New Empire magazine STID photos

[Christopher]

I miss the days when behind-the-scenes production photos involved people working with elaborate miniatures and puppets and glass paintings and cool toys like that. It used to be that the process of creating an FX scene was at least as interesting to watch as the final scene. Now it's all just people sitting in front of monitors, which isn't all that engaging.

[SalvorHardin]

I enjoy watching featurettes on how ILM or others like them do their work. There is a lot of creativity, art, hard work and cool stuff involved in making things work even with computers. It is still fascinating to watch.

[Christopher]

^But not so much when it's just still photos of people staring at monitors. If I want to see that, I can hang up a mirror.

[SalvorHardin]

I suppose you are generally right when it comes to still photos. Though what's shown in those monitors can still be interesting sometimes.
But things become more equal when watching a 20 minute video of how it is done.

[Carcazoid]

Christopher wrote:

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I miss the days when behind-the-scenes production photos involved people working with elaborate miniatures and puppets and glass paintings and cool toys like that. It used to be that the process of creating an FX scene was at least as interesting to watch as the final scene. Now it's all just people sitting in front of monitors, which isn't all that engaging.

Here's an old HBO movie intro from 1983, done the old fashioned way: miniatures, stop-motion, optical effects. They had a short behind the scenes documentary back then that I must have watched a hundred times. Recorded it on my Beta machine, dontcha know.

Ha. Found it.

http://youtu.be/wqzihgR_-SI

[Franklin]

As good as CGI is on screen, the sad thing is they'll never be anything to display in the Smithsonian (sigh).

A post-production picture and one movie photo may give away a bit of the sequence of events in the film. I'll put it in spoilers, just in case I'm right.

In the fist set of high resolution photos Salvor posted, the fourth one over is of Kirk and Marcus. Kirk is in uniform and has obvious cuts around his right eye. In the set of post-production pictures Salvor posted, the third picture over is of Kirk in his civvies with the same cuts. Could be that's from while he was on Kronos with Spock and Uhura. So, maybe Kirk gets his command back after losing it. Or he's at least back in service.
(The pink "beam" and other stuff in the shot on the big screen must be reflections -- note the pattern showing on the right side of the screen is the same as the pattern painted on the office wall. They're not in the shot on the smaller monitors.)

[SalvorHardin]

Franklin wrote:

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A post-production picture and one movie photo may give away a bit of the sequence of events in the film. I'll put it in spoilers, just in case I'm right.

In the fist set of high resolution photos Salvor posted, the fourth one over is of Kirk and Marcus. Kirk is in uniform and has obvious cuts around his right eye. In the set of post-production pictures Salvor posted, the third picture over is of Kirk in his civvies with the same cuts. Could be that's from while he was on Kronos with Spock and Uhura. So, maybe Kirk gets his command back after losing it. Or he's at least back in service.
(The pink "beam" and other stuff in the shot on the big screen must be reflections -- note the pattern showing on the right side of the screen is the same as the pattern painted on the office wall. They're not in the shot on the smaller monitors.)

I'd have to agree about the command thing. To copy/paste what I wrote in another thread a few days ago

They are at Nibiru doing their thing while Harrison is back on Earth blowing cities up.
Kirk and crew go back to Earth, there he loses command and they go rogue hunting Harrison on Qo'nos. They capture him, and then Kirk gets him in the brig of the Enterprise and somehow regains his command.
After that more things happen we are not yet aware of and haven't seen in the trailers.

[Ryan8bit]

Were those production thumbnails from an actual video, SalvorHardin? I'd still like to see it if it's available.

[SalvorHardin]

Ryan8bit wrote:

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Were those production thumbnails from an actual video, SalvorHardin? I'd still like to see it if it's available.

Here you go

http://apps.avid.com/2012-Webcast/Bad-Robot-archive/

[Christopher]

Franklin wrote:

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As good as CGI is on screen, the sad thing is they'll never be anything to display in the Smithsonian (sigh).

They could use 3D printing to make replicas of the digital starship models.

[M'Sharak]

SalvorHardin wrote:

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Here you go

http://apps.avid.com/2012-Webcast/Bad-Robot-archive/

That's some fascinating stuff.

[Franklin]

Christopher wrote:

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They could use 3D printing to make replicas of the digital starship models.

I suppose so. I just read an article about 3D printers in The Washington Post, yesterday. Didn't know a thing about them before that. Fascinating and amazing technology.

[Ovation]

A few write-ups on them in The Economist worth checking out on a general level. More technical stuff is also easy to find in a basic google search.

[Ryan8bit]

SalvorHardin wrote:

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Here you go

Much appreciated.

Christopher wrote:

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They could use 3D printing to make replicas of the digital starship models.

Except 3D printing is more expensive and more time consuming. Plus, it's at a level so primitive that extensive detail can't be put in unless you have an insanely scaled up model, which then wouldn't be able to print because of size limitations. The colors on such prints don't come out reliably, the material is typically one type of material, and things like lights and glass would be much more difficult to achieve.

3D rendered starship models are here to stay.

[Christopher]

^The state of the art is advancing so quickly that I'm sure the problems you cite will be tackled within a few years, and the cost will also go down. I wasn't proposing something for next week, but just as a general thought for the future.

Besides -- "more time-consuming" than what? Building a physical model the old-fashioned way? I hardly think so. Just so we're clear, I was responding to the lament that with digital effects there was nothing physical to put on display in a museum. I was suggesting that a digitally rendered computer model could be "displayed" physically by 3D printing.