Following on the heels of Raiders and Temple of Doom, the Last Crusade presented the optical effects unit at Industrial Light and Magic and the physical effects team in London with the ultimate challenge, topping their own exemplary work in the two previous films. With such diverse assignments as the construction of an authentic World War I tank, the collapse of an enormous temple, and the aging of a man into dust without the aid of cutaways, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade would prove to be the perfect vehicle for cinematic one-upsmanship.

In the film's opening sequence Indy must contend with not only the bandits chasing him, but also the train's inhospitable occupants. At one point, he fights with a bandit on top of a boxcar while an angry rhinoceros below pokes its prodigious horn up through the ceiling. Lantieri rigged the roof to break away and then had technicians down below thrusting a horn up through the roof. A cuing system was rehearsed so that at the crucial moment, the horn would burst up under River Phoenix's arm, along his side and between his legs. The massive foam and fiberglass rhinoceros prop had been created by the British special effects crew but three days before filming the scene, Spielberg decided he wanted the rhino to move! John Buechler took on the challenge. The huge prop was delivered to Buechler's North Hollywood studio from the stage at Universal. Buechler and his crew set to work re-inventing the rhino. Over the course of three days, Buechler and company resculpted, re-cast, and mechanized the beast to such a degree, that not only did the rhino blink, snarl, and snort as Spielberg wanted, but it also wiggled it's ears! The director was so happy with the final creature that he allowed Buechler to call "action" and "cut" on the final shot of the film.

Buechler re-inventing the rhinoceros.

Elsewhere in the sequence Lantieri relied upon two mechanical giraffes built in England by mechanical effects supervisor George Gibbs and his crew. "The giraffes were operated by cables and brake handles," Lantieri explained, "and we cut skylight holes in the top of one of the boxcars so the heads could stick up through. One of the first things we learned was that steam locomotives are very loud - so loud that when we were in the boxcar it was hard to hear directions. Ultimately we used radios to communicate with David Tomblin, the first assistant director. We could not stick our heads out of the car because it would ruin the shots, so after a while we started answering his questions with the giraffes themselves. David would ask if the giraffes were ready, and the giraffes would shake their heads 'yes' or 'no' in response. It got to be pretty funny."

Continuing his hide and seek chase onboard the steaming train Indy encounters a ferocious anaconda, in reality an animatronic one.

Young Indy's victory is short-lived. Once home, he finds his father preoccupied and unwilling to listen to his tall tale. Before he can convince him of the urgency of the situation, the priceless antiquity is reclaimed by Fedora and the local sheriff. In a grudging gesture of admiration for the boy's tenacity, Fedora places his hat on Indy's head, the brim momentarily covering his youthful face. Then, in a cinematic transition, the scene shifts to the deck of a small freighter where the adult Indiana Jones - now played by Harrison Ford - is once again embroiled in a struggle to reclaim the elusive Cross of Coronado.

Though real rats had been employed for wide shots, George Gibbs and his team created some 1000 rubber replicas for shots that might endanger the rodent performers.

For Indy and Elsa's arrival at the Austrian stonewalled castle, an actual castle was photographed in West Germany. When the real edifice was later deemed too small, however, ILM matte department supervisor Mark Sullivan was called upon to expand it with a painting. "We also needed to add a rainstorm over the castle," said Sullivan. "In the past, effects people have had trouble shooting and matting in real water, so we tried something different, we filmed granulated Borax hand soap against black, threw it into a fan to get the effect of sheets of rain and shot it high-speed. Then, since it was a daylight shot, we just barely double-exposed it in. If the Borax had been brighter in the shot, it might have looked like snow. Also, we used a fast speed so it would not appear to be drifting." Mike Lessa in the animation department added lightning bolts to further enhance the establishing shot.

Later in the film, with Henry's diary saved from a book burning rally, Indy and his father race to the Berlin airport to catch the next flight out of Germany. The task of creating a pre-war representation of the Berlin airport fell to the ILM matte department. The live-action basis for the painting was an existing airport facility located on Treasure Island between San Francisco and Oakland. The airport is now part of a military installation, but in the 1930s it was used as a terminal for seaplanes. Also appropriate was the fact that it had an art deco style of architecture. Matte artist Yusei Uesugi added a control tower, Nazi banners, vintage automobiles and a sign that read 'Berlin Flughafen' as a final touch.

Full-size biplane ready for action.

