Model Making Quotes

Destruction is always an attractive idea. My brother and I used to spend weeks making models of cities so that we could destroy them in 15 minutes. There's a fantastic joy in destroying something that you've meticulously built. Then you're free to build a new thing. Destruction and creation... they're inseparable.

When I finally got up to Industrial Light And Magic to work on the 'Star Wars' movies as a model-maker, it felt like dying and going to heaven.

When you have an idea for a work and when you've finished your model for it, for the artist it's almost complete, in a way. But then bringing it to the finish is really something you do for the audience. It is always exciting.

When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was as model-maker.

When I was a child, I thought I was going to be a paleontologist because I loved dinosaurs. I loved monster movies and sci-fi, and then 'Star Wars' came out, and I was completely out of my mind with that, with 'Close Encounters,' and then I thought maybe I was going to go into special effects makeup, which I thought was awesome.

I like to play with architecture! It's my favorite game.

I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from 'Star Wars' - especially parts from 'Star Wars' - I can do this stuff all day long. It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years.

Every 'Star Wars' film was about pushing what was possible in terms of effects, puppets, matte paintings, stop motion and, now, digitally.

I was always really geeky about design and buildings. Always into architecture as a kid.

I've made a bit of a career taking daunting projects out of Lego. I've done things like a dinosaur skeleton and stuff like that.

I started off as a model maker, so the first part of my career was a model maker and then a motion control camera operator, so I shot a lot of miniatures.

I've been on lots of movies where we've done a lot of planning of sets - how much you build, and is this big enough, and will this get us what we need? - just with foam-core models.

When I was a kid, I built miniatures, and that was actually the first thing I did professionally in the film industry. It was a demonstrable skill that I had, so I worked as a model maker.

Both Adam and I come from a practical effects background.

When my younger son was 13 years old, he asked me to read 'Swallows and Amazons' to him while he made models. He liked it so much that I ended up reading all thirteen of Ransome's books, including the ones that I missed out on. This led my son to 'Treasure Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe' and 'Coral Island.'

As a kid, I liked building a lot of Legos and built houses and did some fun stuff with that.

When we looked out at the world and saw what 3D scanners could do, we wanted to make something that could make really high quality models that you could create on your MakerBot.

I adore physical miniatures and try to use them as much as I can and have a bit of a fetish about that.

I grew up as a little 4- and 5-year-old kid, watching Phil Tippett and my dad make monsters in our garage. That's what I did, as a child.

That one [in "2012"] was different because it was all CG, getting washed away by water. In "Independence Day," everything was still done in models, built in a certain scale out of plaster, and packing tons and tons of little explosives and charges in there. We had a second one in case it didn't work the first time, but it worked the first time.

Back when I was a professional model-maker at Industrial Light & Magic, my specialty was hard-edged construction - spaceships, miniature sets, and architectural stuff. These objects were sometimes just 12 inches across yet needed enough detail to fill a movie screen.

I will never tire of recommending the custom, practiced by the best architects, of preparing not only drawings and sketches, but also models of wood or any other material. These... enable us to examine... the work as a whole... and, before continuing any further, to estimate the likely trouble and expense.

I remember that, at an early age, I spent many months making a three-masted sailing boat with rigging in a half-walnut shell.

Well, the Empire State was about 40' high in the studio. King Kong was a little model about 2' high, and the scenery that he worked in was in proportion to his size.

I want to be free again. I want to be free like when I was a kid, working with my brother and making toy airplanes and a whole model of the World's Fair in 1939 out of wax.