A City in the Sky

Both Star Wars and Close Encounters are triumphs of special effects--of very different kinds. In Star Wars, the spaceships, robots and aircars were made to look so hard-edged, so real and on occasion so dented and dirty that audiences felt they could reach out and touch them. In Close Encounters, the flying saucers, the giant mother ship and the extraterrestrial creatures are meant to look alien and so formless that the imagination is forced to fill in the details. "We went for a style that is nebulous but with brilliant light," explains Special Effects Chief Douglas Trumbull, who also created the effects of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. "In a way, it's going back to the old radio concept of setting off people's imagination. It's a way of generating something in the eye of the beholder."

After 30 years of reading about UFOs, says Trumbull, audiences have "a very abstract, mind's-eye view of what they expect to see in a flying saucer. It's a very religious kind of thing. For a film maker, it's like trying to show Jesus Christ or God. It's very hard to meet people's expectations."

Rather than constructing complete flying saucers, with aluminum skin and Plexiglas bubble tops, Trumbull built about two dozen in different shapes with remote-controlled lights inside. The lights were then aimed at the camera lens, creating the optical effect known as lens flare. Says he: "We used that technique in order to have those UFO objects pass over, through or around whatever the human action was in the scene. You never really distinctly see anything except in a few very brief cuts."

The ultimate UFO--the Big Mama of the flying saucers --is the mother ship, part of which was built in a giant air plane hangar in Mobile, Ala. Big Mama is a huge, circular construction, with narrow spires rising from the center and a hundred or so windows around the rim. The mother ship is supposed to land at night, and Trumbull placed 2,000 flood lights and six arc lights along its edge to create what he calls a "wall of light" and the illusion that the entire ship is whirring as it settles to the ground. "We did a lot of experimentation," he says. "But the result is really spectacular. The ship is a city in the sky." The aliens who emerge from the base of Big Mama were the assignment of Italian Designer Carlo Rambaldi, the man who made King Kong in the 1976 film. "The idea was that they will be perhaps 100,000 years ahead of us in the process of evolution," he explains. "They don't use their arms any more except to push buttons, but they do use their minds much more than we do. So the arms are small, but the head is very large. In their own world they probably communicate with fellow creatures by mental telepathy, so ears are very tiny. They don't need larger ears to gather and focus sound waves as we do."

Once the drawings were approved, it took Rambaldi three months to build the alien that emerges from the mother ship to greet Truffaut. Spielberg and the crew nicknamed him Puck. The other aliens were propelled by simple machinery or by dwarfs, but Puck was animated in the same way that King Kong II was, through a combination of mechanical and hydraulic gadgets. There were even artificial tendons in his face, and by pushing levers 45 feet away, an operator could make Puck do everything but scratch his stomach and laugh like Santa Claus. "He doesn't have a wide range of expressions," says Rambaldi, "because probably very great advances in civilization would gradually bring people to lose much of their emotional nature." Just one question: Will they still eat popcorn?

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