What are those black squares on the underside face of the bench/table against the windows? Are those all paintings? Some kind of vent? Or other decoration?
Those are other photographs or paintings. Maybe they're too dark on your monitor to see, but there is definite some sort of design/painting/drawing/photograph on them. It's too hard to tell what though. I'm thinking of using some TOS matte paintings on them, as the rightmost one looks like it could be a building from the nighttime Starbase 11 matte painting.
It’s funny - my eyes had always “read” the frames of those glass bar cabinet doors as being some kind of metal colored - like brushed aluminum, not green (or some shade of white reflecting green light). But now I see it both ways. Funny how light can trick the senses. Like that blue and black dress that looks white and gold.
[/QUOTE] Actually there's a few shots (at least two) in IV that show where you are, the bridge, and the city (BIG city) on the other side. Same when Admiral Cartright is looking out the window to the bridge.
I too originally read them as metal, but I think they're just white reflecting the green light. But could be wrong. I can depict them either way
Re the TGT SF proposal mentioned above... I merged two disparate frames of the space office complex background and removed the vehicles. I reoriented the resulting image based upon what he said was the Golden Gate Bridge, and then did "north" in two possible ways. Voila. Make of that what you will...
Re possible art choices for the officers’ lounge walls- There is also the painting of the TOS Enterprise done by Matt Jefferies that is on the cover of his biography by his brother. http://www.mattjefferies.com/images/01-bookcover.jpg
I tried to up the contrast on that image and outlined what I think are the matching features on a real map. The three points of Marin are very similar. SF is much smaller in comparison and oddly shaped, even if there is some distortion from perspective/curvature. The bridge angle is wonky as well. But I do think it is SF Bay.
Ah, the blogger over at Third Wave Design has already indentified the painting on the left as another Robert McCall's: "Apollo 8 Coming Home"
Oh, neat! Great to have them both identified. I guess the lower ones are probably other McCall paintings. Hey, you were talking about maybe using abstract art in one of the sets -- how about some of the early concept paintings for V'Ger? Some of those are pretty abstract, and it'd be a nice in-joke.
I'm warming up to the idea of using TMP concept art. I can use the head canon that my TMP "tour" of the ship is shortly after the V'ger incident and perhaps Spock or another crewmember has done some artwork based on their shared experiences. Ugh. I really want to identify the other paintings. The middle left two are virtually impossible because they're nearly blobs of dark color, but the two on the middle right have just enough identifying lines/shapes that I may be able to match them, should I come across the images online.
McCall has a very identifiable style, so his work is usually easy to spot. Or a photo of the Mike Minor-designed and later scrapped TV V'ger miniature on a viewer somewhere.
They could also be by @Rick Sternbach; as a lot of the space paintings featured in TNG were his, and he was an illustrator on TMP.
BTW, to anyone unfamiliar with the geography, in the righthand image see the lake the bottom center, and the lake near the west coast about halfway up? Draw a line through them both out to the water and THAT is the San Andreas fault. Everything east of it is the North American Plate and everything west is the Pacific Plate. Anyway, after seeing this (thanks @Mark 2000), I'll got back to my source PSD file and reorient it to match true north.
I'll reach out and ask. However, given that two of the six paintings in the TMP officer's lounge miniature are Robert McCall's AND focused on the Apollo program, I think it's safe to say that I should stick with this theme since I can't for the life of me identify the others. Perhaps a "early human space flight" theme (although my brain wants to be more inclusive and change it to "early Federation species space flight", but alas there are no such images in existence, AFAIK ). So I can just stick with some of the McCall space-flight paintings that were made before 1980. It now feels weird now to have TOS matte paintings flanked by two Apollo Program paintings. Derp.
It may be impossible to get a true orientation. If you turn your image to match the map the Golden Gate Bridge will nearly be going East-West.
I'm going to ignore the line which seems like it might be the bridge, which honestly, at such altitude might not be visible at all. Maybe those points are sandbars.
I doubt Rick would know, since he was in the main Art Dept. not over in RA&A and later Trumbull's factory. Andy Probert designed that miniature room, so maybe he'd know.
Either way this looks amazing! It’s so cool to see some of these background details brought to life. I never realized how much there was to that room - it just looked like a cabinet in the background in the film. You did a great job making that space become something “real”. What seemed like a very tiny set now seems so much larger thanks to your efforts. Now when I watch this scene in the movie I can “see” the room it really was. It was actually a pretty impressive set considering it was cobbled together at the last minute using furniture from the Rex Deck.