that if we did a red, deep red sky, and the squid comes out of the water, it would be a wonderful effect. Well they tried it. They put on that kind of wishy washy sky, and it looked ridiculous.

Richard Fleischer, director: [The first squid] had all the tentacles, but the tentacles were held up by very heavy cables, which you couldn't avoid seeing... The cables would break, or great hunks of the material would come apart, come off. And the inside was stuffed with kapok, and it was absorbing the water, so it's getting heavier and heavier and getting less and less mobile, and it was just impossible. So I'm trying to shoot this thing, and I'm sick to my stomach looking at it because I know it's not working.

After seeing the dailies of the squid sequence, Walt talked with director Richard Fleischer, and they both agreed that it looked comical. Thus, Walt halted production while they thought of an alternate solution.

Fleischer: [Walt] said, "Start a dramatic sequence, and leave the squid sequence alone." He said, "I'll get together with my geniuses at Disneyland, and we'll come up with a squid that will do something for you. It'll be much better than this." ...My writer Earl Felton had seen the dailies too. And I said, "You know, Earl, what are we going to do with this thing? It doesn't work, even if we get a good squid." He said, "Well, look: everything's wrong with this sequence. This should be a sequence that takes place at night in a violent storm with lightning and thunder and wind, tremendous wind, waves smashing everything, so that it becomes not just a fight against the squid, but a fight against nature as well. You'll only see the squid really in flashes of lightning, and you won't see any flaws it may have." So I kissed his hand and ran out to find Walt, and I ran right into Walt on the studio street, and I said, "Walt, this is the new concept for the squid fight." And he listened, and he said, "You're absolutely right." He didn't hesitate a minute. "That's the way we'll do it, and you tell Earl to write that sequence."

The new squid was redesigned and remodeled by sculptor Chris Mueller (who sculpted a majority of the animals on Jungle Cruise). In his redesign, he tapered out the ends of the tentacles to allow them to stretch out to twice their length. He added a brow ridge to the squid to give it a more menacing look and rounded out + shortened the head.

The new mechanics were concepted and created by technical effects expert Bob Mattey (who made the animals on Jungle Cruise move and eventually would become well-known for creating the three animatronic sharks in the film Jaws). He created a spring device that made the tentacles light in weight and fluid in movement. It required 28 men to operate the squid, and they would use vacuum hoses to make the tentacles writhe, inflating them to make them curl and deflating them to uncurl them.

With the new stormy setting, it also required the addition of wind machines, dump tanks, wave makers, and reengineering the Nautilus so that it could lean during the storm.

Most of this reshoot was shot by second unit director Jim Havens (pictured in the first and eighth gifs; James Curtis Havens on IMDb), who already had previous experience shooting action sequences, including the underwater scenes in Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Needless to say, the reshoot practically flooded the soundstage. You can see in the last gif that the water spilled outside the soundstage as Walt, with rubber boots on, walks into the building.

The reshoot cost an additional $250,000, but with only half of the principal photography having been shot, the production was in danger of being shut down. The film had to start taking from funds intended for Disneyland.

Fleischer: They had to get in the bankers... They asked them to supply money to finish the picture, and the bankers wanted to see what had been shot up to date. And that was a big day for us. I was working on the set, waiting to hear word whether we're going to come back to work the next day or shut down that night. It was really that close. Word got back to me. They loved it. And they're giving him a million and a half dollars to finish the picture. That's our squid story. It was a real hair-raiser. A movie in itself.

quotes and footage from “The Making of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” featurette additional sources [x][x][x]

for anonymous

[alienssapiens]

"Glass Castle" by Peter Ellenshaw

[buddiebeginz]

These were done by Harrison Ellenshaw (Peter's son)

[ltwilliammowett]

Sailing ship with cloudy skies, by Peter Ellenshaw (1913-2007)

[1five1two]

'Woods Cove'. Peter Ellenshaw. 1961.

[70sscifiart]

Peter Ellenshaw

[exhibit-of-the-century]

Concept/Comic Artists Part 3:

Masterlist

BUY ME A COFFEE

This post will be focusing on concept artists, some from @willow-dino's notes and some of my own that I have discovered and enjoyed. Some artists will have links to their websites!

Credit where credit is due, thank you @willow-dino!

Concept Artists

Frank Lloyd Wright, 1935; Falling Water

Alex Tremulis, 1960; Cars

Raymond Loewy

Mario Larrinaga, 1930’s onwards; King Kong matte painting

Micheal Pangrazio; Raiders of the Lost Ark matte painting

Peter Ellenshaw

Paul Campion

Mary Blair; Disney

Maurie Nobel; Loony toons

Kellan Jett

West Studio

Studio ZA/UM - Aleksander Rostov

Alberto Mielgo

Dana Rune

Gabriella Rossetti

Tom Zhao

[simena]

Peter Ellenshaw

[tomoleary]

The Black Hole Original Concept Art by Peter Ellenshaw

[shadowofmoths]

oh my god please tell me more about practical effects i LOVE practical effects

hi anon i owe you my life. here’s some stuff i learned from the industrial light and magic docuseries i jusf finished watching & also the george lucas bio i finished recently (i recommend both to ppl who care abt star wars history or the docuseries if u care abt effects)

1. in order to do the shots they wanted for star wars they had to invent a camera that could do the things they needed. it’s called a motion control camera & they needed it so they could make composite shots. basically rhe camera needed to be able to follow the same exact path multiple times so they could film multiple elements. this took a shitton of time and money bc they had to invent it and then learn how to use it. and they did do it! but george lucas was pissed w how long it took & fired the guy who had invented the camera

2. i was really fascinated by the use of matte paintings for star wars...first of all one of the main people doing matte paintings was harrison ellenshaw, son of peter ellenshaw, who famously did the matte paintings for mary poppins. but like when obi wan is trying to turn the tractor beam switch off and he's over a bottomless pit in the death star, that background is a matte painting! they're really well done like i wouldnt have guessed

3. a lot of the less important/central models are just repurposed hobbyist models. like wwii planes and tanks and shit. they'd buy them in bulk and then break them apart and repurpose them for whatever

4. the death star trenches were like. they made these big rubber molds of all these different pieces that they had to then cut up and put in random patterns so it wouldnt LOOK like it came from the same like handful of molds, right. and it was everyone's least favorite thing to construct.

5. when lucas showed the rough cut of star wars to all his filmmaker buddies they were mostly like. hey, this is shit. but there was one effect, where 3po and r2 leave leia's ship in an escape pod. and they put like, mica powder on the model, so it would look like the escape hatch like sparked and fuses blew, basically. and THAT scene, people liked bc it looked cool and ppl who were filmmakers knew that that had to have been some like smart effect.