Unable to get a standard flight, the Joneses opt for the only available alternative, a commercial zeppelin. When the zeppelin is ordered back to Germany the Joneses, in order to avoid capture, climb down into a small biplane attached to the underbelly of the ship and fly off. Partial full-scale sets and miniatures were used for the sequence. For shots of Indy and Henry lowering themselves into the biplane, George Gibbs and his crew constructed the entire belly section of a full-size zeppelin. The set piece was suspended forty feet in the air between two towers, and a full-size biplane was attached to a large scissor lift that could lower it and move it around in the frame. The full-size setup was used solely for close-up and medium shots. Wide angles of the full zeppelin employed a miniature constructed by ILM model shop supervisor Michael Fulmer and his crew. The airship model, eight feet long and carved out of foam, also featured a like-scaled miniature biplane small enough to fit in one's palm. For scenes of the plane separating from the zeppelin, a larger-scale biplane with a two-foot wingspan was built. The zeppelin and biplane miniatures were then shot separately under motion control and combined in optical.

Making & filming the zeppelin minature and the result in the film.

Though airborne and free of the zeppelin, Indy and Henry soon discover they have not shaken their enemies and are in fact being chased by two Nazi fighter planes. Once again, full-size airplanes and miniatures were combined to realize the sequence. For live-action shots involving the enemy pursuers, Swiss army training planes were dressed to look like German World War II fighters. To simulate machine gun fire, both the fighter planes and the full-scale biplane were fitted with electronic strobe lights and a revolutionary new firing system designed by George Gibbs. "We built what we call 'gas guns'- a new idea we pioneered based on the internal combustion chamber of an engine. The guns run off liquid gas-propane gas and oxygen-that we ignite with a spark plug similar to what is a Honda motorbike. By doing this, we are able to avoid using guns that shoot blanks-which is an advantage, not only because blanks are expensive, but also because you can hurt someone who is standing too close when the blanks go off. With these gas guns, nothing comes out of them except flames. Unfortunately, the technology works only with larger weapons like machine guns. The equipment required is too bulky for handguns."

After father and son crash-land into a countryside shack, they appropriate a car as their next escape vehicle. As the fighter planes try to zero in on the speeding car, Indy barrels around a comer and ducks into a tunnel. One plane veers away, but the other crashes into the mountainside. Its wings shear off completely, but the flaming fuselage continues on through the tunnel as Indy and Henry race to stay ahead of it. There was some discussion of trying to filming the scene full scale. They realized that first of all it would be horrendously difficult to do, especially in a location like Spain where you don't have all the support and materials. But the main consideration was the danger of putting real people in an old tunnel with fire and explosives. So almost immediately it was decided that there was no way to do that practically. So the ball fell in the ILM's court.

The miniature set of the tunnel in on ILM's parking lot.

"The fire tunnel involved miniatures shot against blue screen and also a complicated miniature set," explained McAlister. "The sequence begins when the plane crashes into the tunnel. We filmed the plane motion control and made wings out of aluminum foil that we stop-motion animated to crumble and break away at the moment of impact. Then for shots of the action inside the tunnel, we made quarter-scale models of the car, the airplane and the tunnel itself which ended up being a hundred and eighty feet long."

The finished miniature tunnel including the scale plane.

Since there was no stage big enough to accommodate the miniature set of the tunnel the filming took place in the ILM's parking lot. It took up about 14 parking spaces for a couple months, which ticked everybody off when they couldn't find a place to park. "But it was worth it," said McAlister. The 210 feet long fire tunnel was built in eight-foot sections, with each section hinged on one side so the top could literally be lifted up like a canopy for accessibility. The camera was affixed to a very complicated sled that was pulled along the left side of the set by a cable underneath the floor of the tunnel. Both the car and the airplane chasing it were also on cables. The models were moving at about twenty to thirty miles per hour and at that speed, things really had to be timed very carefully. The miniature plane was set on fire, sent through the tunnel and filmed at high-speed to help keep the flames in scale. Since the ambient light created by the burning airplane was not enough to fully illuminate the inside of the tunnel, additional lights were concealed within the detail in the over-head rocks.

Ford and Connery.

For close-ups of Indy and Henry inside the tunnel, Ford and Connery were photographed against blue screen in a full-size vehicle. The shots called for a dirty windshield in front of them; but since this would have interfered with the transmission of blue, the glass was removed and later filmed in miniature for optical insertion.

