ST:TMP - Lost Footage from the Trench

[QuasarVM]

The fact TDK triggered off a conscious reexamination for some of how much CG you NEED vs how much you actually should use (in tandem with physical effects) might mean the pendulum swings back the other way a bit, at least on some productions.

There's too much inertia to avoid CG overkill for most thing these days now, but I think very high end AND very low-end artistic shows are going to be doing more with the physical (by physical I mean full-scale effects AND originating with old-fashioned miniature/photographic work) when it is smart to do so rather than everything whole-cloth CG as an automatic response.

Until you've got CG that is routinely finished at 4K (with elements scanned at 6K or higher) and a better appreciation for photographic tonalities incorporated into the CG work, I think there's going to continue to be a marked difference between most high-end traditional vfx work and even the best CGI efforts (at least to my eye.)

Yeah, I have a degree in computer animation but I agree with you.

The good thing about CG is that it's allowed people who might otherwise not have the resources do do visual effects to produce some very good work -- and produce some quality videos/films.

It's certainly taken the fan films to the next level. So, for that...I am grateful for CG.

But, like you...I can always tell when something is CG.

I miss the days of "models, spit and chewing gum".

 

[Christopher]

Weren't they planning on having the Klingon ships "resurrected" from data and having them take on the Enterprise in a climactic space battle in some early-early version? I've seen concept sketches showing a damaged Enterprise separating years before the Enterprise D was even thought of. Maybe that was just for Phase II, but I know I've seen sketches and I think Andrew Probert might have drawn them.

They're in The Art of Star Trek, pp. 198-9. Some great, detailed color storyboards by Probert showing the saucer separation from multiple angles.


On the CG vs. practical FX front, there are still some filmmakers using practical FX and making for interesting behind-the-scenes stuff. I just rented the DVD of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and the special features include some cool behind-the-scenes footage of some of the practical effects, stuff that many filmmakers would've used CGI for but that Guillermo Del Toro did onstage or in camera.

 

[Basill]

I've just gone over the screencaps, and there are some shots where the nacelles are illuminated when the ship is at relative rest, e.g.:

http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/tmp/themotionpicture0860.jpg

Judging from the screencaps, I suspect the illumination indicates that the warp engines are functional and online, not necessarily that they're in actual use.

I am picking this up way to late! I think this cap is from TMPTDE and this is one of their new shots added to the film?

That cap IS from the DE, but I think there are other shots from that part of the pic in the regular version which still have the inboards lit (they're just not on trekcore, I don't think.) PhotoStory, anyone?

I don't seem to remember any shots of the Enterprise outside the "maw" at all until the DE. I thought the original version just showed everything through the bridge's main viewer (at least until the ship began its descent into the maw itself.) Its one of the problems I had with the DE when I first saw it. Although it is beautifully crafted visually and effectively showed the arrival of the first probe, the Enterprise would have had to make a near 180 degree turn back towards V'Ger just seconds after it passed over it, and the last thing I recall Kirk ordering is to "hold relative postion." Definitely threw me off the first time I saw it.

It also clouds the issue as to whether or not the Enterprise was moving at warp or not. The turn would indicate she was not moving at warp, unless she was traveling backwards. But moments after Ilia is ripped away, the tractor beam grabs hold and the engines sound like they are suddenly fighting desperately to get away. Kirk has to order all main drive systems disengaged to prevent catastrophic explosion. In the original version the struggling engine sound wasn't so immediate and Kirk ordered all power to the shields. So at least we know the engines were on, if only for extra shielding and defensive weapons. Also, phasers had recently been re-engineered to run through the engines to boost their strength so another reason for engine power... Its all a bit murky.

I can accept that the ship was traveling along with V'Ger because it was within the Intruder's warp field but that is the only way I can see it happening within the context of the DE. You just have to assume that sometime shortly after the Enterprise crossed the cloud boundry she had to slow to impulse, and by then the film had shifted into artsy mode for the Cloud Journey.

They're in The Art of Star Trek, pp. 198-9. Some great, detailed color storyboards by Probert showing the saucer separation from multiple angles.

