About

 This website is about the use and photography of model spaceships used to depict real and fantasy space-faring vehicles in visual effects shots for movies and in some cases television. It is an outlet for my fervent enthusiasm for and interest in the practice of miniature effects and is a sister site to the blogs modelshipsinthecinema.blogspot.com which I have been working on sporadically since 2009 and modelaircraftinthecinema.blogspot.com which I started in 2018.

 

It will be a similar attempt to cover every film I can find that has a model spaceship featured in it however briefly. It will more than likely fall short as I have little knowledge of and access to non-english speaking films and I might miss a few others along the way. If you spot any films that I have neglected please let me know in the comments system.
  

 

I resisted doing a comprehensive survey of spaceships in the cinema for a long time as I felt that it was being amply covered elsewhere but have recently come round to the idea given that models and particularly spaceship models have been my obsession for a very long time. I build spaceship models as a hobby using the same basic techniques as the models from the films that will be covered on this site. Examples and full making of descriptions of my work can be found on my other hobby blogsite rcscifi.blogspot.com. 

 

I was fifteen years old when Star wars was released in 1977. Seeing the dynamically moving , intricately detailed spacecraft in that movie had a profound effect on me. I started building spaceship models to try and figure out the technique. When I started there was no internet with information on anything you want that was only a few clicks and a search away. For any information on how to do something you looked in books in a library or purchased magazines. One of the benefits of the release of Star Wars was that suddenly a lot of information on visual effects and miniatures was being published, information that was previously kept from the public. I made up scrapbooks of all the spaceship model photos I could find, cut out of magazines and original movie programs, so I could study them and figure out what worked and what didn't. It was critical to the efficiency and success of this study to have all the pictures in one place. This blog and my others is really an attempt to build an online extension of that scrapbook idea, to try and have a repository of pictures and information about visual effects miniatures now sadly a dying art.