John Goodson has centered his career and his life on model making and painting, practical and digital.

CGSociety :: Artist Profile
21 July 2009, by Barbara Robertson

On the wall behind John Goodson’s desk at Industrial Light & Magic is the saucer section of the 'Enterprise' model used in 'Star Trek VI'. When you hear Goodson’s story, you realize that it just couldn’t be otherwise.

This is what comes to his mind when asked how he came to be a visual effects model maker: One day, when he was five years old, he was watching a boy playing with a model airplane. The boy picked up a rock and smashed the model into a million pieces. Goodson was stunned. He picked up all the parts, took them home, and rebuilt the model. Five years old. “I used cardboard things out of a Mars bar to make the wings,” he remembers. “It was my first model.”

One of his latest is the 2009 'U.S.S. Enterprise' which glides through 'Star Trek,' and for which Goodson was a viewpainter (texture painter) at ILM. It was his fifth 'Star Trek.' For the previous four, he was in ILM’s practical model shop; and for 'Star Trek: Generations' (1994) and 'Star Trek: First Contact' (1996), he supervised the model making.

In fact, in high school he and his friend Tony Hudson built the Walkers from 'Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back,' put them in sets that they made, and filmed stop motion scenes. “We told each other that if either of us made it to ILM, we’d call the other one,” Goodson says.

Following high school, after reading all the three 'Art of' books for 'Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI,' and pouring over the bios of the model makers, Goodson picked his major: industrial design. He was living in North Carolina at the time, so he chose the North Carolina State School of Design. There, he used the model shop to experiment with materials and shapes used by the special effects model makers.

“I remember reading an interview with Greg Jein who said he had built the ship in ‘Dark Star’ out of urethane foam,” Goodson says. “I drove from one end of the state of North Carolina to the other looking for urethane foam and all I got were blank looks. It was frustrating. There wasn’t much information back in 1984/85.”

So, during the most recent 'Star Trek', he was a touchstone for the CG modelers who gathered at his desk to check the design as the ship evolved. “I’ve worked on almost all the miniatures for the Enterprise that exist and I’ve studied them all,” he says. “I love these ships.”

Although the 2009 model sports a streamlined design, Goodson added some details from the Enterprise in the original TV series – a series of shapes on the underside. “It’s subtle, but it will matter to someone out there,” he says.

It also fit with viewpaint supervisor Ron Woodall’s idea of mimicking the paint from the original Enterprise. “It has a type of paint on it called interference paint,” Goodson says. “It actually has little prisms in it so that when you see it from one angle it reads red and from another it reads green. You can get it at Kragen’s [auto parts store] now, but it was revolutionary for the time. So we used two different specular color maps with exactly the same patterns but colors in opposition to get that effect.”

In fact, from the time he put that first model together until today, Goodson has been obsessed with model making. He builds and paints digital models during the day at ILM, and at home, builds practical models. He’s filled his garage with projects. Enough, he says, to last him a couple hundred years. Airplanes hang from the cathedral ceiling in his house, ones he’s built and some he’s collected. “I had one wall starting to fill with World War II movie props,” he says. “But, I’ve kind of had to retract so my girlfriend has some space. I’m always building models. I love reproducing things.”

But then Tony Hudson called. It had been five years since they had built the stop motion 'Star Wars' set, Tony had landed in ILM’s creature shop, and he was fulfilling his part of their high school pledge. Goodson flew across the country to visit him. “He let me sleep on his couch for six weeks and hang out while they were working on 'Star Trek IV,'" he says. “Greg Jein was there working on ‘Batteries Not Included'.”

Goodson, of course, told Jein he wanted to work in the model shop and Jein, of course, told him to finish school first. So Goodson went back, but for his independent study project, he mimicked the work of ILM modelers building the 'Enterprise' for the 'Star Trek Next Generation' pilot. “I was talking to Tony about once a week, finding out how they were building it,” Goodson says. “I was trying to do the same thing on the East Coast, not building the same ship, but using the same techniques and processes.”

In 1988, after Goodson finished college, he flew to San Francisco and met with Larry Tan at ILM. Tan said maybe he’d have a job, and that slight encouragement was enough. Goodson and his wife moved to California a month later. “My wife knew what I wanted to do from the first night she met me,” he says. Six days after they arrived, the model shop called and asked if he could come in for a week. He’s been at ILM since, except for a short stint at ImageMovers Digital. His wife, though, gave up.

“We were incredibly busy,” Goodson says. “My first feature was ‘Ghostbusters,’ and we had minimum 10 hour days at the time. The clock had a sticker on it with an arrow that pointed to 7:00. The top half of the arrow said, ‘go to work,’ and the bottom said, ‘go home.’”

Goodson remembers seeing his first digital composite in 1991, for 'Back to the Future, Part II,' but he stayed with the practical model shop until six years ago, working on more than 30 films as a modeler, painter and concept artist.

Six years ago, though, he was working in the art department at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch building concept models for 'Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith'. “We’d take the sketches George approved and build, basically, a three-dimensional blueprint. I remember building a two-foot or so study model for the Republic Cruiser, which is the big star-destroyer ship at the beginning of 'Episode III', and then the next thing I knew I was painting a digital model of the Republic Cruiser in the computer.”