As the action continues, the plane rockets past Indy and his father, proceeds on out of the tunnel and explodes. For that explosion a background plate of an actual tunnel was shot in Spain. The same location was used for the very end of the sequence where a real car with stuntmen drove out and crashed through the airplane debris. For our plate, we shot the exit point of the tunnel with a big explosion going off to give us the correct lighting effect on the hillside around it. Later we shot the miniature airplane motion control as it skids out of the tunnel to the point where the practical explosion on the plate takes place. To get pieces of the plane flying around, we then blew up the model with a miniature explosion. We also shot additional miniature explosions to fill in the gap between the practical explosion on location and the model explosion. To make it appear that the miniature plane was kicking up rocks and dirt before it exploded animated shadows and dirt elements were incorporated into the final composite.

Toying with scale plane.

Emerging unscathed from the tunnel, Indy and Henry drive on with the remaining Nazi fighter still on their tail. The plane drops a bomb on the road ahead of them, gouging out a huge crater, which Indy cannot avoid. With their vehicle crippled Indy and Henry make their way, on foot, down to a beach, only to find themselves about to be strafed by the low-flying fighter plane. Sighting a flock of seagulls on the sand, the professor uses his umbrella to frighten them away. The birds fly up into the flight path of the airplane, causing the pilot to lose control and crash into a mountain nearby.

Dropping seagulls.

To actualize the sequence, McAlister had to create images of a plane smashing into a flock of seagulls without actually harming any real birds."For the scenes where the airplane hits the birds, we made up a whole bunch of crosses with feathers glued on them. Actually, they looked pretty stupid; but because the shots were quick cuts, all we needed moving through the frame were shapes that looked like birds. We took the miniature plane that we used for the fire tunnel, cleaned it up, put the wings back on and hung it up in the air on a long crane arm. Then we placed a painted backing behind it and had the camera pan past the airplane so that it looked like the background was moving and the plane was actually flying. During filming, I had about a half dozen people dropping these cross shaped feather balls onto the airplane from a grid above the stage."

The feather balls served as the base effect, but to simulate a flock of birds in flight, a slightly more sophisticated approach was employed. "We found flying toys called Timbirds that you wind up like you would an old-time glider airplane," McAlister explained. "When you release them, their wings flap and they actually fly. I believe they are loosely based on a Leonardo da Vinci design from centuries ago. Just by chance, one of our cameramen brought a Timbird in one day and released it just before dailies. I thought it was neat, but didn't give it another thought until about a month later when I was having trouble finding real birds to use as a second element on these shots. So we bought several hundred of these Timbirds, wound them up and released them into the air against a black background. Then we double exposed them into the scene to create a denser flock of birds flying through the frame." For one additional close-up shot of the plane's propeller grinding to a halt, a miniature propeller was filmed with ordinary feathers falling towards it.

Making & filming the zeppelin minature and the result in the film.

The use of special effects for shots of birds crashing into a plane was to be expected. However, even the shots of gulls sitting on the beach had to be created by the special effects team. "For three months I had people in Spain trying to get seagulls," Robert Watts remarked, "but no one could come up with any. Usually, if you go out on a beach and throw a few pieces of fish around, millions of gulls will swoop in; but because it was their nesting season, there were none about. So we ended up using dummy seagulls that we cast in plaster and covered with feathers. We had some standing on the rocks, some on the beach, and some out in the water with anchors on them, bobbing up and down on the waves. They looked fantastic. Even standing ten feet away, it was impossible to tell they were not real. Their feathers fluttered in the wind, which gave them movement. Once we had everything all set up, real seagulls suddenly started to appear in the sky - with all those dummies on the beach, they must have wondered what was going on and decided to check it out." For one additional shot of the birds actually flying up through the scene, Watts rounded up hundreds of white pigeons. Since all they needed to do was move through the frame very quickly, the impostor pigeons were able to pass convincingly as seagulls.

For the establishing shot of the fictional Republic of Hatay in the Middle East Mark Sullivan and the matte department created the striking image of a city at dusk. While Sullivan's painting of the German castle was an extension of a real castle, this nonexistent city was created entirely in silhouette with cutout buildings and telephone poles made from photo-etched brass and sheet aluminum. "We grouped the brass and aluminum pieces together in forced perspective about twenty feet deep and sprayed them black," Sullivan explained. "Then we pumped in a lot of smoke and backlit it which created a pretty realistic effect that was shot by Wade Childress and Jo Carson. To bring life to the silhouettes, we added a matte painting that created the appearance of fill light inside the shadows and rim light on the edges of the buildings. I also painted in the sky, and in a couple of passes we put in some smoke coming out of the chimneys and even a few animated birds flying across the scene." Over the city shot appears a title identifying the locale. Usually such a title would be added later in an optical duping situation; but to avoid this extra generation, the entire shot was created latent image with a holdout matte bipacked in the camera. Then after the various silhouette and painting passes were completed, Childress burned the text into the final image.

