The Unauthorized Trekkers’ Guide to the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine

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 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. 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.”

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CHARACTERS AND CAST (#ulink_13123f6e-8d5b-5171-9436-9c9ff2144981)

CAPTAIN JEAN-LUC PICARD (#ulink_8d7b0dc1-7cde-533b-ab93-5fe217102475)

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 rehearsal or performance,” he explains. “I used to get my colleagues to cover for me, but often I would just make up reports. Finally, I was found out. I had a terrific row with the editor, who said, ‘Either you decide to be a journalist, in which case you give up all of this acting nonsense, or you get off my paper.’ I left his office, packed up my typewriter, and walked out.”

There followed two years of selling furniture. “I was better at selling furniture than I was at journalism,” Stewart observes good-naturedly. He also enrolled in drama school at the Bristol Old Vic to bring his skills up to the level of his enthusiasm.

The actor used to see his roles as a way of exploring other personalities and characteristics, but nowadays it has become more of a means of self-expression. “When I was younger, I used to think in terms of how I could disguise myself in roles. Now I want my work to say something about me, contain more of my experience of the world.”

A FAMOUS BRIT

Patrick Stewart has become a highly regarded actor in Great Britain from his roles in such BBC productions as I, Claudius, Smiley’s People, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, all of which have aired in America. His face is also known to American filmgoers from roles in a variety of motion pictures. In the David Lynch adaptation of Dune, he played Gurney Halek, one of the more prominent roles in the film. In Excalibur, he played Leondegrance.

More recently, he was seen in the strange science fiction film Lifeforce as the character Dr. Armstrong. On stage, he starred in London in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which garnered him the prestigious London Fringe Best Actor Award. As an associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stewart is considered one of the leading talents of the British stage. His impressive list of stage credits includes Shylock, Henry IV, Leontes, King John, Titus Andronicus, and many others. In 1986, he played the title role in Peter Shaffer’s play Yonadab at the National Theatre of Great Britain.