Good catch on the upholstery; hadn't noticed that. And nice work on the models. I just checked and the different upholstery does show up towards the end of Nemesis. When the Enterprise rams the other ship, all of the sudden the chair looks different. I seem to remember, maybe delusionally, that the command chair might have been stolen again just like it had been right before Generations and a new/different one rushed to replace it....but I may have invented that memory. Showing up right when the bridge gets damaged is suggestive. They'd most likely place filming of that after all the pristine bridge scenes were done, as well as giving them time to rig it for effects/stunts. Maybe that interlude would give time for the chair to be set aside and taken by someone. Or, as an alternate theory, they wanted to protect the hero chair and brought in a less special version that would could be damaged without concern. I would note that some of the bridge chairs sold at auction were listed as having upholstery damage from pyrotechnic sparks during filming. If that's the case, then maybe the hero chair was claimed by someone and that left the stunt-double/replacement chair to be auctioned. Of course, it could have just been reupholstered during production and it's substantially the same chair. But what reason they would have to do that, I don't know.
IIRC, the captain's chair disappeared during filming of Nemesis, apparently stolen, so they had to scramble to construct a new one. (This was totally separate from the new chair with the seatbelts introduced in the cutscene from the end of the movie.) I remember reading contemporary accounts of this, but at this point I can only find a story on Fark and trivia items on websites like TrekCore and IMDb.
Didn't this also happen after TNG S1? The original chair had flip-up controls on both armrests, and was later replaced (in S2, I think), with an always-present pair of fixed controls after being stolen between seasons. This was one of the inconsistencies I caught in AGT, which had the newer chair configuration for the Farpoint flashbacks. I also remember hearing that the Nemesis chair was a re-use of the Enterprise chair (or maybe it was the other way around) because it had the seatbelt slots in it. I could be completely messing up the history, but there was definitely something weird going on with the Captain's chairs over the years.
Upholstery is as much art as science. You are pulling flat fabric/leather/etc into compound shapes. Getting exactly the same result twice is highly unlikely. Especially in leather.
IIRC, the Season 2 modifications were made so the chair would fit Patrick Stewart better. This chair had to be replaced for Generations when someone stole during the break between AGT and the beginning of soundstage work on GEN. Re: the flip-up controls from the S1 chair, the last time we see them in their original form is on the captain's chair on the Hathaway in "Peak Performance." They were replaced with boxier flip-consoles that were seen in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Best of Both Worlds II." After that, the consoles disappeared and there were just padded armrests. ("Night Terrors," "All Good Things") If I had to guess, they just didn't exist by the time they were recreating the S1 bridge for the flashback scenes, and it wasn't worth the trouble to recreate them. The Nemesis "seatbelt chair" became Archer's captain's chair in S4 of Enterprise, starting with "Borderlands."
Ah, thanks for that forensics work. If I'd have looked at ALL my Nemesis screencaps last night (instead of just the first few), I would've noticed the different upholstery towards the end as well; indeed the upholstery that appears in the auctioned version is what we see late in the battle of Nemesis.
The S1 chair existed concurrently with the S2-S7 chair. You can see it in 2x07 Unnatural Selection on the bridge of the USS Lantree seen on the viewscreen. My theory is that they had cannibalized/reupholstered the chair by the point of All Good Things and didn't want to bother recreating it. There was the USS Pasteur command chair that had the same form in purple fabric, but that could easily have been the Battle Bridge chair reupholstered. Although, there was 4 years between its last appearance and AGT, so it could have gone missing in that time.
Well, that wraps up the bridge chairs! The control panels graphics are conjecture, as we never get a clear look at them in FC/INS, but what little we can see doesn't seem to match up with the control panel graphics that are available on the Captain's Chair CD-ROM. So I've approximated the graphics based on the little we can see, from a distance, in the films. If anyone has seen any images of the FC/INS version of the control panel graphics, please let me know!
Really fantastic job Donny. You don't think the control panels looks as they do on the auctioned chair?
Beautiful! The leatherwork is particularly stunning. It’s funny, now that I see the E-E Captains Chair, especially the base, more clearly, it looks quite ... Klingon in its shape and design.
Weren't the chairs reused on alien bridges in Voyager or Enterprise? I'm sure they turned up somewhere.
Well, let's take a look. Here's a collection of what we do see of the control panels in FC and INS: (The bottom image just showed me something I didn't notice before, which would appear to be two small non-illuminated gold stripes at the top outer edge of each panel, probably the same brushed gold that adorns the wall consoles seen throughout the bridge. I will add this later tonight. I'm also noticing now that there appears to be five rows of buttons on each panel, rather than the seven I have depicted) Here are the images from the auction, which is post-Nemesis: On both panels, two small blue "buttons" were added, which I believe were added for Nemesis alone, as I don't see any evidence of their existence in the two earlier films. Also, you'll see the right-hand panel was modified with additional gold-brushed detailing and allowed for an LCD screen, as many of the bridge stations were modified similarly for Nemesis. However in the above compilation of FC/INS screen grabs, it appears that both panels are similar and are standard backlit display graphics, and neither has the blue buttons. The Captain's Chair CD-ROM shows us these graphics for the captain's chair: a "message" screen, and a standard column of LCARS-style buttons: I see no evidence in the screencaps that this "message" screen existed on-set, as both panels appear to be similar styling to the LCARS-style "button" panels. So what I did was just create the LCARS-style button panels on each, doing my best to guess coloring and layout. Dunno how correct I am, as this is all just some forensic work based on available resources. I will be making another pass on these tonight to add the gold stripe at the top, and to drop the rows of buttons down to five.
Yeah, this is from the Nemesis version, though, which I've pointed out above is different than the FC/INS version which I'm aiming to replicate. Thanks for posting though! Yep, I'll be modeling those this weekend.