I realised: I miss external Enterprise shots... and ad breaks

C.E. Evans · 2025-09-07T16:26:57+0100

I do think a brief 3-second shot of the ship at the start of some acts in an episode can give a quick sense that it takes place over a period of time. It may cut down on relying on log entries or exposition dialogue to tell us that time has passed since the last act or major story beat.

Michael · 2025-09-07T16:48:43+0100

Until this thread I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, but yes, something does feel differently about the way Strange New Worlds employs (or rather doesn’t employ) establishing shots of the ship. Can’t say it really bothers me too much, but I will say it sometimes feels like we’re not seeing the ship outside all that often. And I’ll agree that on the older shows it helped to create a sense of the passing of time, a sense of location and of the ship as a character.

That said, thinking back to Discovery, I can’t say I’m missing these constant shots flying from a wide shot of the entire ship to one of the windows or the open hangar door. These are cool to have the first handful of times, but they overdid it to a point where it felt rather gratuitous to me, almost drawing attention to themselves.

CorporalCaptain · 2025-09-07T16:53:17+0100

Michael said:
Until this thread I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it, but yes, something does feel differently about the way Strange New Worlds employs (or rather doesn’t employ) establishing shots of the ship. Can’t say it really bothers me too much, but I will say it sometimes feels like we’re not seeing the ship outside all that often. And I’ll agree that on the older shows it helped to create a sense of the passing of time, a sense of location and of the ship as a character.

That said, thinking back to Discovery, I can’t say I’m missing these constant shots flying from a wide shot of the entire ship to one of the windows or the open hangar door. These are cool to have the first handful of times, but they overdid it to a point where it felt rather gratuitous to me, almost drawing attention to themselves.

On TOS, there was stock footage. Not expensive to insert, but the same every time, except maybe putting a different color filter on the planet (make that relatively inexpensive in that case). TNG also (re)used lots of stock footage.

Does stock footage go over well these days? I'd expect there'd be a Twitter storm about how the show is too cheap because they're reusing stock footage all the time.

JohnCrichton1999 · 2025-09-07T22:07:53+0100

CorporalCaptain said:
On TOS, there was stock footage. Not expensive to insert, but the same every time, except maybe putting a different color filter on the planet (make that relatively inexpensive in that case). TNG also (re)used lots of stock footage.

Does stock footage go over well these days? I'd expect there'd be a Twitter storm about how the show is too cheap because they're reusing stock footage all the time.

They could do more animated stock footage that could probably trick the average viewer enough if they really wanted to cut on SFX expenses. I was thinking of that very idea before, and honestly they did that often with Voyager when it was the early days of pure CGI external shots. They forgot the art of creating CGI stock footage. It really should be a thing again.

MarcKyle1964 · 2025-09-08T00:23:07+0100

JohnCrichton1999 said:
They could do more animated stock footage that could probably trick the average viewer enough if they really wanted to cut on SFX expenses. I was thinking of that very idea before, and honestly they did that often with Voyager when it was the early days of pure CGI external shots. They forgot the art of creating CGI stock footage. It really should be a thing again.

Bring on the Babylon 5 toasters, I say. (the entire B5 pilot was rendered on 24 Commodore Amigas networked together)

Christopher · 2025-09-08T00:38:33+0100

MarcKyle1964 said:
Bring on the Babylon 5 toasters, I say. (the entire B5 pilot was rendered on 24 Commodore Amigas networked together)

The Video Toaster pretty much made the '90s-'00s sci-fi/fantasy TV boom possible by allowing extensive CGI effects for a fraction of the cost it would've taken before. It really was revolutionary.

AntonyF · 2025-09-08T08:23:22+0100

Really even Voyager had stock model shots, it didn't start using CGI until about season four really.

In fact the only broadcast era show that would have been CGI is Enterprise. I can't remember off hand, but I suspect they were just happy to use stock shots because we'd gotten used to it by that point and it wouldn't have seemed odd. It was a CGI copy of a model-driven world.

But now...

CorporalCaptain said:
I'd expect there'd be a Twitter storm about how the show is too cheap because they're reusing stock footage all the time.

Probably that!