Ah! Thanks for that. I have that book. I knew I had seen those not too long ago and I knew had copies of them. I was looking through my HD files last night trying to find them to no avail. I knew I had them somewhere!

 

[QuasarVM]

Thanks! I now have a headache!

 

[trevanian]

I don't seem to remember any shots of the Enterprise outside the "maw" at all until the DE. I thought the original version just showed everything through the bridge's main viewer (at least until the ship began its descent into the maw itself.)

It IS mostly POV stuff in the sequence, but there are I think 3 very distant shots of the E during the flyover. One, what I assume is a badly animated photocutout, when it passes over the back end, another sort of 3/4 from above view as it is about halfway along the journey (this uses the smaller model built by Apogee, but it is too hard on disk for me to tell if they painted the engines to light or not in all the murk), and a third, just after it passes the front of vger (which might be another photocutout, the ship just looks overexposed white, in profile.)

Again, I assume the ship is driving at warp 7+ throughout the scene, and holding station at warp up until turning everything off when the tractor pulls.
(But like the enterprise-class/constitution-class argument, I do realize I am in the minority with this view, so I'll retire it for now ... when Paramount offers the edit-your-own-TMP feature, though, I shall be all over that.)

 

[alchemist]

How on earth does a private collector end up with something like this, anyway?

Why has he sat on such a thing for so long?

It occurred to me in the shower this morning thinking about you guys...uhhm, wait...that's not what I meant...uhhm...let me delete this...uhhm...okay...starting over...

I really didn't mean to tease when I orginally replied to this. So, here is something I can say, based on direct experience - and this isn't divulging anything that I'm not supposed to divulge:

As most of you know, Lincoln Enterprises sold film clip packets almost from their inception. Well in the early 1980's, shortly after ST:TMP came out, and not too surprisingly, Lincoln started selling clips from that movie. Most of the clips they sold were cut from worn-out theater prints and trailers, but Roddenberry did manage to get his/her hands on the dailies from Paramount and transfer them to Lincoln. And, of course, they were cut-up into film clips and placed in the packets. I know this because there were daily clips in the packets that I bought from them.

The odds of getting anything "behind-the-scenes" in the packets were fairly remote because there were so many more theater and trailer clips cut up, but there were indeed some in the packets, including those from the memory wall/trench sequences. And that, unfortunately, leads to the inescapable conclusion that a lot of the daily prints (and maybe the negatives, based on some ancedotal evidence, but I'm not 100% certain of this) were butchered and sold by Lincoln. Sigh. Let me pause here and wipe my eyes....

Anyway, as I said at the beginning, I didn't mean to tease. So, here is the curtain-less frame from the begining of the sequence (actually, it is a frame right after the scene is marked with the slate) that shows Kirk reacting to the on-coming swarm of memory crystals. The crystals were obviously to have been added in post-production.

 

[ncc-1017-e]

Very cool! I can't wait to see more and for you to get your web site up again! My friend from The Idic Page told me what happened!

 

[QuasarVM]

How on earth does a private collector end up with something like this, anyway?

Why has he sat on such a thing for so long?

It occurred to me in the shower this morning thinking about you guys...uhhm, wait...that's not what I meant...uhhm...let me delete this...uhhm...okay...starting over...

I really didn't mean to tease when I orginally replied to this. So, here is something I can say, based on direct experience - and this isn't divulging anything that I'm not supposed to divulge:

As most of you know, Lincoln Enterprises sold film clip packets almost from their inception. Well in the early 1980's, shortly after ST:TMP came out, and not too surprisingly, Lincoln started selling clips from that movie. Most of the clips they sold were cut from worn-out theater prints and trailers, but Roddenberry did manage to get his/her hands on the dailies from Paramount and transfer them to Lincoln. And, of course, they were cut-up into film clips and placed in the packets. I know this because there were daily clips in the packets that I bought from them.

The odds of getting anything "behind-the-scenes" in the packets were fairly remote because there were so many more theater and trailer clips cut up, but there were indeed some in the packets, including those from the memory wall/trench sequences. And that, unfortunately, leads to the inescapable conclusion that a lot of the daily prints (and maybe the negatives, based on some ancedotal evidence, but I'm not 100% certain of this) were butchered and sold by Lincoln. Sigh. Let me pause here and wipe my eyes....

