Editing Supermarionation (section)

====Special effects====
Special effects were created with miniature models and sets in a range of scales.<ref name="Hirsch64"/> A wide variety of materials were used in their construction – for example, rock faces were made from painted blocks of polystyrene, while miniature vehicles incorporated recycled household objects and parts from toy model kits.<ref>Meddings, pp.&nbsp;27-28.</ref><ref>La Rivière 2014, pp.&nbsp;114-115.</ref> The lighting used for effects shooting was five times as strong as that normally used on a live-action production.<ref name="Hirsch64"/> Effects were typically shot at high speed (72 to 120 [[frames per second]]) with the footage slowed down in post-production to give a sense of greater weight or steadiness, thus making the sequences look more realistic.<ref name="Hirsch64"/><ref name="Meddings16">Meddings, p.&nbsp;16.</ref><ref>La Rivière 2014, p.&nbsp;148.</ref> High-speed filming was essential for shots on water in order to make the small ripples inside the filming tank look like ocean waves.<ref name="Meddings16"/> As sets were built to scale, it was often hard to maintain a realistic sense of depth.<ref name="O'Neill,4"/><ref>Rogers et al., p.&nbsp;162.</ref>

Underwater sequences were filmed not in water, but on dry sets with a thin aquarium between the set and the camera to distort the lighting. Bubble jets and small fish were added to the aquarium to create [[forced perspective]].<ref>Meddings, pp.&nbsp;16-17.</ref> Beginning with ''Stingray'', shots of aircraft in flight were filmed using a technique called the "rolling sky", which was devised by effects director [[Derek Meddings]] to allow filming of dynamic shots in confined space. It involved painting the sky background on a canvas, which was then wrapped around a pair of electrically driven rollers, and creating an impression of movement by running the canvas around the rollers in a continuous loop as opposed to moving the miniature aircraft itself.<ref>Meddings, pp.&nbsp;36-37.</ref> ''Thunderbirds'' saw the introduction of the "rolling road", an adaptation of the technique whereby foreground, middleground and background elements of road sequences were created as separate rolls of looped canvas and spun at varying speeds.<ref>Meddings, p.&nbsp;72.</ref>

In the pursuit of realism, newly built models and sets were deliberately "dirtied down" with paint, oil, pencil lead and other substances to give them a used or weathered look.<ref>Meddings, pp.&nbsp;17-18.</ref> [[Jetex]] propellant pellets were fitted to the undersides of miniature ground vehicles to emit jets of gas resembling dust trails.<ref>Meddings, p.&nbsp;54.</ref> Over time, the effects used for puppet gunfights became more elaborate: whereas gunshot effects in ''Four Feather Falls'' were created by simply painting marks on the [[film negative]] (which showed up as white flashes on the finished print), for later series the puppets' miniature prop guns were fitted with small charges that were fired using a car battery.<ref>Meddings, pp.&nbsp;98-99.</ref>