More like The Andromeda Strain, Robert Wise's previous SF film, and other '70s films like The Illustrated Man. If anything, Star Wars and Alien were the films that bucked that design trend in favor of more gritty, run-down sets, albeit with a few exceptions like the Blockade Runner interior and the Nostromo computer room.
Just looking through the thread and saw this pic. I cant believe I never noticed those wall panels behind McCoy are reused in TNG as the Wall Displays in Crushers Office. Neat.
Interesting! I'd never noticed that about Kirk's viewscreen cabin wall, that the soft bevel of the edge terminates at the bottom. Good to know! What 3D scan are you referring to?
Yeah, I meant like the Tantive IV and the Alien computer room; I'm afraid I'm not familiar with those other films.
The Andromeda Strain might be worth checking out for TMP fans, since it's a clear forerunner to Wise's aesthetic and directorial choices in the latter film, with the same kind of clean, sterile futurism and the same kind of sedate, dispassionate acting (the idea, I suppose, being that trained professionals stay calm in a crisis rather than giving in to their emotions). As for The Illustrated Man, I wouldn't recommend it -- it's a sluggishly paced, unsatisfying adaptation of Ray Bradbury's work. Although it does have a Jerry Goldsmith score. And its version of "The Veldt" kind of anticipates the holodeck concept. Other '70s films embracing the "sterile white future" aesthetic include Woody Allen's Sleeper, George Lucas's THX-1138, and Superman: The Movie (though the Krypton parts were technically in the past).
Well, The Veldt itself presages the holodeck (one of my favorite RB stories): They stood on the thatched floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. “But nothing’s too good for our children,” George had said. The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed, and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.
But as I said before, Star Wars was one of the films that ended the trend of sterile high-tech environments and reoriented cinematic visual futurism toward a more grungy, lived-in aesthetic -- Alien and Blade Runner being the other main examples. The sterile, clean environments are the exceptions there. They aren't portrayed as the places where ordinary people live and work.
Finished up the consoles on either wall of the Examination Room This console is the "Scan" console, according to the Enterprise Flight Manual. The controls to the left activate the viewers above, and the main panel controls the scanning mechanisms and light up to show the results of the scan. The circular insets there are storage wells for medical scanners/tools, which I will place there when I get some modeled. These consoles/displays are for the mini-transporter unit. I've used the same model of mini-transporter that I used on the TMP bridge, although scaled down. This is described in MSGTTE as a closed-circuit transporter unit for transporting medicines, tissue samples, etc to any lab on the ship. Although we don't ever see this mini-transporter unit, we can infer it was meant to be somewhere on that wall, given that the controls in the Enterprise Flight Manual describe these panels are for the function of such a transporter. And although it's not there in that trading card of McCoy and a crispy Preston, I've placed it there nonetheless after trying a few different positions (like to the left of all these panels) because it fit here and made a nice, neat little box of stuff on the wall.
Im no quite sure what's gong on at the bottom. It kinda looks like the shadow of the couch could be making the curvature seem gone along the bottom. This image (link) is about the best look we get at it in TMP. Here are crops from two frames, and the former smells more like a shadow than anything.
That's how it looks without anything in front of it. Here it is in Generations. http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=518&pid=56309#top_display_media
Never made the connection that Kirk's wall screen was the sickbay screen from TNG! I always assumed that the flat bottom was just some sort of manufacturing mistake they couldn't fix (which is why I didn't reproduce it on my TNG era sickbay models). Perhaps it was indeed a mistake and that's why they tried to cover it up with the sofa? It's not exactly the most logical layout to have a sofa looking away from the screen anyway...
I wouldn't think it was a mistake so much as either an aesthetic choice or time saver. Maybe they thought it wasn't worth it since it wouldn't be seen behind the sofa. But I actually think it looks kind of difficult to blend the radius into the flat edge rather than continue it all the way. I really don't know. Also, I had kind of assumed that this screen was also what's behind The Doctor's desk on Voyager. But when I went looking for images to prove this, it looks like that one has sharp edges around the screen, so I guess not. I also looked at the viewer in the Briefing Room, and no luck there either.
AH that clarifies it, thanks. That has to be deliberate. It's hard to say what the screen was designed for first. Kirk's quarters for the Star Trek II TV show was very different and had no such feature. The wall might've been built for sickbay and repurposed for Kirk's quarters in TMP. EDIT: Maybe others have seen it, but I just found (here) this low-quality image of a blueprint for the TV set: ...and you can see the office area is MUCH smaller than the final set, the sonic shower, etc., is positioned differently, and there's no door into the "bedroom" side. Instead, there's one in the "office". This fit with these photos. Here (lower left) you can see the quarters under construction. The caption says the set is being "widened", so they knocked out the far wall out where that viewscreen ended up. And here, upper left. Notice the absence of the door to the corridor of the foyer that contains it, which matches the blueprint. Finally in this one (right) you see the set earlier along that in the photo above. Note the door in the wall is in the office area, as per the blueprint. When they revamped the set they put in the foyer leading into the bedroom and the door in the office was lost behind the curved walls. Interestingly, Mike Minor's concept sketch for the quarters features those wall plant-ons seen in sickbay (LINK) and features the "red trim overhang" noted in the first page of set photos I posted above. I got no idea what's going on with the backsides of walls seen through the door here. Seems like that's the door into Kirk's TV office, so maybe those are wild walls standing in there. I do notice the doors are centered under the corridor beams and centered on wall sections, which would be helpful in doing a TV corridor.
I've seen a lot of stage plans over the years but that one is new on me! Shame it's so small. It's fascinating to see any Phase 2 material, because so much of it was just a more polished version of the TOS sets - Kirk's cabin is an excellent example. The door leading into Kirk's office instead of his bedroom make tons more sense than opening into his bedroom. I assume the change was made as a consequence of building the "more cinematic" long/short corridor segments: By insisting that all doors had to be on the "short" segments in TMP it made for a very tight fit with the cabin entrance! Or maybe it's simply more cinematic to have those swooshing glass panels?
The door needed to be in the bedroom side because when they redressed Kirk's quarters as Ilia's cabin, they put in that wall unit with the mirror/dresser that blocks off the "office" section. http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/tmp2/tmphd1858.jpg In this configuration, the set is depicted as "Junior Officer's Quarters" in Mr. Scott's Guide.
Got the examination room bed modeled and textured! The graphic is pretty crude, as it's what I made years ago, based on a graphic of the nervous system I found online. Since we never really get to see this graphic in great detail (unless @Rick Sternbach has any images of it he can share, since he created it), I figure this is "good enough" I should point out that I think the inclusion of a graphic of what is a very human nervous system is kind of weird and not very inclusive, unless we are meant to believe this graphic changes based on what humanoid/lifeform is lying on it. Any thoughts?
I like the idea of a dynamic display that changes with whoever is on the exam table. And maybe the graphic of a human nervous system is why the table was covered in fabric for TNG.