The Unauthorized Trekkers’ Guide to the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. James Hise van

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Search for Spock, wherein the new Enterprise is substituted for the old Enterprise. This has turned up in The Next Generation on an average of once a season since 1987.

      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. СКАЧАТЬ