Updates? We don’t need to show you no stinkin’ updates!
by DarenDoc on Aug.23, 2011, under Movie Design, Star Trek
Well, ok, just one.
I’ve been working a lot. Which is a good thing. However, it does keep me from doing updates on the ole’ bloggerino… so thanks to those who keep checking on me. (And thanks to the dozens of fascinating russian members of this blog who keep telling me about exciting new ways to buy prescription medications online!)
Todays update is about… you guessed it… ANOTHER Star Trek: TMP ditty.
As a lot of you know, the infamous “Officer’s Lounge” scene in TMP was one of those things that was never gotten “right”… When it was filmed, budget concerns made the set “less than adequate” to show the scale of the ship and its relation to the exterior. During pre and post production, there were ideas to set this scene in the large-windowed lounge behind the bridge on the egg shaped section of the primary hull. Andy Probert did a couple of these concept drawings, one in the “rec-deck” that was later transposed to this officer’s lounge, and rendered in the film with a model.
And this drawing… which was never realized…
When we came to work on the “Director’s Edition” back at the turn of the century… (Ten years ago already!) The idea was to try and get as close to this as possible… what we ended up doing was just putting the nacelles into the existing windows… (due to a couple compounded problems, we were forced at the last minute to use the existing stars… which, yes, resulted in the stars’ vanishing point not being completely aligned to the engine’s vanishing point) Anyway… what we had wanted to do would have, at the time, been a time and budget busting nightmare.
This is what we wanted to do.
(click on all images to enlarge)
There you have it. It could have worked… if we had a squad of about 20 rotoscope artists work around the clock for about 2 weeks. Nowadays, the tools are easier… and I figure I could do it myself in about half the time.
So, if we do ever get the call from Paramount for the 4K remastering of the Director’s Edition… We stand at the ready.
Leave a Reply
Daren’s Twitter Feed
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
Daren's sites
Fun Sites
Geek 'Cred
Meta
Archives
Pages
thumbtack
Promote Your Page Too Galaxy Quest: The Next Generation
Promote Your Page Too
August 23rd, 2011 on 9:48 am
That is pretty.
I’d buy the DE again just for that
August 23rd, 2011 on 8:45 pm
I hope you won’t be mad when I build this Trek lounge from your lovely drawings in my backyard!
Ps- Nascells are cool.
August 23rd, 2011 on 8:54 pm
Damn! The Blu-ray edition of ST:TMP – Director’s Edition is not ALREADY in the works. I am seriously looking forward to it. Thanks for the fascinating post! Love the
blog…
August 24th, 2011 on 3:16 am
I have no idea if the studio will ever give the DE the Hi Def treatment… but it should.
August 24th, 2011 on 10:05 pm
I have the Directors Edition DVD. I see no reason to get an inferior BluRay. Paramount, give me what I want or lost $18 (yeah, that will get ‘em)
August 24th, 2011 on 10:37 pm
I’d rather you fix Star Trek V. ha.
August 26th, 2011 on 6:26 am
Daren your work here is amazing, I hadn’t actually considered what would happen if you were called back to do the Motion Pic in Hi-Def. This enhancement would be worth the price of the Blu-Ray on its own!
August 29th, 2011 on 2:37 am
Daren, I love your work on the “ST:TMP” Director’s Edition. However, the one teensy little thing that has always bugged me about your beautiful revised effects is that for that scene in the lounge, the lights on the engine nacelles have lens flares which are cropped behind the window border and the actors. (I assume warp engines are powered by an unknown glowing substance which can make lens flares happen before the light gets near the camera lens. It’s faster-than-light flaring!) The comp showing the version you would have done (had you had the budget) nicely avoids that issue.
August 29th, 2011 on 9:10 am
Fingers Crossed Daren. I’ll be spreading the positive word around!
September 1st, 2011 on 9:52 pm
@Kibo
I’ve actually thought about this… and talked with Mike Okuda about it, and we came to agree that the molecular crystalline structure of transparent aluminum, which the windows of the Enterprise are constructed of, actually does make flare patterns when strong light goes through them… so, yes… we would see the flares within only the boundaries of the window material itself… case solved.
September 2nd, 2011 on 4:03 am
Daren – Ah yes! What makes the transparent aluminum strong is undoubtedly bonded layers with the molecules aligned in a different direction in each layer (much like the stretched layers of plastic in a “Force-Flex” trash bag) and thus the nano-striations in the windows would act like diffraction gratings (at least at optical wavelengths — we’d have to ask Geordi if they also scatter gamma rays and Berthold rays.)
This also explains why the 2009 movie had all those lens flares — they added all those big new windows to the 2009 version of Enterprise, but lens flare kept coming into the ship from outside. They needed to conserve power for battle so they couldn’t spare any electricity to darken the windows’ liquid-crystal polarizer layers. (LCDs are weird. I tried plugging my Nintendo 3DS into a dilithium power cell once, and it started displaying six dimensions…)
September 2nd, 2011 on 4:34 am
Better watch out. Lens-flare radiation is like Berthold rays; it’ll suddenly kill you after two weeks of continuous exposure (up to that point you’re completely healthy). Starfleet personnel, of course, have lens-flare shielding built into their uniforms, as an invisible microscopic viridian patch just above the base of the spine.
September 4th, 2011 on 8:01 pm
Matt: Of course. In fact, because the invisible viridian patches work so well to keep everyone healthy, those big medical-monitor belt buckles they wore in “ST:TMP” are actually just 23rd-century Pez dispensers, able to dispense a small brick of sugar-flavored candy whenever the normal food replicators are malfunctioning. (This is why the medical-monitor belt buckles are positioned directly over the digestive tract, so they can sense stomach rumbles when the need for emergency candy arises.) In fact, it turns out that only a small portion of the machinery in Engineering is actually used to power the ship — the big intermix chamber is actually used for blending mixtures of dextrose and fructose to achieve a ratio of 110% fructose, and then compressing the ultra-high-fructose sugar into little bricks at a force of one million Earth gravities.
I don’t know why they switched from an all-candy diet to real food between the first and sixth movies, nor do I know why the chef in “Star Trek VI” is attempting to knead bread dough with a balloon whisk (he even moves it like a potato masher in one shot.) That’s going to lead to some mighty tough bread, which seems like a good explanation for why Valeris’s phaser disintegrates the pot but not the dough. Perhaps regulations require all Starfleet dough to be mis-treated until it becomes tough enough to serve as an emergency substitute for deflector shields.
(The switch from an all-Pez diet to real food must have actually occurred right before “Star Trek V”, because in that movie the Enterprise has toilets for the first time.)
Say, Daren, here’s yet another idea about lens flares: Since a deflector shield would necessarily scatter high-intensity light (to protect against beam weapons) I bet it’s another potential source of “real-life” lens flares. After all, the shield has to scatter bright light so that people don’t go blind whenever one of the windows is pointed towards the Sun, right? (And that’s also why there’s always some fill light on the dark side of the Enterprise — the shield is scattering the light from one side of the ship to the other.)
May 25th, 2012 on 3:12 am
Don’t wait to get the call from Paramount for this. You call THEM and tell them it’s being done and that they bloody well get ready to release the even more improved ST:TMP TDE Mark II Blu-Ray!!!