Special effects veteran Mark T. Noel was recognized with a Scientific and Technical Achievement Award from the Academy for his contributions to motion bases.  Mark T. Noel first encountered motion bases on the set of Jurassic Park, when he saw that Stan Winston’s giant animatronic T-Rex had been positioned on one for filming. “I was working on some of the mechanical effects like the car up in the tree gag, but then over on the next stage they had that T-Rex on this motion base. I was blown away. I had never seen one before and I was just completely mesmerized by it.” Now, some three decades later, Noel was recognized with a Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate) from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his own contributions to motion base technology.  Mark Noel at the 2024 Scientific and Technical Awards at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Tuesday, April 29, 2025. ©A.M.P.A.S. All rights reserved. The full citation for Noel’s achievement is as follows: To Mark Noel for adapting and enhancing the safety and reliability of transportable six-degrees-of-freedom motion base technology for motion picture use. The NACMO series of modular motion bases enables filmmakers to dynamically control simulated actions, providing precise movements, enhancing special effects, and enriching the visual experience for audiences worldwide. The special effects veteran, who runs NAC Effects with his sons, previously received a Sci-Tech award in 2011 in relation to a servo winch system that pulls vehicles through the air on wires. This year he was part of a cohort of recipients honored at the annual Scientific and Technical Awards ceremony held on April 29 at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. A history with motion bases After Jurassic Park, Noel’s next major encounter with a motion base was on True Lies (1994). “I had some connections and they said, ‘We want to put a Harrier jet on a motion base’, and they basically made me in charge of that, even though I had never done it before. But I think hanging a car from a winch up in a tree for Steven Spielberg gives you a certain amount of credit, as it were.” The rented motion base used for ‘True Lies’. Noel is flying the Harrier on the right of the picture. At the time, the motion base was rented, tested at Van Nuys airport, and then moved to the top of a twenty-story building in Miami. “We got it up there with a tower crane, and put a full-sized Harrier buck on the motion base. We shot for two months there, took it all apart and moved it back to Van Nuys to shoot all the parts where the Harrier is rotating.”  What Noel found on that project was that the rented motion base was difficult to use. “You had to completely disassemble every single part of it to move it around,” he recalls. “It was very tedious and it was definitely something I thought could be made more user-friendly and made safer, and there was a desire to use a better computer.” It took Noel about six years but he finally built his own motion base. With the help of special effects supervisor John Frazier, Noel came on board Almost Famous (2000) to help realize a scene with a plane and its passengers experiencing severe turbulence. “John got me the funding to finish my motion base,” shares Noel. “It was only half done and he got me the money. I finished it, and it worked fine. And then, the next day, it went on to Space Cowboys (2000).” The NACMO II as used on ‘Rampage’. Indeed, a trademark of Noel’s motion bases—NAC Effects now has six of them that it rents out, the largest of which can accommodate loads of 75,000 pounds—is their portability. “The original motion base from True Lies would take two weeks to set up, but these days we just need one day to load in, a day to assemble, a day to test it, and then we’re ready to go,” says Noel.  Alongside the push for more modular motion bases (Noel notes that the larger ones are more complicated and do take more time to set up) came the desire for enhanced safety. “We said, ‘OK, how do we really make this safe? How do we implement the valving and the e-stop systems and everything to really make this thing as safe as possible?’”  How motion bases work You have probably seen behind the scenes footage of partial aircraft fuselages or boats with the actors or stunt performers inside atop motion bases being rocked around on film sets. These mechanical set-ups, now often computer and motion-controlled, are crucial for helping to safely capture dynamic scenes of characters in or on moving vehicles or creatures or structures in the confines of a controlled set, especially against bluescreen or greenscreen, or, quite commonly these days, LED walls.  The NACMO motion based used on ’12 Rounds’. Noel describes motion bases as effectively hexapods with six axes of motion. “They can basically do six different kinds of motion. They can pitch/roll, which is where it tilts in either direction. They can surge forward. They can sway, which is back and forth. Heave is up and down and rotate is yaw. All these combinations of motion are all blended together.” “There’s six cylinders that are formed into triangles,” continues Noel, “and there are universal joints at either end. Because hydraulics are so strong, whenever a cylinder is stopped, it’s basically an iron bar. It’s just rigid until it’s told to move electronically. Each cylinder has a valve. It has internal feedback, which tells the computer what position it’s in. So, when you command the valve, you tell it to move and the cylinder will move until the transducer inside tells the valve to stop. That’s called a closed loop system.” ‘First Man’ utilized the MIGHTY-MO with a rotator and rotisserie. Most of the time, motion bases are operated via a waldo. “It basically looks exactly like a small replica of the motion base, and it has six transducers on it, and that’s our joystick,” explains Noel. “We move this little motion base and it lets us move the big one all around. The big motion base is slaved to the waldo.” NAC Effects’ motion bases are able to be operated via different motion control computer systems. In addition, moves can be pre-programmed in a DCC like Maya, where a creature might be animated first and this then used to drive the movement of the motion base.   Mark Noel at the 2024 Scientific and Technical Awards at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Tuesday, April 29, 2025. ©A.M.P.A.S. All rights reserved. Motion base highlights Recently, NAC Effects was involved in the film Flight Risk (2025) which saw a small plane fuselage placed on a motion base and filmed on an LED volume for essentially the entire film. “That was 25 days on a motion base,” remarks Noel. “It looks amazing in the movie, considering they did it on a stage in Las Vegas and it’s meant to be taking place over the Alaskan mountains.” Another highlight for Noel was special effects supervisor JD Schwalm’s use of NAC’s 35,000 pound eight axes motion base for First Man (2018), which also relied on an LED volume. “For that one, the team was actually able to tilt the horizon with the waldo. They locked the horizon of the volume screen into the waldo. They were controlling the motion base and the horizon at the same time.” Several years ago, for Spider-Man (2002), John Frazier utilized one of Noel’s motion bases to place around 20 children on a tram car mock-up. “They were between five and eight years old on the motion base for the part where the Green Goblin cuts them loose and it’s shifting around,” remembers Noel. “You have everybody’s parents there, they’re putting their kids on this crazy hydraulic thing, and I’m controlling it. I had to make it so that nobody started freaking out, because one kid starts crying, they’re all going.”  The largest object Noel believes has been placed on one of NAC’s motion bases was a 65,000-pound robot head for Pacific Rim (2013). “The crew had water dumping on it. They had sparks. It had so much inertia. It was 6-inch cylinders and 4-inch rods with a 400-horsepower electric pump. It was the craziest thing because it was shaking the floor when it would move.” The post ‘I was just completely mesmerized by it’ appeared first on befores & afters.