Back when I joined Next Generation,
they didn't really have any knowledge of this area of effects.
Everything was on opticals, ten or 12 shots a week,
which was murder back in the '60s when they did the original show.
Some original producers, like Bob Justman, were on this show,
so that's his frame of reference. They knew they needed videotape
or electronic medium for the effects but no one had done it before.
I found Rob.
He had been doing visual-effects work for the series Twilight Zone
He'd also done a lot of commercial work.
He came out of Robert Abel's group.
He really understood
not just the video end of things but the film end of things.
I was a live-action producer.
Then I did visual effects on tape, shot on film but done on tape.
Then I worked on a TV show.
When they wanted somebody qualified to do it, there was basically me.
Maybe one other guy but not a big crowd to pick from.
I was apparently it.
So that's how I started.
It started in a very naive fashion.
A script doesn't say much.
Encounter at Farpoint was 250 shots,
which back then would be at least two features' worth of material
in a fraction of the time and budget.
He was quite ingenious in coming up with new transporter effects,
new lighting looks for ghost effects.
There was new stuff.
That's what everybody wanted, I think, from Star Trek. New ground.
He had to coordinate the work of Industrial Light & Magic
with the work being done in Los Angeles.
And of course trying to satisfy Gene Roddenberry's vision
and Rick Berman's vision and Bob Justman's vision
and trying to bring it all in on budget and on schedule.
Then when we went to episodic television,
after the pilot, doing it on a weekly basis.
That was an even tougher challenge, because you're delivering,
as Roddenberry was fond of saying, half a motion picture every week.
I know that he and Gary and the guys had a lot of sleepless nights.
It was really hard and tiring.
We worked seven days a week, 18-hour days.
We got into the series.
They said, "Encounter at Farpoint has all the stuff in it. "
"We'll steal that. It might be ten or 12 shots. "
The first show had 95 shots!
They said, "It's the first show. We gotta kick it off well. "
And the second show had 80 shots.
The next show 110 shots.
Ladies.
I was like, "When does the light schedule happen?"
We had to get more people.
He was going nuts trying to keep up,
because the supervisor's required to be on the stage
working with the director, director of photography and the actors,
covering shots that will require visual effects in postproduction.
Plus the visual effects supervisor must budget, attend meetings
and supervise the compositing
and supervise the photography of motion-controlled miniatures.
There is no way that could be done by one person
because you can't be on stage and all those places at the same time.
So that's when I was asked to join the team.
Rob and I alternated episodes
so that one team would be available to cover the stage
while the other team was in postproduction.
At least it allowed for some degree of normalcy in our hours.
So they cut back from 120-hour work weeks
to maybe 60- to 80-hour work weeks.
Dan Curry is one of Star Trek's heroes.
He's amazingly ingenious.
He delights in finding different solutions to things.
Where the proper way to do something might be hi-tech,
he'll say, "Why don't we try filming a silver pom-pom?"
And he's right, it looks good.
New course.
307, mark 275.
But that is dangerously close to...
We had to do a scene where Worf's brother
lures the bad guys to follow him
and he kicks up a wake off the surface of the sun.
In the pre-digital age, where we used bizarre alchemy to produce images,
I looked at still photographs of the sun's surface
and for some reason it reminded me of dried oatmeal.
So I sprinkled oatmeal on a light table
and put an electric motor on it so it vibrated to create a sizzle
and took that flat plane of sizzling oatmeal
and wrapped it in an electronic device
over an imaginary or virtual sphere.
By making a negative of it and tinting it orange
it looked like the cells on the surface of the sun.
We came up with this bizarre stuff.
My favourite thing in the first season was,
I can't remember the show, but it was the edge of the universe.
The written description was, "A concept so bizarre
it can't be described because it can't be understood. "
"How much is that going to be?"
"I don't know! I can't understand what the sentence was. "
So I made up, I don't know...
I saw a pattern of aluminium foil with light hitting it, bouncing on a wall.
That looked kind of nebulous to me.
I shot it in my basement. I shot these little plates.
I came up with the edge of the universe.
It was all tinted blue.
We had an adage, "If you can't make it good, make it blue. "
Those were the types of things you had to do.
Once you did that and it worked, and some people appreciated it,
you start to say, "I can shoot liquid nitrogen. "
"I can use a previous shot, flip it upside down, change the contrast. "
You start to create or learn to create these things
out of nothing pretty quickly.
Then they become... "The nitrogen can be this. "
So you get this experience of,
"I can pull these elements together and shoot this new thing. "
- All stop. - Reading all stop, sir.
I worked at Bob Abel Associates.
They did big-budget commercials and graphics.
There was a guy named Tom Barron.
He and his partner made models and created a subdivision called Image G.
I was familiar with them, so when I was asked to do the show,
I wanted to shoot the ships and do various things
and you need a place to shoot it.
The way of getting that amount of work done
in a short period is to not storyboard,
not bid out things, but to hire a company by the day.
As they were friends I could say,
"Give me a price for how much it cost to shoot today. "
If I could do five shots instead of three
then I made more production value for the same amount of money,
as opposed to bidding on each shot which takes for ever.
Everybody wants to do what's set down on paper
no matter how mundane it was.
The only way to do the work was to learn to shoot very quickly.
The more I could pack into a day, the more production value I have.
That's how we did it. It was a great way.
They're only a couple of minutes from Paramount.
On The Next Generation, it all began
with designs from the art department. Rick Berman would review them
and decide on the designs for the ships.