The scale tank in action.

Having freed Henry and Brody from the belly of the steel beast, Indy fights it out atop the tank with Nazi officer Vogel. Caught up in their scuffle neither man is aware that the armored vehicle is heading straight for a cliff. When the tank goes over the precipice, it appears that Indiana Jones has indeed made his last crusade. "For obvious reasons," noted Mike McAlister, "the scene could not be done with a real tank and a real cliff. Not only would they lose actors if the tank did not stop at the right moment, but they also did not want it to look like the tank was slowing down as it got closer to the edge, which it would have had to do if it were being shot for real. So we created the illusion of a cliff by combining the full-scale tank footage with miniatures and a matte painting. We started by picking a suitably flat spot over in Spain where we could simulate a cliff edge. We shot the scene with the actors on the tank just as if the cliff were really there. During filming of the live-action, the tank got closer and closer to our imaginary cliff line and then continued right over." To complete these wide-angle shots, a matte painting was added to create the precipice itself. Then for other angles of the vehicle actually tumbling over the edge and crashing into a ravine below, a quarter scale miniature tank built by the Gibbs unit was filmed going over a fifty-foot high cliff in Spain. Additional shots of the tank plummeting into the chasm employed matte paintings and a tank miniature shot against blue screen at ILM. Final shots looking down on the chasm featured the miniature tumbling into a rock quarry located near the effects facility.

Amazingly, Indy once again cheats death and rejoins his friends at the edge of the cliff. With barely a moment to catch their breath, the determined foursome race off to find the Grail temple and block the Nazi pillage. Their quest takes them to the Canyon of the Crescent Moon where they discover a mighty temple carved into the face of a cliff. The initial long-distance view of the full canyon was yet another Mark Sullivan matte painting, augmented with a miniature set built by Paul Huston.

Once inside the temple Henry gets shot in the stomach and Indy has no choice but to face the temple's three challenges. The first, The Breath of God, requires a 'penitent man' to pass. Indy grapples with this cryptic phrase as he walks down a temple corridor and realizes a penitent man would get down on his knees in prayer. Indy does so just in time to avoid being killed by an array of circular blades that slice into the passageway from the walls and ceiling. The blades themselves were a combination of fully operational mock blades built into the temple set and miniature blades blue screened in by the ILM effects team.

Adding cobwebs to the cavern's miniature.

Indy quickly disables the device and then moves on to a passageway of stepping stones marked with individual letters. For this second challenge, the Word of God, Indy deduces that he must spell the name of God in order to proceed. However, when he steps down on the stone marked with a letter 'J', for Jehovah, the rock collapses beneath him and he nearly falls into an enormous chasm below. Initially, the scene was filmed with Harrison Ford stepping on the wrong stone and being attacked by a big spider but the result wasn't satisfactory enough and they came up with the a chasm underneath. In the scene, the chasm was realized in a matte painting showing a view from the bottom of the cavern looking up at the place where Indy's foot has pushed through the floor. To create the shot, a stuntman was filmed on a set built thirty feet above the floor of the ILM main stage. The set represented a portion of the ceiling of the cavern, or the underside of the floor Indy is walking on, and was made to look like it was constructed from inlaid stones. The camera was positioned on the floor of the stage looking up to get the correct angle on the stuntman's foot crashing through. "On the wall behind the set," Sullivan said, "I placed a background painting depicting the wall of the cave so that as the stuntman's foot fell through, we could also film debris and dirt falling away from him. The painting was done on a large canvas, fifteen feet wide and forty feet high, that was erected vertically in the main stage. This shot was actually added late in our schedule and I had to do the painting in a hurn, so I literally threw buckets of paint onto the canvas and smeared it around with brooms. Since the background was supposed to be dark and mysterious, it did not need a lot of detail." Once this live-action plate was filmed latent image, it was incorporated into a matte painting of the rest of the cavern. In separate passes, foreground miniatures were shot to add cobwebs and support pillars for the 'safe' stones in the ceiling. To complete the illusion, matte paintings of aerial haze and light streams were double-exposed into the shot.

