Mark's Steelworking Projects

May 9, 2014

Mark is currently working as steel construction foreman for the GB project. They are building sections for a shoot of a ferris wheel that breaks free and rolls into a forest. They construct only the pieces that are going to be on camera. Above is the beginning of the frame, and then at right as the dressing up is being done for the shoot. The whole thing was moved out into the woods for the actual set.

Side view of the ferris wheel section and a sample of the kind of fencing Mark's crew has been doing.

Mark sometimes gets to help out the special effects crews, and on this day he and his partner were sent out to cut this car in two. He said they did the cutting with a cutoff wheel on a grinder.

This is for a car which is sliced in two by a laser beam in the movie. They have thin rope led lighting which will be strung around the edges of the cuts so that when the laser cuts the car, the edges will glow as if they are still red hot from the cut. Mark worked special effects on the last movie, and liked it, so he is always glad to be involved in what they are doing.

On June 3, Mark sent us this picture of the steel support frame his crew had constructed for support of a ferris wheel frame in the woods in the vicinity of Conyers. In the movie, a ferris wheel gets loose and rolls away and into the woods.

We had had interesting conversations with Mark during the design phase of this support frame when he came out to visit. Being twenty-something feet into the air and having to support the ferris wheel made it an engineering and fabrication challenge. They did have to get an engineering signoff on this design since it had to be designed to withstand a 110mph wind according to the engineering protocols. They embedded a spiral steel support into the concrete feet that supported the steel frame. The last time we had talked with him before this, he told us that they had the steel fabricated and were about at the place bring in a crane to lift it into place.