Remaking TOS' original fx...

There is a TOS group on Facebook where an individual, Mark Meyers, has posted some pretty impressive pics and videos using a Polar Lights 1/350 scale Enterprise model to recreate some of the familiar shots from TOS. It's pretty cool since, unlike the original 11 footer, his model is finished all around and he manages to recreate the lighting and camera lens to make it look like a very clean and pristine original shot. And so he captures the original aesthetic style while having an image that could be as clean and high resolution as the live-action footage on BluRay.

He has done the same with the recently released Polar Lights Galileo model and the original Klingon battle cruiser. He has also done the TMP refit as well as vehicles from other productiobs such as Lost In Space, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Fantastic Voyage, Battlestar Galactica and Land Of The Giants.

Note that someone here on the TrekBBS has done the same thing wth the WNMHGB version Enterprise only he has done it with a 3D model rather than a physical model.

I can't help but feel it would be a fascinating project to remake the fx of a TOS episode using this method, perhaps to add a bit more than they had time for back in the day (such as a finished on both sides Enterprise) yet in the least present the images as perfectly clean and pristine. Yeah, it could be time consuming and labour intensive, but it's a TOS-R that could really rock in looking far more authentic.

 

Definitely! A remastering, but staying completely faithful to the original. I like it

 

This could be tricky. It’s possible not all of this could be done with miniatures and props. CGI could be utilized for things difficult to build or replicate physically. And cgi would be used for fx like energy beams and explosions in space.

 

Wow! That is awesome!

 

Recreating the planet killer from “The Doomsday Machine” or the Fesarius from “The Corbomite Maneuver” could be challenging as physical miniatures. On the flip side having the Klingon and Romulan ships painted in original colours along with being lighted could be relatively easy.




Very nice studio scale Klingon D7 replicas.



Early attempt at WNMHGB footage.

 

Mark Myers post on TrekBBS. I forget his screen name here, but I'm sure he'll show up.

--Alex

 

@Mark 2000 Made similar attempts a few years ago with his Polar Lights build, trying to figure out a motion control rigging system.

 

These two here look like they really belong in TOS. Damn near perfect!

 

Now, had I the money…I would have Mark build a model to go in a green screened Vomit Comet interior with GoPro drones flitting around it. Adjust the plane’s speed and trajectory just a tad…and the model seems to move on its own. Shove one out of a Dragon airlock and shot on IMAX and huge optics as it re-enters full of explosives.

I could even see a model released by a craft on a collision course with an asteroid as an aside to a mainstream mission.

 

While those are all nice and well done they point out the problems inherent with shooting small models: poor depth of field. They all look like toys because to correct for that you have to pump tremendous amounts of light at the model and adjust the aperture and f-stop accordingly. ILM had a mathematical formula for this stuff.

 

Didn’t someone a some years ago construct a 6ft. TOS replica with lights? Now something like that could work.

Maybe something like this.

 

Was the formula made public?

 

You can calculate the values with any online depth-of-field calculator (like www.dofmaster.com). You'd typically want the the entire ship in focus so if you know how far the camera is from the ship, the focal length of the lens and the length of the ship that needs to be in focus then you can calculate the aperture setting.

For example, you're trying to shoot an 11' ship at a distance of 5' with a Canon 5D II with a 45mm lens. You can get the whole ship in focus between 2.9' and 16.7' if you stop down to f/32. f/32 barely lets in any light so you'd need to tons of lighting to be able to film it.

 

It was in the first big ILM book. It's not a secret.

 

The Star Destroyer model used in the opening shot of Star Wars (1977) was only three feet long. So, whatever processes were used then were completely successful.

 

Does this mean that with a small model everything tends to be in focus, where with a large model or real ship, things nearer the camera would be in better focus than the far away parts?

 

It depends on the distance the camera is to the subject and the camera+lens and settings used. For example, when I was visiting the USS Lexington museum I could get the entire ship in focus with a wide 17mm lens from a nearby beach at f/8. But if I walked up the ramp and got within 5' of say a gun emplacement and took a photo then everything beyond 24' would be outside of the camera's depth-of-field.

So you'd normally see a real ship in focus unless you were really close to it (either physically or with a telephoto lens) or there were some atmospheric effects in play.

 

Good info. And of course, camera lenses and apertures are not the whole story. I think many people assume, like I used to, that a miniature should be as detailed as possible to look real. But in fact, you have limit (or soften) the fine detail in a model to simulate the fact that really large objects have to be viewed from farther way. If you can see too much fine detail in an ocean liner and the water it's sitting in, you know it's a model and the camera is just steps away. Fine detail destroys the illusion of distance.

Along similar lines: when CBS Digital started making TOS-R, the Enterprise was too sharp to come across as the full-sized ship. They had to reduce the rendering resolution of their CGI to make the ship seem farther from the camera.

 

They had to really work to get that shot to work, including a super wide angle lens. At one point they considered building a giant belly of the ship to get that shot. It's one reason they built they much much larger Star Destroyer for Empire.

 

I recall seeing an 80s SF movie filmed in 3D in the theatre and 3D adds another whole problem for model photography. All the space ship scenes looked like little models because they wanted to emphasize the 3D effect. In reality, looking at large object isn't really a 3D experience. Your eyes are only a little over 2 inches apart. How much parallax can you detect for a large object far enough away from you to fit in your field of view? The only legitimate effect is to have smaller things in the foreground, while the large objects far away look relatively flat.

The cameras they filmed the miniatures with had lenses spaced, in scale terms, dozens of feet apart. I can make a real-life container ship look like a little model if I take two photos of it a football field apart and combine them into a 3D view. It will look impressively three dimensional, but also rather like a toy.