Anyway, as I said at the beginning, I didn't mean to tease. So, here is the curtain-less frame from the begining of the sequence (actually, it is a frame right after the scene is marked with the slate) that shows Kirk reacting to the on-coming swarm of memory crystals. The crystals were obviously to have been added in post-production.

Amazing stuff! Again...a great discovery on your part, Dave!

 

[Basill]

I don't seem to remember any shots of the Enterprise outside the "maw" at all until the DE. I thought the original version just showed everything through the bridge's main viewer (at least until the ship began its descent into the maw itself.)

It IS mostly POV stuff in the sequence, but there are I think 3 very distant shots of the E during the flyover. One, what I assume is a badly animated photocutout, when it passes over the back end, another sort of 3/4 from above view as it is about halfway along the journey (this uses the smaller model built by Apogee, but it is too hard on disk for me to tell if they painted the engines to light or not in all the murk), and a third, just after it passes the front of vger (which might be another photocutout, the ship just looks overexposed white, in profile.)

Again, I assume the ship is driving at warp 7+ throughout the scene, and holding station at warp up until turning everything off when the tractor pulls.
(But like the enterprise-class/constitution-class argument, I do realize I am in the minority with this view, so I'll retire it for now ... when Paramount offers the edit-your-own-TMP feature, though, I shall be all over that.)

Well, that is actually my preferred view, but as I mentioned I can accept the V'Ger warp field- Enterprise at impulse cloud/flyover theory... as long as I tilt my head and squint after 3 shots of rum while watching the Director's Edition. Of course my brain still reinserts all the cut dialog to this day (Oh... my god) so I'm with you on the Edit-Yourself-DVD-Kit.

Anyway, as I said at the beginning, I didn't mean to tease. So, here is the curtain-less frame from the begining of the sequence (actually, it is a frame right after the scene is marked with the slate) that shows Kirk reacting to the on-coming swarm of memory crystals. The crystals were obviously to have been added in post-production.

Beautiful stuff! So I take it that animating the "attacking" crystals would be added post production, but the other image(s) of those static triangular objects already attached to Shatner would be the stage prop versions? Kind of like the way they animated the bridge to Voyager at the end?

 

[trevanian]

Amazing stuff! Again...a great discovery on your part, Dave![/QUOTE]

Seeing the name DAVE and that image made me think, geez, this is like the HAL brain room in 2001, just with the red all dialed out!

Alternately, by squinting a little, I might think the trench is where all oversized backlit rocker switches go to die.

Hey, do any of you guys have scans of the TREK TMP card set trench images? I remember there's a wide shot in there (very FANTASTIC VOYAGE ear set), but I don't remember if there's a live-action guy in the foreground or not. It was like #57 or #60, something like that.

 

[QuasarVM]

You mean this one?

 

[trevanian]

You mean this one?

Can't get anything past you, can I?

I haven't seen that in so damn long ... a friend of mine had the set in the early 80s, and I remember seeing that picture for the first time and right then flashing back to the trench and memory wall set costs listed in MOSTTMP (pretty sure they were both six-figure sets) and thinking, 'how many full-length movies could I have made for the price of these unseen sets?'

I think I'm only now getting an idea of the size of these things. I watched a DS9 last night and I'm thinking the curved wall must have been at least a third the length of the Promenade on DS9, or maybe even longer. I don't see how they could have force perspectivized the set if they were flying the actors and stunt guys all the way around it, so it must have been ... geez, TMP is still blowing my mind!

Forget about any more new movies ... what'd make me happiest is finding a publisher that would put out the Preston Jones TMP stuff, maybe bundled with the other discoveries you guys have made. That'd probably hold me quite awhile.

 

[QuasarVM]

You mean this one?

Can't get anything past you, can I?

I haven't seen that in so damn long ... a friend of mine had the set in the early 80s, and I remember seeing that picture for the first time and right then flashing back to the trench and memory wall set costs listed in MOSTTMP (pretty sure they were both six-figure sets) and thinking, 'how many full-length movies could I have made for the price of these unseen sets?'