JohnCrichton1999 · 2025-09-08T11:18:36+0100

AntonyF said:
Really even Voyager had stock model shots, it didn't start using CGI until about season four really.

In fact the only broadcast era show that would have been CGI is Enterprise. I can't remember off hand, but I suspect they were just happy to use stock shots because we'd gotten used to it by that point and it wouldn't have seemed odd. It was a CGI copy of a model-driven world.

But now...

Probably that!

I thought Voyager was pure CGI, not physical SFX? I could be mistaken. Either way, I really think they should make greenscreened cgi stock shots these days.

AntonyF · 2025-09-08T11:45:19+0100

JohnCrichton1999 said:
I thought Voyager was pure CGI, not physical SFX? I could be mistaken. Either way, I really think they should make greenscreened cgi stock shots these days.

No, they definitely had physical models early on. It was around about Scorpion that you really start to notice them get going with CGI. Look at the crazy movements Voyager does in some of the shots that would never have been possible with models. Then they started using CGI also for some of the standard stock shots; personally I never liked them as they lost some of the texture of the model shots.

But yeah I agree. Even with TNG they had one stock shock that they used with planets and other ships or nothing at at all. You can take some reasonably standard shots and vary them up.

You'd have thought churning out a few of the Enterprise at warp or just looking amazing in space would be doable.

AntonyF · 2025-09-08T11:46:26+0100

The Voyager model...

Christopher · 2025-09-08T11:51:45+0100

AntonyF said:
But yeah I agree. Even with TNG they had one stock shock that they used with planets and other ships or nothing at at all. You can take some reasonably standard shots and vary them up.

When ILM filmed the miniature FX for "Encounter at Farpoint" (before Image G took over for the rest of the series), they extended a number of the Enterprise shots beyond what was required for the pilot, so that they could build up a library of stock shots for use throughout the series.

Still, the slitscan technique used to stretch the ship for warp-entry shots was very complicated, so for seven seasons, TNG only used the same three warp-entry stretching shots that ILM had created for "Farpoint," or did a simpler warp-entry shot by having the ship facing the camera and suddenly blurring forward past it. The only time we saw the ship stretch outside of those three shots was in "Where No One Has Gone Before," which was shot directly side-on so that it was a simple matter of stretching the 2D image horizontally. It was only in later series, once they started using CGI ships, that it became easier to do stretching warp shots.

Tuskin38 · 2025-09-08T20:10:35+0100

AntonyF said:
personally I never liked them as they lost some of the texture of the model shots.

and there's some weird wraping that doesn't match the physical model. Compare the phaser arrays between the physical and CG models for example. In a head on shot, the phaser arrays on the physical model are level when wrapping around the front, but on the CG model they kinda wrap down ward

Both models are robin egg blue, Rob tried very hard to match the CG model to the physical model, but in a lot of shots it's really hard to tell, it gets washed out.

EAS has a bunch of images of both models people can use to compare

Ex Astris Scientia - Starship Gallery - Intrepid

Gallery of Starfleet's Intrepid class (USS Voyager)

www.ex-astris-scientia.org

here's an interview with Rob Bonchune

Voyager's Visual Effects: Creating the CG Voyager with Rob Bonchune

We’re wrapping up Voyager Week with a very special behind-the-scenes article from former Star Trek: Voyager Senior CG Supervisor Rob Bonchune. Rob’s tenure at the franchise led him to work on all three CG-heavy Trek shows: Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise, eventually becoming the Senior...

blog.trekcore.com

The Voyager CG model was way more accurate to the physical model than the Defiant CG model with the giant nose and other odd shapes.

I realised: I miss external Enterprise shots... and ad breaks

C.E. Evans

Admiral

Michael

A good bad influence

CorporalCaptain

Nerd

JohnCrichton1999

Lieutenant Junior Grade

MarcKyle1964

Captain

Christopher

Writer

AntonyF

Official Tahmoh Taster

JohnCrichton1999

Lieutenant Junior Grade

AntonyF

Official Tahmoh Taster

AntonyF

Official Tahmoh Taster

Christopher

Writer

Tuskin38

Fleet Admiral

Ex Astris Scientia - Starship Gallery - Intrepid

Voyager's Visual Effects: Creating the CG Voyager with Rob Bonchune

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