I don't really but that, we saw some great sets in the course of Voyager. Sprucing up the ship and adding a new set or two would not have broken the bank.
Does It Get Better???
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I don't really but that, we saw some great sets in the course of Voyager. Sprucing up the ship and adding a new set or two would not have broken the bank.
The Maquis that blew up Cardassian ships were Chakotay's Maquis. They were defending their homes because in "Maquis pt 1 & 2" we discovered that the Cardassians were supplying their citizens with weapons to terrorize the the Federation colonists left behind. At that time the Federation still considered the Maquis Federation citizens and was willing to pardon them as long as they stopped the hostilities. Remember, Sisko's friend Cal told him the Maquis had no beef with Starfleet/Federation and asked they be left alone because they didn't want to end up fighting their friends. Chakotay's Maquis were not enemies of the Federation.(or at least didn't want to be) Starfleet had to get involved because Cardassia told them if they didn't, they would and they'd kill them all. Remember officers like O'Brian sympathized with this group of Maquis.
It was Eddingtons leadership of the Maquis that made them go out and attack Federation ships and poison planets. He was due to his escalating matters is what caused Cardassia to seek out the help of the Dominion. To Dominion promised to kill all Maquis in return, Cardassia would become members of the Dominion. Nobody in Staerfleet sympathized with Eddingtons tactics and his direction of the Maquis. Due to his actions, his Maquis weren't welcomed or pardoned.
There are two different divisions of the Maquis, Chakotay's and Eddingtons.
Don't forget they had to rebuild the bridge set after it caught fire in between s3 and 4, I think it was.
Plus, "YOH" was a sweeps week eps., in which studios are allowed to spend a bigger budget on eps. because that when sponsors are shopping for hit show to advertise on. Season premiers, mid-season and season finales are the when the biggest amount of the shows budget is spent. If you look at the DVD's, you'll notice all the higher budgeted eps. are always clumped together. Look at when DS9 used it's budget on those FX space battles. Between DS9 & Voy., you'll see the pattern.
"Nothing Human", further proof of reusing an old set from DS9. Besides the DVD extras on TNG DVD's explain how many of the sets they us are reused sets and props to save on budgets. Every time their in a cave, it's the same cave in every series.
Yep, budget is everything on a show with such high production already such as Trek. The lighting bill on DS9 just to light up the Pormenade and Quarks alone must have been though the roof considering they film for 14 to 16 hours a day!!!
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Insurance almost certainly paid for that; if it didn't, I'd still be surprised if those costs were charged against the series budget.
The lighting bill on DS9 just to light up the Pormenade and Quarks alone must have been though the roof considering they film for 14 to 16 hours a day!!!
I'm sure the average lighting cost of the series was no more expensive than the average lighting bill incurred by other Paramount productions each day. The lighting of Hollywood sets -- any set -- is rather elaborate.
Jammer wrote a 1,500 word review of the episode. Come on. It's not hard to find.
And it's TheGodBen, no spaces. Since you obviously went to the trouble to look up his review thread (and thanks for doing that; his three word review gives the episode as much effort as it's worth) it shouldn't be that hard to just copy and paste the name.
Can't say for sure, honestly.
I know on screen, not including the production lighting, it's one of the most impressive.
However, I think the main point still stands that budget controls allot of what happens in production.
Oh, certainly. However, Trek (especially once you get past the early seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation) was not a low-budget affair for Paramount by any means. And if you're looking at where the money is going, electrical costs are a minor expense in the scheme of things.
To compare, since I have the actual production budget in front of me, the total electrical cost of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was $432,911. That's the total cost of all the electrical expenses (lighting and otherwise) of a $29,157,511 feature film on a 54 day shooting schedule.
The television shows, in contrast, shot episodes on a 7-day shooting schedule, with a much smaller budget. Assuming that you're spending the same amount of money per day as a feature (and this would likely be less, since feature films usually have much more elaborate lighting and camera set-ups than episodic television) that's about $50,000 per episode. That's also a more or less fixed cost, since sets always need to be lit, so it's not really going to have an effect on other budget lines.
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That was not the most efficient way to arrive at the point. Apologies.
To compare, since I have the actual production budget in front of me, the total electrical cost of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was $432,911. That's the total cost of all the electrical expenses (lighting and otherwise) of a $29,157,511 feature film on a 54 day shooting schedule.
