Backdrops cut down to size
For most little boys, tinkering with model trains doesn’t lead to a viable career. But for Joachim Gruninger, it laid the tracks for a life as a miniature supervisor and visual effects guru.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany, the son of an engineer, Gruninger studied his father’s trade for three years before a friend recruited him to work as a set decorator on 1985’s “Joey,” director Roland Emmerich’s first movie after film school. “Working with my hands and with machines was always something that I liked, and so that made me move into this sort of craft,” he says.
After several more Emmerich productions, Gruninger moved to Munich and founded the company Magicon in 1987. Since then he has designed miniatures for “The Pianist” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” For Emmerich’s latest epic, “10,000 BC,” due in theaters Friday, Gruninger built the largest miniature of his career: a vast backdrop consisting of three pyramids, a palace and the River Nile.
Smaller than life: There was nothing diminutive about the 200-by-200-foot miniature set on “10,000 BC.” “The bigger you build it, the better you can build it,” Gruninger says. “The sheer size makes it easier to add the necessary amount of detail and that allows the camera to go closer and closer. It’s easier to get the depth of field. And you don’t want to have a soft, blurry foreground because that immediately makes it look like a miniature, toy train perspective.”
Fantastic plastic: Gruninger chose to build his pyramids out of something a little more worker-friendly than giant blocks of stone. “As far as the materials go, there is, of course, wood,” he says. “But most of the materials creating the surfaces are some sort of a resin or a plastic material. You pour it into a mold, and it hardens and the reaction takes place. So all the surfaces that you see in the movie that look like stone or even like the wooden scaffolding constructions that we put all over the pyramids are, as a matter of fact, the things that we’d cast in molds in large quantities. They’re painted slightly differently, so you still believe that it’s something that’s manufactured by hand rather than from some sort of a modern factory assembly.”
Rewriting history: Gruninger’s miniature pyramids blend the historically correct details of Giza with elements of Emmerich’s imagination. “We got hold of all sorts of books about ancient Egypt and stuff like that,” says Gruninger. “But the film has a title ‘10,000 BC,’ so we are creating a fantasy pre-Egyptian world there. Roland actually pretends that there was somebody else putting up the pyramids and the Sphinx and all of that before the Egyptian culture actually modified or altered them.”
The shipping news: The miniature build spanned two continents. “We had up to 70, 80 model makers working for a period of four months on the whole miniature construction back in Germany,” says Gruninger. “And then we had 15 long overseas containers, the ones that are 12 meters, and we had those filled with all the parts of the miniatures. They were sent by ship to Namibia. It took 30 days’ transportation, and then it took us three weeks to set the whole thing up in the Namib Desert. We had some concrete foundations cast into the sand to stand the more important buildings on, and then we filmed it for six weeks. We did literally hundreds of miniature shots. That was quite a huge build.”