Douglas Trumbull, Special Photographic Effects Director on Star Trek – The Motion Picture, has died at the age of 79. Here's Variety's obituary: https://variety.com/2022/film/news/douglas-trumbull-dead-visual-effects-1235174814/
79 years is a long time, and he seemed to have had a productive life; certainly, his contributions to science fiction film cannot be understated. Still, it is incredibly sad that he's gone now. My condolences to his friends, colleagues and family.
He did a number of better films than TMP, considering the state of the art at the times of his prior films.
He saved that movie TMP and his brilliant work of the hull self reflecting light was something even the best artists at ILM still couldn't figure out how it was done. As much as I love their work of TWOK I wonder what this incredible man , Trumbull, and his team could've done with that film if he was available to do it? His work will live on and he will always be remembered.
He did amazing work on a number of films. His work on TMP was really cutting edge and I believe it still stands up to scrutiny today. It was good enough that ILM basically did the same thing with TWOK, TSFS and TVH. As far as special effects go the first 4 films all look like they were done by the same people. ILM obviously didn't feel the need to redo everything since the effects for TMP were excellent in their own right.
TWOK actually uses several scenes from TMP, no doubt for budgetary reasons. If they had more time and money, they probably would have created their own renditions.
Watching TMP on the big screen was one of the best movie experiences I ever had. It was truly spectacular. And now the 2 best contributors (Trumbull and Goldsmith) are gone. RIP DT.
Probably wasn't necessary since the beauty passes already shot and TWOK didn't really need additional ones since the bigger task was to blow their own models up. Still wonder what Trumbull could've done but his resume was phenomenal: 2002: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the 3rd kind, The Tree of Life and of course there's more but man what an artist and his incredible achievements.
Well, they did end up doing that. They used a few stock shots from TMP as you noted. But the style and look of the scenes ILM created were consistent with TMP. And for the first 4 movies the style looked very similar, enough so that it almost looks like the same people could have done all 4 movies. Now I would say partly that was probably because they wanted to maintain some consistency in the look and feel of the ships and effects. It's telling that when given the opportunity to create new ships, like the Reliant and Grissom, they had a similar design feel to the refit Enterprise. So while they wanted to take the story in a different direction from TMP, they felt the design and special effects work was good enough to keep for new ships and movies. It also doesn't hurt, of course, that Nicholas Meyer did retain some of the production staff from TMP.
I always wanted Mr. Trumbull and others to design more refit era ships--as if Excelsior never existed---what would they have looked like? Now, we will never know. It is said that every time a senior dies---a library burns. A light show even then. Thank you Doug....for making our lives so much brighter.
Very sad news, Mr. Trumbull's contributions to the past and future of motion picture design are immeasurable.