QUICK ESCAPE
A special feature of the new Enterprise is the ability of the saucer section of the vessel to separate from the main hull in emergency situations. The only drawback to this escape procedure is that the warp engines are located in the main hull while the saucer section contains only impulse power from an engine located at the rear of the saucer.
There are also shuttlecraft aboard the Enterprise that are used when the transporter is malfunctioning or should the starship become disabled and evacuation in deep space become a necessity. This new Enterprise 1701-D is the most amazing in a proud heritage of ships bearing that title.
Special visual effects are those shots done separately from any live-action shooting. Some special effects shots, such as on-set explosions, are done by a different crew entirely. Optical effects are done after live-action shooting is completed.
In the 1960s, when the Enterprise was first given special-effects life, the process involved was difficult and time consuming. Thus new and extensive special effects didn’t appear on the old series often, and shots of the Enterprise flying from left to right, orbiting a planet, or warping through outer space were reused over and over again. The audiences of the eighties and nineties, accustomed to the extravagant special effects of motion pictures in the post–Star Wars era of motion pictures, expect more.
In the fifteen years since Star Wars revolutionized special effects and the science-fiction film, television has found itself in the unenviable position of having to compete or look pathetic by comparison. While motion pictures can take days to get one shot right, television technical crews have only days to get upward of fifty shots done right. What has made this possible are the strides in video and digital technology.
When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, much was made of its tie-in to Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic. But while ILM did contribute the dazzling special effects for “Encounter at Farpoint,” they performed little for the series thereafter, because Lucasfilm was geared toward the more time-consuming schedules of motion pictures, not the rapid pace of television production.
Industrial Light and Magic produced some fifty special effects shots for “Encounter at Farpoint,” but a new team of specialists was hired by the time the second episode was in production. In fact, two teams have worked on the series producing its special effects since 1987. One team consists of Robert Legato and coordinator Gary Hutzel, the other of Dan Curry and Ron Moore.
TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES
They began with a weekly special effects budget of $75,000, only $25,000 more a week than the old Star Trek had for its FX shots twenty years before. But the modern technology surrounding both videotape and motion control gave them the advantages of speed unavailable to the old series.
For The Next Generation, special effects are shot on film and then transferred to videotape for both editing and composition purposes. This gives a sharper resolution to the image, which is why the new Enterprise never looks grainy or fuzzy the way the old TV Enterprise often did. While the special effects on the sixties series are still often impressive even twenty-five years later (particularly if you’ve seen one of the old shows projected on a large screen), the new generation of effects has opened the show up to more possibilities.
Originally the producers of The Next Generation had thought they could use the same approach that the sixties series did. They believed that from the shots ILM did for “Encounter at Farpoint” they’d be able to create a stockpile of special effects shots to use as needed.
Battlestar Galactica did this in the seventies, with the result that the show was already reusing effects shots even before it reached the conclusion of the pilot episode. It made for a less than satisfying effect overall. But upon cataloguing the special visual effects shots in “Encounter at Farpoint,” it was discovered that most of them were so specific to the needs of that story that stock scenes for transitions and set-ups just weren’t there. Few shots from that episode have been reused since.
A DIFFICULT MODEL TO WORK WITH
The special-effects technicians brought in after ILM had done its work on the pilot had been led to believe that about ten new shots would be needed for each additional episode. This quickly escalated to an average of sixty to a high of one hundred new shots per show. Even in the first season the producers were hoping to find stock shots to match the demands of certain scripts. But there were no scenes available that could show the edge of the universe (“Where No One Has Gone Before”) or the Enterprise being knocked end over end through space at warp speed (“When the Bough Breaks”).
Complicating this was the fact that the new effects teams inherited the Enterprise model built by ILM. It was six feet long and was lacking in the kind of detail necessary for close-ups. Furthermore, at six feet in length it was too large to do a true long-shot, as the camera couldn’t pull back far enough to make the Enterprise look very small. But since they also had a two-foot model available, they were able to make use of that one as well. A four-foot model was built for season three, which has been used for the new special-effects shots of the Enterprise ever since.
The lighting on the six-foot Enterprise was also difficult, as it involved wiring that had to be strung through the model. When the four-foot model was built, Gary Hutzel developed a neon transformer that enabled him to change the lighting scheme on the Enterprise model with the flick of a switch. By contrast, each lighting change on the old six-foot model took an hour.
Because only the six-foot ILM model of the Enterprise was built to have saucer separation capabilities, this model was brought out for Robert Legato’s team to shoot in “The Best of Both Worlds,” and the cumbersomeness of it made for a difficult time. It just reinforced all of their feelings about why a smaller model worked better for their specific needs.
TIMING IS IMPORTANT
“The Best of Both Worlds” featured a higher than normal amount of optical effects, plus many that were more than normally complicated. In the scene where three Martian probes attack the Borg ship, that shot involved several elements—the starfield, the three probes blowing up, the planet Mars, and the Borg ship flying toward the camera and then away. Ten seconds of screen time for something that complex can take four to five days to shoot.
The head of whichever special-effects unit is working on an episode supervises the on-set effects filmed during the normal principal photography schedule of seven to eight days. The film editors then spend two weeks assembling the footage and deliver the final cut of the live-action part of the show to the special-effects team. The special-effects teams get the script for a show and plan out their shots, but are unable to do any real work on it until the live-action footage has been shot and edited.
From that they’ll know how much time is allotted for the demands of the visual effects, and they generally then have from eight to ten days to deliver the needed special visual-effects shots. The special visual effects involve from five to nine days of shooting the Enterprise and other ships, with five or six days to composite all of the elements together into the finished shots. Specific instructions are then given on where to edit each scene into the episode.
Due to modern computer animation techniques, a phaser beam can be drawn right on the frame of film when it’s being edited on videotape. Other previously used visual effects can be sometimes combined to create something new, such as a cloud image or a water pattern, which can be used to create an unusual-looking force field. Stock footage can be employed, such as using the orbiting space station first seen in The