> > Has anyone ever seen any preproduction art or early sketches
> > of the UFO's themselves?
>
> Ummm, no, I don't think pre-production sketches of the UFOs
> have ever been published... (or if they even exist)
>
> Marc
There are a couple of drawings by Phillip Rae, and I do seem to remember something by Derek. I have uploaded them and some other UFO craft related bits on here:
http://tinyurl.com/34gs9co
Anderson recalls, "The shape of the UFO was certainly something that we went into in great detail. The feeling was that everyone at that time saw UFOsas saucers and, you know, . we found ourselves thinking about the old argument that if you hold up a teacup and say to somebody, 'This is a telephonein the 22nd century: they will always say, 'No, it isn't, it's a teacup! So with the UFOs, we were anxious that people should instantly identify themwith UFOs and so we decided to keep what had become the classic saucer shape."
In a 1993 interview, Derek Meddings remembered, "I knew that in my mind, ithad to be something that was a little unusual and, having looked at all the photographs that had been taken - you know, all these great photographs you see - you never see one that's clear, do you? They're all a bit fuzzy, which always makes me suspect that somebody's been tampering with them, so Iwanted to bring that
quality to our UFOs, spinning and reflecting light as they spun so that they were a bit fuzzy and indistinct.
I think I came up with the final shape and that sort of design because I had to think how it was going to work, and it was a shape that was quite difficult to actually get to spin. I drew it out on paper and then we made a model up and tried it out, and that's how it came about really. I came up with the idea that the top part would be made of thin Perspex which was blown over a wooden frame. The Perspex dome then had a motor fitted inside it which was powered down the four wires that we used to suspend the model in theair. This top section was then connected to the bottom part which was turned by the motor so that the whole of that bottom part spun while the top was locked off.
"I put little paddles all around the circumference of the bottom section and covered them with highly reflective tape so that when it was going around, the paddles caught the light. That made it flash and strobe in the camera, giving the flying saucer an ethereal look to it so that you wouldn't really be aware of what you were looking at. The problem was that when we came to film them, we found that once they were hanging on the wires, we kept having to balance them, sticking bits of Plasticine on the back of the paddles because, for some unknown reason, they would start wobbling when we set the motor going. We couldn't get them to bank either, because the minute youbanked it, it stopped revolving, so we always had to shoot them travellingin a straight line."
The reason they couldn't bank them was they had in effect, created a gyroscope, which has it's own internal inertia. There are still arguments amongstmodellers as to exactly how many paddles the UFO had, and whether there was a gap in one place for a "door".
Hope that helps,
Rob
Locked
