J.J. wanted a "new Enterprise" and that was the description he and production designer Scott Chambliss gave me — they were open to anything and wanted to see everything at that point.
My concepts ranged from "extremely faithful to the original," with just material and detail update, to "complete rethink," which I don't think anybody ever really considered, but sometimes you have to go too far in order to see the right answer.
I did many concepts for the look of the Kelvin, some conservative and some fairly pushed, in the end we figured out that it really had to look a lot more "traditional Trek." It's a very simple basic shape and ILM was responsible for a lot of the details including the way the guns pop out — very cool stuff. The bridge was worked on by illustrator James Clyne, you don't see much of it in the movie but it really looked great on set.
The script was pretty vague about this one — basically the name "Jellyfish Ship" and the fact that Spock describes it as "we outfitted our fastest ship" or something like that. I tried a lot of different designs for this one; I had a lot of transparency in some of the designs which I thought was unique and certainly looked "jellyfishish," but in the end we went with this more bizarre shape with the unique propulsion system
The spinning was part of the idea that we were selling a very exotic and alien propulsion system, something very advanced and impossible to understand given the technology we are familiar with. I always thought of the two fixed round "pincers" as focusing the propulsion from the spinning field generators. The trick was specifically to make something that hadn't been seen before in the Star Trek universe.
