Scratchbuilding the Nuclear Truck from On Your Mark --Finished.

The wheels have arrived and are bigger than I thought they would be. I also decided that the door I had put on the driver's side looked "wrong." 

So I spent today constructing a new door and reshaping the driver's side of the truck. I also built a lower hull. I plan to mount the wheels onto the truck using simple metal rod for axles, which will run through holes drilled into the sides of the lower hull.

Glued the lower hull to the rest of the body and then finished up by hitting everything with a coat of primer gray.

I spent today working on the turbine housing on the left rear of the truck, using a combination of bent card stock, heat-bent styrene, and superglue gel to fill in the gaps. I used small guage speaker wire for the wiring coming out of the housing.

I also ordered some "hot rod" headlights from Detail Masters. They only had two sets of the satin headlights (four). Since I needed five headlights (three on one side, two on the other) I ordered a set of polished aluminum headlights to go with the two satin sets. I hollowed out a pair of legos and then cut them in half to make the headlight shields.

All I have to do now is enjoy Christmas and wait for the resin wheels to get here. Then I'll work on the suspension, front fenders, and cowling. (I've already printed out a wicked set of Nuclear Warning symbol decals).

Over the weekend I attached the panels on the right side of the Truck, adding latches and lift handles.

On the left side i fabricated a fender with a curved lip and a 40 degree angle downward, where it attaches behind the crew hatch door. I also added grab rails beside the door, and that angled bit which sits on top of the fender.

Under the fender I added some ":frame" detail, and a perimeter band which angles in at the front (which will eventually support the front fender).

Scratchbuilt the radiator and shell.

The Bonecrusher Transformers I purchased on ebay are too small to be used as a base for this scratchbuild (I really thought they would be bigger). So, falling back on my computer graphics experience, I made a "wireform" platform which will form the bottom of the Nuclear Truck.

I purchased some .040 sheet styrene and found that it is very hard to heat and bend. So I bought some .020 sheet and started making body panels, using my propane torch as a heat source. The body panels are being positioned and glued on top of (and around) the wireform base (bottom of the truck).

This is the body, to date:

As you can see, I have masked the windows of the crew cab, primed it in light gray. I also added some cooling grills to the right side of the body (they are from a model locomotive engine) black grillwork to the rear of them, and two round doodads that are toward the front.

I also built and primed the angled door hatch.

 Four sets of resin dual-wheel for a 1/25 scale semi are on order. They will be placed on the right (passenger) side of the Nuclear Truck (you will remember that it has four front wheels, with the passenger side wheels being dual wheels and the driver side consisting of single wheels).

I left the hood rather long because I don't know how much space the double front wheels will need. When I get the wheels, I will fabricate the front suspension. The rear will probably just be a metal rod running through holes in the body, since the rear wheel on the passenger side is mostly covered.

I spent the weekend building the windshield section.

Here are two pictures. I still need to do some clean-up work and paint it.

While waiting for my materials to arrive (two broken Tranformers and some sheet styrene) I decided to draw and paint a background for when the Nuclear Truck is finished.

It's based on one of the screencaps and is 14 inches wide and 10 inches high.

On Your Mark is a seven minute music video which Hayao Miyazaki did for the Japanese singing due Chage & Aska. The song is in Japanese, but you don't need to know what the lyrics mean to appreciate the video. Miyazaki is known throughout the world as the unofficial Japanese Walt Disney.

I had a friend who was stationed in Japan pick up a copy of the video and convert it to an AVI file. You can usually find really bad (jerky animation) copies of On Your Mark on youtube. Just search for On Your Mark Miyazaki.

The story told in the video is set in the future. The camera pans through a beautiful countryside, with houses, but no people. There has been a Chernobyl-type accident and Mankind is now living in a huge, glass-topped underground city. Nuclear warning symbols are on all the vehicles.

A police force leads a raid on a religious cult (the building has a blinking single eye and the message "God is watching You").  After the raid, two of the policemen find that the cultists have an angel imprisoned in a small room. She is laying in garbage.They rescue her; the authorities take her away. The two policemen decide to rescue her and set her free.

The plotline is non-linear. It looks as though there are three attempts to get her out of the city. After each failure, there is a kind of  "rewind" and you see the plot repeated taking a different path.

There is no dialogue, but the drawn images are powerful and laden with emotion. Miyazaki, in an interview, said that he tried to incorporate every cautionary visual clue he could think of into the backgrounds. The walls are stained. There is trash everywhere. When they escape outside, there are hundreds of nuclear cooling towers in the distance. As the angel flies away, you can see a city with skyscapers on the other side of a distance shore (and if you freeze the frame, you'll see that one of the skyscrapers is leaning to one side, ready to topple). The road's edges are overgrown, as are the front yards of homes at the very end of the video.

I have watched this video repeatedly and always notice something new in it. The attention to small details. The emotion expressed by the characters through their actions is amazing.

Miyazaki's animated films aren't  just for kids. They create worlds and tell stories that adults can get into as well.

His best are: Nausicaa; Princess Mononoke;  My Neighbor Totoro; Porco Rosso; Spirited Away; and Kiki's Delivery Service. Pick any of them up on DVD. They are classics. They have a depth that early  Disney features never approached.

What is that, from a movie?