INGENUITY CAN GO A LONG WAY
Not all optical shots are time consuming or expensive. In the season-one episode “When the Bough Breaks,” Robert Legato’s team had to create a shot of the power station seen near the end of the episode. They built models and shot them against a black wall that was heavily backlit, and then matted that into a miniature, which created an effect of looking at a ledge that appeared to be a hundred feet off the floor. The shot cost only about $3,000 to do. Had they farmed it out, the shot would have cost $35,000 to accomplish. Ingenuity won out.
Some technical shots are more than ordinarily demanding. In the fifth-season episode “A Matter of Time,” they had to show the Enterprise cleansing a planet’s atmosphere of smoke and ash particles. This required shooting liquid nitrogen and dry ice in a tank in order to get the equivalent of cloud movements, which could then be manipulated in the context of the Enterprise.
While The Next Generation is filmed at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, the special-effects teams work across town in Santa Monica at Digital Magic. There the optical effects are shot on film and then sent out to a video transfer lab to be transferred to D-1 digital videotape, where the special-effects technicians can later combine various effects to create a single image.
For instance, the Enterprise is filmed separately from its lights as the use of motion-control cameras allows a separate pass to be made of the model with its lights glowing to be superimposed on the previous shot of the Enterprise now on videotape. The engine lights will be a brighter exposure with some diffusion while the cabin lights, filmed on yet another pass, will be dimmer. When composited in one shot, it’s impossible to tell that it’s multiple shots combined into a single image.
SHORT ON TIME
Working on videotape allows color correcting and even light balancing to be done, which could not be as easily accomplished working with an effect on film. When effects are combined on film in an optical printer, the work goes down a generation in quality each time, thereby resulting in the grainy appearance of some special visual effects seen in past motion pictures.
After five years, some five hundred special visual effects have been created for The Next Generation, which allows the reusing of some shots and even compositing shots together. For instance, a scene of the Enterprise can be combined with a previously recorded image of a Romulan ship to create a completely new shot of the two ships in the same frame.
The now famous shot of the new Enterprise stretching as it enters warp speed (seen in the opening credits of each episode) was created using the slit-scan process pioneered in 1968 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. ILM created three such shots for “Encounter at Farpoint,” and Robert Legato’s effects team later created two additional ones for an episode that Legato directed. Legato has directed two episodes, “Menage a Troi” and “The Nth Degree,” the latter involving considerable effects work, which the director had to oversee after directing the live-action portions of the episode.
The special visual effects achieved on the series are often based on what can be achieved in the limited amount of time available. In an interview in Cinefantastique magazine, Robert Legato stated, “I get a big kick out of the fans who send letters and come up with reasons why things on the show look the way they do. You get letters from people telling you how brilliant this concept is because of the structural dynamics and design and air flow. In reality, you just thought it was a neat idea and it’s the best you could come up with on the spur of the moment.”
At the time of the voyages chronicled in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard has recently completed a twenty-two-year mission as captain of the deep-space-charting starship Stargazer and is legendary in Starfleet. With only eleven percent of the galaxy charted, the Stargazer contributed important information to these chronicles. Tragedy was no stranger during those two decades of exploration, as it was near the end of the mission that Jack Crusher was killed saving the life of Picard. Jean-Luc accompanied the body when it was returned to the family, thereby meeting Jack’s wife, Dr. Beverly Crusher, and the very young Wesley Crusher. Beverly requested posting with Picard on the Enterprise, even though she subliminally blamed him for her husband’s death.
Picard feels some guilt himself, and in the episode “Justice” found himself having to weigh the Prime Directive against the life of Wesley Crusher when the boy violated the inflexible laws of a planet. Picard would have been troubled with any crew member thus endangered, but the dilemma took on added weight when the person in question was the son of the man who had saved his life. The inherent unfairness of the situation led Picard to confront the entities responsible, thus saving Wesley, whose progress since then has been watched by Picard with growing pride.
PICARD’S ROOTS
Picard was born on Earth, in Paris, France, in the twenty-fourth century. His lack of ethnic accent is explained by advanced forms of language instruction. Picard betrays his Gallic background only in times of deep emotional stress. He uses French on rare occasions, as when he bade farewell to Dr. McCoy in “Encounter at Farpoint,” or when he visited his ancestral home in “Family.”
The young Picard was a far cry from the disciplined commander of the Enterprise. In “Samaritan Snare,” he reveals to Wesley that he has an artificial heart since losing his original one in an ill-advised brawl. Still, his career has been an exemplary one; a young and awestruck Lieutenant Picard was in attendance at the wedding of the legendary Spock, an incident referred to in “Sarek” but not yet shown in any of the motion pictures.
Captain Picard can be very tough and pragmatic, but he is also a romantic who believes sincerely in honor and duty. He is a philosophical man with a keen interest in history and archaeology. He still accesses information in the old-fashioned way, from books, and is especially fond of Shakespeare and 1940s hard-boiled detective fiction. The past, to him, is as vast a storehouse of knowledge as the future, and must not be disregarded or forgotten. His gift to Data, the complete plays of Shakespeare, is a fitting guide to the various aspects of humanity, and is much cherished by the android officer.
Although baldness had been cured generations before the twenty-fourth century, the men of this time find the natural look appealing, and Picard is content to remain so. He is not vain, and has no interest in cosmetic surgery or other artificial enhancements of his external appearance. With the advanced medicine and extended life spans of his time, Picard in his fifties is just entering his prime and would be comparable to a man of thirty in the twentieth century. Active-duty Starfleet males and females are in prime physical condition through their seventies.
While still relatively young by twenty-fourth-century standards, Picard remains content with a “starship love,” a personality attribute accented by his twenty-two-year duty on the Stargazer. But on the Enterprise 1701-D, with its ship’s complement of over a thousand crew and family members, Picard is facing new challenges to his skills, experience, and intellect, learning along the way that life is more complex than he ever imagined.
PATRICK STEWART
Patrick Stewart reveals that he was “compelled” to become an actor “as a result of an argument.”
At age fifteen, Stewart left school and landed a job on a local newspaper. He also happened to be an energetic amateur actor—the two vocations didn’t mix.
“I was always faced with either covering an assignment or attending an important