Exeter "The Tressaurian Intersection" Grading & Discussion Thread

[STEPhon IT]

I don;t think one has to have a "hard-on against" a show to personally feel someone was miscast in a role.

It's as if they're pretending to not know there was an obvious age difference between the two actors from Star Trek/ Shatner in his 30's and STC/Vic in his 50's. Brian Gross who played Kirk was more age appropriate and made the character his own, not trying to ape William Shatner.
I have no problem with the same actor, Jim Johnson, portraying the same role he created years later.

 

[Maurice]

Well, if they did another one, they wouldn't pretend it was one or two years later. I think only B'fuselek could pull that off... I mean, since he had the antennae lift he looks 10 years younger!

 

[STEPhon IT]

LOL!!! I'm sure if they did come back, you would probably find a creative way for Cutty to final earn his cup of coffee?

 

[Maurice]

Cutty never gets coffee. End of story.

 

[Mudd]

I am so necroing this thread...

A couple of us who worked on the show were chatting offline the other day, and I looked at a couple of minutes* of it while we we were talking. I was just struck by this one visual sequence as an example not only of the artistic talents of the effects people, set designers, director and so forth but of the amazing changes in technology that by 2005 had brought tools into the hands of low-budget filmmakers that would enable them to do, on a shoestring, things that could not be done on a network TV budget forty or fifty years ago.

This is entirely miniature work mated with a little bit of live action and some in-computer matte work. And the matting process worked with so many fewer visual flaws with computer technology than with older optical printer processes (on TV budgets, anyway):





Of course, the old saying that you can make up for a lack of money if you have enough time** rings true. Principal photography was at least as time-compressed on this fan film as on most current TV shows, but the post-production period was much longer and more flexible for us.


*It's got over 2.2 million views on YouTube now, with minimal promotion over the last ten years.
**And the reverse, although IMO often to less satisfying effect

 

[Tallguy]

The miniature work on this film was out of this world. It not only showed us what we had never seen but it was exactly the way we always knew it was.

 

[Mudd]

The miniature work on this film was out of this world. It not only showed us what we had never seen but it was exactly the way we always knew it was.

That was always Jimm's aim.

Most of the model work for the show was done by David Weiberg of MNFX, who also put a tremendous creative effort - not to mention a lot of sweat and supervision - into the sets for the show. Thomas Sasser built several beautiful models as well, although none of them are featured in this sequence; he'd built an engineering interior that was pretty awesome but not appropriate for the level and kinds of destruction that David put this miniature through.

David was brilliant and painstaking with the details. His interiors were scaled to be populated, if that's the word, by 1/12 scale action figures as the corpses of the Kongo crew. Problem was, action figures don't lay down dead in natural postures. So he either modeled or cast wax replicas of those figures (don't remember which) that he could hand-shape and deform into limp, lifeless crewpeople.

 

[Mudd]

Another thing that was so good about David's work was that he did it in such detail that it matched with full-scale live-action sets of the Kongo which our people used a few minutes later.

There's a difference in the density of smoke in the air - well, these are different corridors located at different places on the ship, right? - but there's nothing jarring in the juxtaposition, IMO:

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Yes, that model work was outstanding. So outstanding that I did not realize on first viewing that all of these shots, especially the ones in the corridors, were models!

 

[Mudd]

Another detail, in terms of "invisible CG" is that the orange hex grille between the upper control room and the main engineering deck is a Lightwave-rendered mesh (with way too many polys!) that's matted in between the live action and the model. The big window behind the actors when they're facing the camera just had a green screen in it.

One reason for doing it that way was concern that it would be too hard to do the matte with the green screen hung behind real orange metal grille. One concern was the grille casting complicated shadows on the green.