This film opens with miniature footage lifted from Operation Crossbow made in 1965 of V1 flying bombs being launched. Other miniature Mosquito footage is lifted from 633 Squadron made in 1964.
There are however miniature sequences shot specially for this film by the Les Bowie Organisation that apparently employed the mosquito models from 633 Squadron (according to a reader of this site). The miniature work was shot outdoors in the sunlight on the island of Malta.
The budget of this film was considerably less than either of the two films mentioned that donated their miniature effects. A great deal of the background plates were large black and white photo enlargements that were hand coloured by the paintbrush of Les Bowie himself who was a very skilled matte painter.
 |
| Les Bowie at work on colouring one of the large black and white photographic backgrounds. |
A large wing section was built for views outside the cockpit for use as a background plate for the live action scenes.
A crash sequence has the miniature aircraft fly between the photographic background scene and photographic foreground tree elements. In one shot the shadow of the model mosquito is clearly visible on the large photo background.
The massive explosive destruction of the chateau at the climax of the movie is also mostly made of large photographic panels of the building from the live action location with some foreground miniature elements of a German military vehicle and soldier figure.
The miniature aircraft were often hung on wires using a Lydecker style rig with two support wires passing through tubes in the wings and a third wire to make the model travel along the two wing wires. Les Bowie and his team which included Kit West also rigged up a bicycle powered winch system to move the model along the wires.
There are a couple of shots where the models are made from off the shelf plastic kits and hung on wires in a formation for a distant shot of attacking German fighters.
In the movie frame grabs below I have omitted the miniature shots taken from the previous films and included only those shot expressly for this film. You can find the those omitted shots on the relevant entries for those films by clicking on the links at the top of the page.
 |
| Surprisingly effective shots employing small plastic model kits. |
 |
| Note model aircraft shadow on background photo blow up. |
No comments:
Post a Comment