I think I'm only now getting an idea of the size of these things. I watched a DS9 last night and I'm thinking the curved wall must have been at least a third the length of the Promenade on DS9, or maybe even longer. I don't see how they could have force perspectivized the set if they were flying the actors and stunt guys all the way around it, so it must have been ... geez, TMP is still blowing my mind!

Forget about any more new movies ... what'd make me happiest is finding a publisher that would put out the Preston Jones TMP stuff, maybe bundled with the other discoveries you guys have made. That'd probably hold me quite awhile.

Well, when I look at this set in this particular shot the trench does not look very wide. The set was big...no doubt about it, but Taylor told me a lot of the scale of the thing would have been created using matte paintings -- I guess to make it more expansive.

A lot of the still images Ottens has over at Forgotten Trek from the Memory Wall sequence (that follows the trench scene) were shot against bluescreen, so again, mattes would have been used for a lot of the scenery behind the actors. Also at Forgotten Trek, there are production paintings of how the finished shots might have looked. You can get a good idea at least by looking at the storyboards and the production artwork.

If you go to the Forgotten Trek site, you'll see the set drawings that Richard Taylor sent me back in '01. These aren't pre-production paintings -- they are technical line art showing how the camera would be set up and the actors strung up on wires, etc. When he sent them to me to digitally photograph, I held in my hands the actual blueprints of these sets. They had the "ASTRA" logo on them -- a special logo that all artwork created by the Abel team had on it. ASTRA stood for "A Star Trek Robert Abel".

One of the things that I love about ST:TMP is the history behind the film. If you include ST:P2 as part of that (and I actually do since so much of -- at least the foundations of -- the sets/design spawned from that about TV series) then it was an amazing behind the scenes story!

 

[Data Holmes]

man... What could have been.

 

[Christopher]

I think I'm only now getting an idea of the size of these things. I watched a DS9 last night and I'm thinking the curved wall must have been at least a third the length of the Promenade on DS9, or maybe even longer.

Which makes me wonder -- which soundstage was the Memory Wall set built on? Is it one that's been used in other Trek productions?

 

[QuasarVM]

Not sure what stage that was.

The bridge set was built on the same stage the TOS bridge was built on.

And I seem to recall that the rec deck set was the larget of the TMP sets...

 

[Christopher]

The bridge set was built on the same stage the TOS bridge was built on.

No, it wasn't. The Phase II/TMP Enterprise sets (which were later recycled as TNG and VGR sets) were built on Paramount's Stage 9. The TOS sets were built on Desilu's Stage 9, which on Desilu's merger with Paramount was renamed Stage 31.

And I seem to recall that the rec deck set was the larget of the TMP sets...

The ST Stages History site indicates that the Rec Deck and V'Ger interiors were built on Stage 8. I imagine that would include the Memory Wall/trench sets as well as the Voyager 6 core.

 

[QuasarVM]

The bridge set was built on the same stage the TOS bridge was built on.

No, it wasn't. The Phase II/TMP Enterprise sets (which were later recycled as TNG and VGR sets) were built on Paramount's Stage 9. The TOS sets were built on Desilu's Stage 9, which on Desilu's merger with Paramount was renamed Stage 31.

And I seem to recall that the rec deck set was the larget of the TMP sets...

The ST Stages History site indicates that the Rec Deck and V'Ger interiors were built on Stage 8. I imagine that would include the Memory Wall/trench sets as well as the Voyager 6 core.

As Steve Martin used to say -- "Well EXCUUUUUUUUSE ME!!!"

Regarding the TMP bridge set and the stage it resided on, I was going from over 30 year memory of an issue of Starlog -- where, I still believe in Susan Sackett's "From the Bridge" column she stated the Phase 2 bridge was being built (at the time) on the same soundstage as the TOS bridge.

Forgive me for not running over to Wikipedia (or whatever) to check my facts before posting.

I'd still put my Treknowledge over a lot of other peoples.

So again....

 

[Christopher]

I was merely clarifying a fact. No personal slight was intended.

 

[Jeyl]

So. How's the website resurface coming along? I'm getting anxious!