Still a very "Klingon" design.
Yes, it's not clear in the featurette just when the Romulan concept was dropped or how much Klingon design influence there was from the start. Others might be able to provide more info; this is all I have on the subject. But since it showed the first model made and covered what
Brutal Strudel mentioned, I thought it might be helpful.
The model would look a lot more Romulan to me if the neck/head boom weren't there. But here's a mention that it was apparently always intended to look like a bird with an outstretched neck, followed by more on its mixed influences:
Leonard Nimoy (6:14-6:58):
When we went to the ILM people, I said, in effect, it should be like a bird on attack. It should be swooping and frightening, and I gestured with my arms this way [arms outstetched to either side], as though these were the wings. And somebody suggested that the wings might change their position, which they did. I'm not sure how much audience awareness we had of that, but the wings actually changed position as the thing went from a cruising position into a diving, swooping, attacking position. But I was very interested in the idea that it should have this outstretched neck as though you would see a bird flying to attack a creature, or sometimes you see a bird swooping down towards the water to dive in, catch a fish, and come up with a fish in its beak.
Bill George, 6:58-7:35:
Very often the way it would start would be lots of sketches, a whole variety of directions, and then we would present those to the director, Leonard Nimoy. And he would pick the ones that he would like, and then from that we would get closer and closer to the ultimate design.
And what we want to get across, if we're successful with the design, is not only that it looks like a different culture, but that has some sort of character that's reminiscent of the culture. In other words, for the Klingon ship, it would be mean and aggressive-looking.
And there were lots of sketches done for the ship, and ultimately there was never one that was chosen as, "OK, that's the design." There were things that Leonard liked about some of them and others things he liked about others. And so we came up with a hybrid.
[...]
8:01-8:51:
And one of the sketches that I worked from, interestingly enough, that Nilo [Rodis, visual effects art director] gave me was this one here...
...of this muscle man. And he said, "Make it look like that," which at first took me a little bit by surprise. But the kind of downturned arms became the posture for the wings in the attack position, and then I also looked - the other thing that was very distinctive were these shoulders, these big trapezius muscles here. And that was the genesis of why I came up with this kind of radial fin area that would, no matter how you bent the wing, would still retain that mass and give it, hopefully, the look of the muscle man.