We then had a pretty short period of time to have those constructed,
in a way that would make it possible to shoot
in the time that we had.
Then once they were constructed, they were brought over to Image G
where all the miniatures were shot
and all of the elements were photographed.
And then Dennis Hoerter would come in
and mount them and prepare them for shooting.
The models had to be constructed very quickly.
We only had six to eight weeks to get them ready.
They literally arrived fresh from the model shop.
Dennis would mount and prep them in a few hours and we'd shoot them.
That was the kind of schedule at that time.
The most fun part was
that the models would arrive, and it certainly was a tight schedule.
They would arrive and it's like, "Is this it?"
"We need to do a few more things," the people working on the models.
As I'm in the shop mounting it, people are putting on final touches.
Now it's going into the rig, ready to be shot.
Just a couple more touches.
Now putting the velvet around the sleeve,
getting it set to shoot, lighting it, a few more touches.
Literally, it was that sort of... The pace was such that
eventually Gary would have to shoo them away. "It's fine. "
The process of photographing the ships involved motion control.
Motion control is an elaborate industrial system
that allows the camera to move through the exact same path
identically, every time, in great precision.
The benefit is that then, all the elements
that we shoot of the ship the matte pass, the beauty pass,
the light passes, will all be in perfect registration.
They'll line up when the separate pieces of film are put together.
Now the trick to all of this in thinking about it
is that the ship is not moving, the camera's moving,
to make the ship appear as if it's moving.
It's relative motion. It's easier to move the camera along a track
than it is to put a model on a rail and move it.
You have more flexibility.
We created the moves by moving the camera, not the object.
It was great. Each week, we tried to better ourselves.
You were never relying on what you did the week before.
Everything had some interest.
They were willing and had the experience...
Anything I dreamed up, or that the script dreamed up,
they would be excited about. "We can take this rig... "
Do this, do that, and come up with a shot you'd never seen before,
certainly not on television,
and get some sense of pride. Each week was like a new premiere.
You get to see if you'd pushed the envelope with this kind of work.
So it kept it fresh. And we'd put in long hours,
some days did not go well. Instead of shooting eight shots in a day,
we'd shoot eight shots in a day and a half at the same calendar date.
We'd be up till midnight working on these things
because you could make it that much better. That made it exciting.
The motion-control house gave us
the facility, personnel and equipment for 24 hours.
So when we started, at 8:00am on Tuesday,
we had that space until 8:00am on Wednesday.
A lot of times that's exactly what we did.
We worked right around the clock in order to finish the shot.
We saw a lot of sunrises working on this show.
We worked a lot with dry ice and liquid nitrogen.
I am responsible for removing
a great deal of liquid nitrogen from the planet, I guess.
In this one we had to create a swirl effect,
sort of a vortex effect.
I had to create this and it had to be velveted
and it had to be attached so it didn't waft around.
In the quick experiments it came down to
moving the liquid nitrogen through with the business end of a vacuum.
The holodeck was never a full set.
It was characters against green screen or bluescreen,
printed in against a very small black box
with fine yellow tape inside it.
That was the extent of it. It was never more sophisticated than that.
Designing the new title sequence was an interesting project,
because Rob had to come up with a whole new design for the show.
We wanted to fly through a series of nebulas.
At that time, there were no virtual clouds.
You couldn't just program clouds flying by.
You had to physically shoot something.
So, it was decided to make what we call the whorehouse mattress,
which was a fibre base put over chicken wire in a frame.
It was actually first created by Tony Meininger,
who did many things for the show.
He basically had spent probably what amounted to 100 man-hours
putting this pad in, poking it, pulling it and shaping it,
until it looked like a series of clouds.
Gary Hutzel is a very clever guy.
Whatever we needed rigged up, he was able to do.
He and Dennis did great things.
I wanted something to show the effect of a beam coming down,
and mowing up the ground and people in front of it.
He made up this thing out of a regular ordinary house screen,
put dirt on top of it, and an air blower underneath
that would rake across it.
When the beam hit, it sprayed up this dirt.
We'd make a patch of scorched earth beneath it.
We had spray and interactive stuff.
We put it together on a Harry, where you frame-by-frame animate.
We made something that again on a TV budget was something unheard of
based on just being clever with a screen and dirt and air and stuff.
That was fun. It worked and looked feature-like.
One favourite was a power station.
A small black cube was the entire power station for this planet.
I think it was the Aldean power station.
I hated the fact that we played everything
against a small black cube.
I asked them to make up something for me.
I wanted to make the power station enormous.
So they built me a model out of the parts that hold model kits together,
the little trees. So they built this elaborate thing.
I stuck a fluorescent tube down the centre.
I shot it in a way so it looked eight storeys tall.
I shot it in my basement
on a little rotator rig borrowed from Image G.
We made this giant power station that glowed and moved and turned.
A little door opens and little people cast long shadows.
It looked pretty cool, especially at the time.
I had to come up with an idea which was to shoot these guys in make-up
and then augment them and do this weird treatment on it
and make something out of cloth.
We had no time to think about it, plan it, figure it out.
Sometimes, the interesting things are spur of the moment.
Throw something out and make it work.
Instead of planning it for weeks as you would on a film,
you plan it for minutes and minutes!
These strands appear to be biomagnetic.
Variable flux. Possibly organic in origin.
A life form.
Rob Legato went on to win an Oscar for Titanic.
He's worked with quite a few of the top directors,
Robert Zemeckis and Ron Howard...
...and of course Jim Cameron.
I think he's doing the Harry Potter show right now.
So we had the right talent on board.