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Movie Set Design
Working closely with the Special Effects experts, The Effects Group, SDA have engineered major mechanical movie sets for :-
K-19, The Widowmaker (Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson)
For the internal submarine scenes, it was required to represent the motion of the submarine. This was done by mounting the entire set on a two-axis motion platform, designed by SDA. Dubbed 'Puff the Magic Dragon' by the film crew, this huge platform had to safely carry the sets, measuring 24ft wide, 40 ft long and weighing up to 23 tons empty, 26 tons with actors, cameras, technicians, directors etc on board. The sets had to pitch and roll 20˚, vibrate and shudder on command.
X-Men (Patrick Stewart, Halle Berry)
Remember the scene where the train was ripped apart? Well, someone had to ensure that when the roof was coming apart that the frame carrying all the actors did not collapse in the middle. You see, trains are designed like cars these days, the roof holds the whole thing together. Tear apart the roof and the entire structure collapses. We had to build a massive system of support beams to keep the railcar intact.
Bulletproof Monk (Chow Yun Fat)
One of the great effects was the 16' diameter satellite dish crashing down on the bad guys. Trouble is, you want to make several takes of that scene to get it just right and that uses up a lot of satellite dishes. At SDA we were required to make the set reusable so that they could film away as often as they wanted. Thus the dish was pivoted at its base and restrained at the last minute by a hydraulic cylinder. The real trick here was not to stop the dish falling so suddenly that we bent the mast in the process. Careful design of the configuration and specification of the pressure and stroke of the cylinder ensured the director got the perfect scene, as seen in the sequence below.
New York Minute (The Olsen Twins)
Maybe it should be called 'Toronto Minute' as the famous Olsen Twins were here for the shooting of this movie. The scene in question involved dropping the Twins off the roof of the Royal York Hotel, and naturally we had to make sure they came to no harm. The twins (or more correctly, their stunt-doubles) were in a swing stage hanging from a rig, which suddenly free-falls 13 storeys before it comes to a halt just above the ground. We had to make sure that that the stage and its support rig was strong enough to withstand the dynamic loads imposed during this dramatic scene.
Dark Water (Jennifer Connelly)
A very wet movie. It seems as if every scene has water in it, whether it comes up out of drains, oozes through walls or sprays out of a washing machine, there seems no getting away from it in this remake of a Japanese psycho-thriller. We had to engineer a five-storey section of an apartment building featuring the elevator lobby on all floors, complete with a fully working elevator and an unusual triangular fire-escape. For one of the dramatic underwater scenes (a view from the bottom of a water tower), we had to design a water tank to sit on the studio floor, measuring 16 ft square and 14 ft deep, that's over 26,000 gallons weighing approximately 110 tons.
Upcoming Movies
We are just starting to work on the following movies:
The Man (Samuel Jackson, Eugene Levy)