robbovius wrote:
@ jack. damn dude, you made those flying snowmobiles?
No, I was engineer on location. Somebody else built them (someone who is unlikely to work in the industry again, and certainly not another Bond film, but he made his wad on the initial sale) but they didn't really work, they were a copy of a copy of a design of mine, they'd basically been through the Xerox machine too many times and nobody (including the "manufacturer") had any technical grasp of how to get (and keep) them flying. They were about to blow off the scene and send 200 cast and crew home, and somebody suggested bringing me over to save the day*. It's a long but entertaining story which I'll tell y'all around a campfire some evening.
There were a total of 17 of those things, 5 that flew, 4 that drove, one that shot off a cliff with a time-delayed reserve 'chute, half a dozen for explosion purposes and some spares.
And yeah, that's how they do it with transformer-type practical props--different machines. When you see a flying snowmobile on the screen, what you're seeing is a flying machine that looks like a snowmobile, which lands in front of the camera, and in the next shot you see a snowmobile that looks like a flying machine, which drives away from the camera. Bond films are full of this stuff; a Lotus drives off the pier, and in the next shot, a submarine that looks like a Lotus sails away.
*Note the refreshing lack of false modesty.