If anyone is a member of the STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE APPRECIATION SOCIETY on Facebook, check their feed NOW. Someone posted a video that appears to be a VHS demo real from one of the effects companies that worked on the film, and it features several shots of the opening Klingon battle that I have never seen before. Some examples. The shot fo the Klingon Cruiser's torpedo launcher lighting up continues onward until the ship almost leaves the frame. You can clearly make out the Klingon Insignia underneath the ship! The shot showing the Klingon ship firing it's first torpedo up close is much longer and we see it fire two whole shots (Some of this shot was used in the publicity material). An entirely new shot showing two Klingon Cruisers firing torpedoes at the Cloud. An alternate shot of the torpedoes approaching the cloud that now features two rows of Torpedoes instead of one. If you look closely, you can see the torpedoes closest to the Cloud disappear! A new underneath shot of a Klingon Cruiser (Similar to the in the finished film) being hit with V'Ger's plasma bolt head on. This is clearly meant to be the Klingon ship that we didn't get to see vaporized. The Epsilon 9 footage goes a bit further showing the station coming even closer to the camera (Even for VHS quality, it looks really nice) A much later cut away from the shot of the second Klingon Cruiser getting hit by the plasma bolt. A few more frames to the Klingon Bridge being engulfed by the plasma bolt. A close-up shot of the Klingon warp nacelle being engulfed by the plasma bolt. This one is very interesting because as the plasma wave makes it's way through the cruiser, you can see that they swap out the nacelle portion of the model with one that's partially gone! The effects team actually had model shots showing the plasma wave eating away at the ships! I can't find this video anywhere on youtube but it IS in that facebook group!
I'm a member of that group...I saw this when I woke up this morning. I was amazed there was fx footage I had never seen.
Makes me wonder just what the state of these effects assets are in. I had a chat with an individual who worked on the Director's Edition and when I told him about these shots, he thought it was a scam. They had access to 'everything' when he and his buddies were working on the Director's Edition and stuff like this would have been something they'd remember. It's starting to sound like if an effect shot wasn't used, they were discarded completely. Only the effects shots used in the actual movie were deemed saving since we see those shots again in TWOK (With some extra bits). The reels of these completed effect shots could simply be *snap* gone. It's only thanks to someone at the visual effects house who made their own tape featuring these effect shots that we were able to see them at all. I for one am incredibly thankful that we were able to see this much.
Here it is. I digitize motion picture film at the Internet Archive (not the way V'ger does it) and I can tell you some of what we might perceive as "crappy" here is the way the dynamic range of film gets squashed in a poor telecine transfer. Too bad no one has the actual film because I'd love to scan it properly! Many of these shots are in the film, but in abbreviated form. Others, like the all three Klingon ships firing, were left out when sequences were re-edited or possibly dropped because the quality lacked and there wasn't time to re-composite them. Also, it's possible some of these shots weren't finished in time to make the cut and Apogee included them in their reel anyway. Return to Tomorrow makes clear there were shots that were improved that never made it into the cut because they ran out of time.
The shot of the Klingons shooting from the side/profile looks kind of wonky...not sure I can put my finger on it, but it's not as clean / convincing as the other work in the film. It's always absolutely amazing to see new stuff after nearly 40 years. Awesome...!
I think one of the more difficult effects to pull off in shots like this were the Photon Torpedoes. The red haze emanating from the torpedoes just doesn't blend well with the background layer. While you can see evidence of the beam streaks from the torpedoes when they're being fired, they're all but covered over by the red haze. Strangely, the worst torpedo effect, when the Klingon Cruiser fires one from the rear, is still worse looking than the ones in this montage. It's just a puff of red mist with no lit center.
Yeah, I never understood why the aft torpedo from the Amar looked so different from the awesome shots that fired from the primary (forward) tube...or even from the blue torpedo the Enterprise fires in the wormhole. Until I saw the film in higher definition, you could barely even see it. I wonder if someone likes @Maurice who is a guru with this kind of stuff knows...?
Another reason I really like this unedited montage is how it shows everything in open matte. That shot of the two Klingon Cruisers fleeing the Cloud for example. You can see the top portion of the cloud! And wow. That sunrise over the living machine planet. No Spock, no rings. Just that one long rotating shot showing the sunrise. Now THAT is a shot I'd like to see in High Def.
The aft torpedo in the theatrical release looks FUBARed because the matte pass for the torpedo was one frame out of sync with the other elements, so the red is double exposed where it's not supposed to be because the matte doesn't line up.
Well he was wrong. This is a demo reel from John Dykstra's Apogee effects house, so there's no doubt it's authentic. But the story goes that Paramount didn't want to pay to store all the VFX elements for the film so they largely got dumpstered, so how could the DE folks be given shots that were tossed in the rubbish after the film was released? And, with all due respect to anyone who worked on the DE, they got a lot of things wrong and made several incorrect assumptions (cough, animating on twos, cough). The Klingon battle was re-edited several times. The shot of the multiple ships firing the torpedoes matches what's in the script. It's been said that some effects were finished too late to make it into the edit, and VFX houses sometimes spent extra effort to re-composite shots for use in demo reels such as this.
Yeah this always bothered me. It's the same on the DE too, is the blu ray better? I've never seen the hi-def release of the movie before.
Was it just different lighting, or are those ships green? They don't even look like they have the same surface detail as what we saw in the movie.
It's the same shot in all the versions ergo the matting error is on the bluray just in high def. The ships in the movie are green, but muted as printed in the release prints. Trust me these are the models used in the film. Much of what you're seeing are shots that are in the film proper but trimmed way down. It looks weird because when film is telecined to video the levels are often adjusted, and the film's dynamic range flattened, which, for instance, is why garbage mattes were usually much more evident in home video than in the theater. If you dial the saturation up in the transfer the colors pop more.
The ships look way more smooth to me as well, compared to the final product. The "wings" particularly had that new surface detail and I'm not seeing that here. Of course, the video could really be that low-res.