I don't get why fans of TOS would complain about the FX in TFF.
Final Frontier special effects
- Thread starter KelisThePoet
- Start date
Because TOS had great FX for it's time and medium and TFF had bad FX for it's time and medium.
alot of trekkie/nontrekkie friendships ended summer 89
Last edited:
I had passes to see STV at a preview. Gave a bunch to friends and co-workers. My girlfriend invited her dad. Oh well, he never liked me anyway.
This is a good reel for people who have forgotten how dreadful the visual effects were in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. It doesn't have every effect shot from the movie (notably missing, for example, is that terrible blue screen [?] shot of Kirk and Spock falling from the mountain at the beginning of the movie), but it has most of them.
And, boy, are they awful -- the models are over-lit, poorly composited, and look crummy in motion. The ships look like toys or paper cut outs in just about every shot that isn't taken from an earlier movie. These are easily the worst visual effects in a Star Trek movie (although the CGI in Star Trek: Insurrection is rather dreadful, as well).
And, boy, are they awful -- the models are over-lit, poorly composited, and look crummy in motion. The ships look like toys or paper cut outs in just about every shot that isn't taken from an earlier movie. These are easily the worst visual effects in a Star Trek movie (although the CGI in Star Trek: Insurrection is rather dreadful, as well).
Also a warp shot of the Excelsior doubling for the Enterprise-B, and a shot of the Bird of Prey cloaking.
alot of trekkie/nontrekkie friendships ended summer 89
I had passes to see STV at a preview. Gave a bunch to friends and co-workers. My girlfriend invited her dad. Oh well, he never liked me anyway.
I took a co-worker and a friend of his, both of whom had never seen Star Trek, to STV. As we came out, they were both gushing with praise for it. I and my other two friends who came with had to almost literally bite our tongues to not turn them off of Star Trek. I did say to both newcomers "Well, if you liked this, you'll love the other ones."
It is 'embarrassing' in so much that had I been responsible for that particular shot, as an FX professional, I would have been embarrassed.
The stock footage was clumsily included and jarred with the rest of the visuals and for me was the worse aspect of the FX in Generations. I dunno, we must have seen a different film as I cannot believe you are actually saying to me the the visuals in TFF, which disregarding the film's other problems are widely accepted to be comfortably the worse in the series, are better than Generations? Bar the two shots I mentioned earlier there isn't a single effects shot in the entire movie that evokes anything other than a shoddy budget-slashed troubled production. Generations had a multitude of problems, visual effects was not one of them. Name me one effects shot in TFF that is better than in Generations.
Last edited:
The only effect which I felt was subpar, even for TFF was the Windex that Enterprise flew through to get to Sha Ka Ree. Even The Classic Series did better than this silly-looking shite. Otherwise, the rest of the FX in STAR TREK V fit in and went hand-in-hand with this feature. They fit right in ...
The Enterprise warping away from the torpedo is a contender, but yes this was truly dreadful. The worst part was it just looked like they zoomed the camera away from the Enterprise rather than it looking like it was flying away from you. It reminded me of Superman IV.
HAHAHA!!! Yes! I forgot about the A's speedy retreat out of the path of the torpedo! Brilliant! That was almost like it came right out of an old Warner Brother's cartoon. My favourite out of the cheap and cheesy FX, though, was when the shuttlecraft was represented as a stage light being lowered on a crane, with a fan blowing some tumbleweeds around. Yeah, to hear Harve Bennett tell it, he and Ralph Winter were trying to make the approach towards making the FX as simple as they could towards the end, for the company. Sometimes it shows and sometimes it really shows ...
I wouldn't have minded the warp trails in isolation in that scene - they were no worse than the warp effect from TSFS onwards, it was the way the ship almost moved sideways with completely the wrong perspective needed for the shot to work. It was laughable. The warp effects from TMP and TWOK were massively better, and in TMP's case a decade older.
I don't see the problem here, either. They didn't have the budget to show something, so they implied its presence without showing it. And in this case, what's lost dramatically by not seeing some shuttle touch down?
On this point, by contrast, I'll concede. My own sense of spatial relations is so bad, this stuff doesn't bother me, but I take people's word for it when they point it out (and can sometimes even laboriously make myself understand).
Fair enough. I came to TFF and TOS at about the same time so I've always associated dated/weak FX with classic Trek.
Movies are always supposed to show ... not tell. Besides which, it might've been nice to actually show Uhura actively involved in doing something other than answering the phones, for a change. Even showing her in the cockpit pressing buttons with trees out the window might've meant something more than a mere spotlight. It was simply another example of how shitful a director Shatner was ... and ever shall be. Even competent directors try this shit, though, with not much better results. For example, in Jurassic Park: Lost World:
There are a couple of occasions, at least, where someone actually has to "announce" (to other people near him who can see this) that the offending dinosaurs are finally leaving the area, without showing them depart. It barely flew the first time, but, "oh! Who's going to care about seeing that?" Well, yeah, I hear you ... you know? I get it, but ... it's kinda lame, don't you think? I mean ... you go through the trouble of setting them up for a big horror sequence, then their departure is just covered with line of dialogue. And then, to keep doing it ... True, no "drama" is lost, but it does screw up the transition to the next shot. It's kind of Film School, trying to pull that shit, you know? Are you shooting a big, event movie, or aren't you?
Similar threads
