question about special effects

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

One of my favorite shots of the E-E is in First Contact near the beginning. Not the "First" shot of it, ... I think the way it turns looks like a plastic model, but the next shot where we see it come up from behined camera, and then we hear Berlioz. It's fantastic. Anyone else think it was a model? If that's CG, how can they go from shots like that to the stuff in INS. I mean I know ILM wasn't involved, but still.

In the shot I'm referring to the ship looks more solid than many ships in the SW prequels

 

[archeryguy1701]

As I recall, it all was a model in FC, and the first went CG for INS.

 

[trevanian]

The only CG E-E shots in FC were when the ship went to warp and went through the time thingie. Everything else used the new 10 foot miniature.

Take it back, I'm pretty sure the tiny e-e seen in the telescope and again at the end by Lily were CG also, all done on John Knoll's Mac at home. And there are a couple shots closeup on the hull during the spacewalk that use CG embellishments to the closeup miniature photography (they were shooting a quarter-inch away from the model, you wind up photographing paint imperfections at that range when you only have ten days to paint the thing.)

I think Knoll did the phoenix windows looking up at the blue sky stuff at home too, while the big space battle was done in large part by ILM's Rebel Mac dept. Except for the E-e, the FARRAGUT style ship (don't know class designations, sorry), and the borg vessels (which were done as miniatures), all the other ships were CG, even the RELIANT.

 

[Kpnuts]

Without a doubt the best special effects came from First Contact.

Most of the Insurrection CGI looked cartoon-like and fake and all of Nemesis' CGI was just horrible and even worse looking.

Very glad they're going back to ILM for ST:XI.

I actually think the two nicest shots of the E-E are the very first shot in FC (during the captain's log) and the bit where it zooms in right in front of the Defiant (jaw dropping moment that was!)

 

[Warp Coil]

The E-E never looked better than she did in FC. The model work was great and the shots gave us a real good look at the new ship. The CGI work in INS was laughably bad (what was the budget for this movie, again?!). The CGI from NEM was better, but still made the Enterprise look like something out of a computer game instead of a real, 3-dimensional object with mass and texture.

 

[Tiberius Jim]

trevanian said:
The only CG E-E shots in FC were when the ship went to warp and went through the time thingie. Everything else used the new 10 foot miniature.

Take it back, I'm pretty sure the tiny e-e seen in the telescope and again at the end by Lily were CG also, all done on John Knoll's Mac at home. And there are a couple shots closeup on the hull during the spacewalk that use CG embellishments to the closeup miniature photography (they were shooting a quarter-inch away from the model, you wind up photographing paint imperfections at that range when you only have ten days to paint the thing.)

I think Knoll did the phoenix windows looking up at the blue sky stuff at home too, while the big space battle was done in large part by ILM's Rebel Mac dept. Except for the E-e, the FARRAGUT style ship (don't know class designations, sorry), and the borg vessels (which were done as miniatures), all the other ships were CG, even the RELIANT.

The CG Enterprise was also used in the battle against the Cube, specifically when the ship flies in front of the Defiant.

 

[trevanian]

That's a misapprehension. I've seen that reported elsewhere (maybe on the dvd -- there is a lot of bad info on the text commentaries, probably due to time constraints), but that is definitely a model of the -e and the cube in that shot, though DEFIANT is CG throughout.

The CG e-e was used for deformation stuff (warp drive.)

 

[Tiberius Jim]

It is stated in the special features documentary on the First Contact DVD that the CG version of the Enterprise was used when it flies in front of the Defiant. I would assume the people who made the movie would know what they're taking about.

 

[Maurice]

It doesn't make sense to build a big old physical model and then not use it for the kind of shot you'd build a big physical model for. Unfortunately, I don't have Cinefex issue 69, which covers the film, which would undoubtedly discuss this.

 

[trevanian]

Flux Capacitor said:
It is stated in the special features documentary on the First Contact DVD that the CG version of the Enterprise was used when it flies in front of the Defiant. I would assume the people who made the movie would know what they're taking about.

It has been discussed here before that Okuda and co don' t usually have a lot of time to do the commentary stuff, so errors creep in as a result. I wrote the Cinefex article the poster mentioned above, and imagine if you check other periodicals of the era, you'll see reference to this shot being done as a miniature, or at least how John Knoll separated out the model shots from the digital ones. The shot looks a little odd at the end because it is the only one in the picture where you see a deflector shield effect (ILM looked forward to doing a lot of those, but was told to not use them in any other shots ... maybe everybody else's shields were already gone by that point?), maybe that is why somebody thought it used CG for the ship as well as the shield effect.

Except for a couple of embarassing mistakes introduced by the editor (like mentioning the version of Enterprise seen in VOYAGER (?!), I'm pretty sure everything in my piece is accurate, though for legal reasons we couldn't mention the fact that ILM's rebel unit (which did the CG part of the borg battle) utilized Macs.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

^That's cool!

 

[GodThingFormerly]

trevanian said:
...though for legal reasons we couldn't mention the fact that ILM's rebel unit (which did the CG part of the borg battle) utilized Macs.

Is that due to the exclusive contract SGI had with ILM at the time to supply all of their graphics workstations and servers?

TGT

 

[trevanian]

^Precisely. It drove us crazy to write about the stuff, because you'd be writing AROUND the software. And sometimes it seemed like we were the only ones obeying the rules: when PHANTOM MENACE came out, CGW ran a pretty decent article on ILM, and they were MAC this and Electric Image that, and nobody yelled at them about it as far as I know.

Savvy readers knew the score: all you had to do was look on the back cover of the GENERATIONS issue and you'd see a full page ad for Electric Image being used for warp drive and battle shots (EI being software for Mac.)
Also, if I mentioned that John Knoll did a particular shot in FC 'at home' that was a pretty clear indicator another system was being used, since most folks didn't have processor farms and SGI units in their second bedroom.