Marc Thorpe -- art • design • creative services

DESIGN

Special Effects

Commissions

Special Effects

Toys

Lamps

Ray Guns

Batting Tee

Other Objects

Other Inventions

ILM

I remember how excited I was to be working at ILM. I was hired to work on The Empire Strikes Back in 1979. The modelshop supervisor at the time, Lorne Peterson, saw a resemblence between my sculpture and the concept for the architectural style of Cloud City. Eventually I did make models of buildings for Cloud City, but first I did a lot of other things. One particularly delightful job was building the Tie Bomber. It was all new to me and the challenge, combined with the opportunity, was almost intoxicating. We would work a 10-hour day/50-hour week...arrive at 9 am and leave at 8 pm. Often, as 8 pm rolled around, I had no interest in leaving, even though I didn't get paid for working later. I was having too much fun to leave. Those were great times at ILM. The salad days of special effects.

Spider Robot

Stop motion puppet for the movie, Explorers.

Sparky

Sparky is a robot built for Panasonic as a mascot. I worked on the robot while at ILM as part of a team headed up by Tad Krzanowski, a mechanical genius from whom I learned so much. Sparky was designed by Ralph McQuarrie, who is famous for his wonderful Star Wars illustrations and designs.

Indiana Jones: Donovan's Destruction

A very complex robotic/prosthetic make-up shot. I was one of a small team that created this motion control, radio control effect whereby the character ages 100 years in 6 seconds. Three heads in varying stages of decay were used in conjunction with a motion control torso and with CG to blend the transitions between the three stages of decay.