Indy manages to catch himself before he falls into the cavern. Quickly he realizes his error, spells out Jehovah on the correct stones and then proceeds on to face the final test. The Path of God involves a narrow tunnel that leads out to a ledge overlooking a chasm, with no apparent way to cross over. The riddle tells Indy that he must make a 'leap of faith' so he slowly, and with great trepidation, steps out into the void. To his astonishment his foot lands on something solid, yet he appears to be standing in midair. As Indy proceeds to walk across the abyss to a ledge on the other side, the camera swings to the right and reveals the trick, Indy is walking on a bridge painted to match the rock on the opposite cliff face, thereby making it invisible from his original vantage point. The camouflaged bridge was a Spielberg inspiration. "I thought it would be interesting if somebody hundreds of years ago painted a false perspective on a bridge that matched the terrain two hundred feet below in color and texture. Of course, thinking the idea up and having it sketched was the easy part. We never knew for certain if it would work until ILM got involved and made it happen."

"The leap of faith shot was an example of a scene that could not exist without the use of special effects," McAlister said. "When the shot was first conceived, there was great discussion in England on how to do it and Douglas Slocombe, the director of photography, was pretty sure he could come up with something there that would work. But Elliot Scott was very worried about whether or not they could accomplish it practically. Also, it would have been much too expensive to build a full-size set because the sequence only involved four or five shots. So the buck was passed to us early on, and I was sure, that if anyone could accomplish it, we could, partly because we would have more control over the elements."

ILM's solution to the leap of faith dilemma was to use a combination of matte paintings and miniatures. The first shot in the sequence was a matte painting by Yusei Uesugi. It was the basic bottomless pit shot, looking down the side of an enormous rock cliff that just goes on and on into darkness. Since this was supposed to be Indy's point of view, his feet are visible in the frame. The feet and the rock that they are standing on were miniatures built by Paul Huston. They found some small boots about one-third the size of the real boots used by Harrison Ford, and positioned them over a miniature rock placed in front of the painting. Then they puppeteered them a little bit so they would not look like stiff shoes.

Yusei Uesugi working on the first matte painting shot.

The remainder of the leap of faith shots involved a model of the bridge, nine feet tall by thirteen feet wide, that was carved by Huston out of green styrofoam. To paint the bridge, the camera was placed in the starting position of the shot so that Huston could view the model from the same angle as the camera. "In the start position of the shot," said McAlister, "the camera was at a very high angle looking down at the bridge and the cliff below. Paul looked through the camera and first sketched on the bridge the detail that he saw below. If, for instance, there were certain rock formations way down low in the abyss, he painted those same formations on the bridge so that through the lens the bridge appeared to blend in with those formations. As long as we photographed the bridge from the same angle that Paul painted it from, it was impossible to tell that the bridge was there." To facilitate the painting process, 35mm Kodacolor print film was loaded into the Vistavision camera. As Huston painted, stills were shot every hour and developed at a nearby one-hour photo store, enabling an on-going assessment of the work in progress.

The illusion of invisibility is broken immediately when the camera moves off its initial axis. Once all the lines and textures on the bridge no longer match up with those on the cliff wall behind it, the nature of the bridge becomes fully evident. This camera move, crucial to the success of the illusion, was actually determined many months earlier during live-action shooting on the ILM blue screen stage. "We shot Harrison Ford against a blue screen long before we built the miniature bridge," McAlister noted. "We did a shot of him stepping out into supposed midair, realizing he is on something solid and then starting to take a few steps forward. I had to imagine as well as I could the move that we would ultimately do on the miniature and then make that move on Harrison. It was important that the perspective change on Harrison match the perspective change we would later do on the miniature. In a way, it made sense to shoot Harrison first because then we could conform our miniature shoot to whatever restrictions we had on the live-action."

The model of the bridge and Ford taking the "leap of faith".

Since Ford was filmed in a blue screen environment, he did not have a shadow, which was clearly needed since a strong shaft of light was streaming into the finished scene. To create the shadow, a miniature puppet figure was photographed on the miniature bridge. A stop-motion puppet was positioned on the bridge right where the blue screen element was going to be composited and then imitated Ford's movements. They did one pass with the puppet on the bridge and then one of the bridge itself. Later they split-screened the puppet out of the shot, leaving only its shadow. Then they matted Harrison in and he suddenly had his shadow. Indy successfully reaches the ledge on the other side of the abyss and tosses a handful of dirt onto the bridge to