The television shows, in contrast, shot episodes on a 7-day shooting schedule, with a much smaller budget. Assuming that you're spending the same amount of money per day as a feature (and this would likely be less, since feature films usually have much more elaborate lighting and camera set-ups than episodic television) that's about $50,000 per episode. That's also a more or less fixed cost, since sets always need to be lit, so it's not really going to have an effect on other budget lines.
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That was not the most efficient way to arrive at the point. Apologies.
I mean space station sets and Planetside sets more than sets within Voyager itself.
Some of those sets you're talking about may have already been re-used ones to begin with (they re-used stuff from FC and INS). All the Borg sets were from FC, and the big holo-museum from "Living Witness" was a re-use of an INS set.
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Well space-station and planet sets are expensive and its understandable why they wouldn't have new ones all the time. But a couple of permanent new sets on Voyager to make the ship feel more alive and show the crew interacting more would be nice.
To be fair, during season four, they added a major set and did a major expansion of a standing set: the astrometrics lab and the cargo bay with the borg alcoves. Still, neither of those were as impressive as Ten Forward or The Promenade, built/expanded during the second seasons of TNG and DS9.
Yeah, it would be nice to have some sets not related to the ship functions. I mean this was supposed to be a 70 year voyage and the crew were constantly stuck in this horrible, grey military environment.
Well, that's the fault of the design aesthetic of Star Trek since TNG (and, really, the lineage goes back to TMP): plenty of grays and not a lot of color. It didn't help that Berman's shooting aesthetic -- rarely deviated upon since 1987 -- was pretty dull and lifeless.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was a little more interesting to look at, since it was allowed to use shadows and dramatic lighting more often, but it still followed Berman's mundane shooting pattern.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was a little more interesting to look at, since it was allowed to use shadows and dramatic lighting more often, but it still followed Berman's mundane shooting pattern.
Its fine for the ships to look a bit duller but with Voyager being in such a unique situation, I would have expected the ship to look like a bit more of a patchwork with alien technology and some personalization.
Yeah, that never did happen. Even the astrometrics lab, which was supposed to be partially built out of Borg technology, was rather dull looking.
It's a shame, really, because if they had started to adopt alien technology, the grey color scheme at the start would have provided for an interesting contrast to the increasingly alien technology being added to it.
It's a shame, really, because if they had started to adopt alien technology, the grey color scheme at the start would have provided for an interesting contrast to the increasingly alien technology being added to it.
Wouldn't that be the fault of the director, not Berman?
Unfortunately, some directors lack vision.
That's one of the reasons I also like "Distant Origin" & "Latent Image". They're one of the few eps. that break away from what you're describing an use shadows and camera angles to convey mood or emotion in story telling.
Before they ruined it with ENT.. wasn't Federation tech already supposed to be an amalgam of alien tech.?
I was always under the assumption all alien tech was converted to look and work with Starfleet. Anything that can't be converted, can't be used. Like what Neelix did by using a tech. that didn't intergrate.
I'd rather that they simply were trapped in one area of the DQ for the series (like how Moya never left the Uncharted Territories) and they could make sets for recurring planets/alien ships that they kept running into.
If they took the trouble of sticking them in the DQ, they shouldn't waste that by having them run away from it. They should've spent the show fleshing out one area of DQ so that by the end it was as built-up and developed as the small part of the AQ that TNG/DS9 took place in.
If they took the trouble of sticking them in the DQ, they shouldn't waste that by having them run away from it. They should've spent the show fleshing out one area of DQ so that by the end it was as built-up and developed as the small part of the AQ that TNG/DS9 took place in.
Berman dictated a very conservative style of shooting and editing, which is evident in almost every episode of the franchise produced under his control. Rene Auberjonois mentions it in a fairly recent issue of the Star Trek Magazine (besides acting in the part of Odo, he directed a number of episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).
Here's the quote (No. 35, July/Aug 2011):
Rene Auberjonois said:
Well I wouldn't have wanted them to be stuck in one part of the DQ for the whole 7 seasons, but there definitely should have been arcs where they are in trouble and traveling through one area of space at either lower warp due to technical issues with the warp engine, or simply traveling through an empire or whatever.
Really!?
That I never knew.
Writer/producers aren't supposed to have that type of control over what a director does. It's one lesson I learned in Broadcasting: you don't step on a directors toes.
Thanks for the info.
Much appreciated.
Writer-Producers (or in Berman's case, really just a Producer; he didn't get heavily involved in the writing of the franchise until Enterprise ) wield a lot of power over directors when it comes to episodic television. In feature films, of course, the relationship is very different.
