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- Thread starter hifijohn
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Compare it to Doctor Who episodes filmed at the time and it'll start looking a lot more impressive!
I did five minutes of Google research and it seems like Star Trek episodes were typically in the range of $170,000-$200,000 per episode, which didn't reach Land of the Giants' massive $250,000 per episode budget, but was pretty close. It appears that the most expensive shows at the time were westerns, which had a lot of location filming, and sci-fi, which had a lot of visual effects. And Star Trek had both.
The trouble with making science fiction is that everything costs so much more than other genres. The budget is drained away by all the props and costumes that have to be created from scratch, the sets full of electronics, the alien landscapes and corridors, and the visual effects. They were working harder just to match the production values of other shows, and work cost money. Especially as back then they didn't have CGI, 3D printing, LED lights etc. Or HD digital video. Part of the reason Star Trek looks so much better than Doctor Who is that it was shooting on 35 mm colour film, which has far better quality than monochrome video did at the time, but that also came at a significant cost.
Star Trek could've had better sets and more miniatures if they'd had a bit more money and time, but the episodes we have are a pretty good demonstration of what $180,000 and a week of filming could get you in the late '60s.
I did five minutes of Google research and it seems like Star Trek episodes were typically in the range of $170,000-$200,000 per episode, which didn't reach Land of the Giants' massive $250,000 per episode budget, but was pretty close. It appears that the most expensive shows at the time were westerns, which had a lot of location filming, and sci-fi, which had a lot of visual effects. And Star Trek had both.
The trouble with making science fiction is that everything costs so much more than other genres. The budget is drained away by all the props and costumes that have to be created from scratch, the sets full of electronics, the alien landscapes and corridors, and the visual effects. They were working harder just to match the production values of other shows, and work cost money. Especially as back then they didn't have CGI, 3D printing, LED lights etc. Or HD digital video. Part of the reason Star Trek looks so much better than Doctor Who is that it was shooting on 35 mm colour film, which has far better quality than monochrome video did at the time, but that also came at a significant cost.
Star Trek could've had better sets and more miniatures if they'd had a bit more money and time, but the episodes we have are a pretty good demonstration of what $180,000 and a week of filming could get you in the late '60s.
I have said this often over the years. I have threads in the Arts forum about this very thing. If TOS had had a bit more time and money with the creative minds they already had on hand it would have been amazing.
But in all candour TOS did look amazing for quite a few years until the fx technology and resources of feature films began to filter into television production. The feature films of the 1970s changed expectations. Indeed it’s an old refrain, but Star Wars in 1977 changed everything in terms of expectations. There had been good looking films before that, but it seemed like people didn’t expect feature film level production on television up until the mid to late 1970s. I certainly don’t recall people ragging on TOS’ production standards until I started hearing it in the late 1970s.
The resources and know-how to make TOS look outstanding on television and for years to come existed then, but that needed a bit more time and money than TOS had available.
Many of the the fx shots in TOS still hold up IMO, although some are terrible. It would be interesting to match-up the fx shots with the companies that produced the footage. I believe there were at least 3 different companies that produced the effects shots for the series. I wonder if certain fx companies produced better footage.
The usual, "Quality, time or cost? Pick two," paradigm was probably in play as well...
The real issue holding Trek's visual effects back from withstanding the test of time was the method they chose. They used blue screen composites and the "garbage mattes" and bleeds were easier to hide on smaller screens, low resolutions and weak tv signals.
Flash forward to large screens and HD-TV and you have age taking its course. But the show was using some sophisticated techniques, some of which became the standard for SF movies and TV after Star Wars.
Now if the had gone the route Irwin Allen and Gerry Anderson had and relied on in-camera effects with models against backdrops, they would look much cleaner. But what Irwin and Gerry gained in clean images and no degradation they lost in versatility. Gerry and Lew Grade threw money at his productions, so there were mostly new shots every week. But the US networks and production companies were different and Irwin Allen had to stick with the same stock shots. So the Jupiter 2 approached the same 2 planets every time and the Seaview would crash against the same rock every week. And the angles were less dynamic. I'd rather have the Enterprise banking away into the distance or doing a graceful orbit repeatedly with bleeding mattes than have straight on shots of a ship passing across my screen.
Having said that, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea's flying sub baking and diving through the sky and into the water was beautiful. Even if it was used practically every damned week.
Flash forward to large screens and HD-TV and you have age taking its course. But the show was using some sophisticated techniques, some of which became the standard for SF movies and TV after Star Wars.
Now if the had gone the route Irwin Allen and Gerry Anderson had and relied on in-camera effects with models against backdrops, they would look much cleaner. But what Irwin and Gerry gained in clean images and no degradation they lost in versatility. Gerry and Lew Grade threw money at his productions, so there were mostly new shots every week. But the US networks and production companies were different and Irwin Allen had to stick with the same stock shots. So the Jupiter 2 approached the same 2 planets every time and the Seaview would crash against the same rock every week. And the angles were less dynamic. I'd rather have the Enterprise banking away into the distance or doing a graceful orbit repeatedly with bleeding mattes than have straight on shots of a ship passing across my screen.
Having said that, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea's flying sub baking and diving through the sky and into the water was beautiful. Even if it was used practically every damned week.
You know this, Scott, but may I say: on Space: 1999 they didn't just use in-camera backdrops that were really there (like the daredevil flying in "Guardian of Piri"). They would sometimes rewind the undeveloped film of an Eagle in space and shoot again on it, to add more elements to the picture. Like: film the Eagle fly-by, rewind, and film the planet right on that same negative.
This multi-pass technique looked damn good, and you only had to develop one negative and the shot is done, but it meant the Eagle had to stay in black space, and never pass in front of the planet. If it did, the Eagle miniature would be double-exposed and transparent.
The same multi-pass technique was used for Moonraker (1979), and I heard they made quite a few passes on the same reel to get all the Space Shuttles and combatants in there with Drax's space station.
As I recall, there were four: the Howard A. Anderson Company, Van der Veer Photo Effects, Film Effects Of Hollywood, and the Westheimer Company.
Yes, those were gorgeous shots of the Flying Sub miniature, courtesy of the Lydecker brothers.
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Yep, and they also made sure in the space scene there was a "path" with no stars to fly in front of, which is one of the reasons why stars were so sparce in that series sometimes. But these were usually one and done shots, they didn't take the same shot of an Eagle and print it over and over, down the generations. But really this is mostly just for 1999. Most of Anderson's shows were filled with in-camera models and they all transferred beautifully to HD.
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