Something I Noticed About the Helm

[AtoZ]

In By Any Other Name, as the Kelvins are turning the bridge staff into those neat little styrofoam units, when Checkov is shrunk his back is to the helm/navigation console and in the background you can see a railing with chairs and one of the control stations/side consoles in the background, as if it had been quickly shifted around. It was not in its proper position relative to the main view screen.

Also, in Spock's Brain as Chekhov and Kirk are reviewing the solar system on the main view screen it is apparent that once again the helm/navigation console is not properly aligned and off to the side somewhat.

 

[Christopher]

Yes, sometimes they moved the console to make it easier to line up a shot without having to take out the back wall of the bridge or something.

 

[GSchnitzer]

In By Any Other Name, as the Kelvins are turning the bridge staff into those neat little styrofoam units, when Checkov is shrunk his back is to the helm/navigation console and in the background you can see a railing with chairs and one of the control stations/side consoles in the background, as if it had been quickly shifted around. It was not in its proper position relative to the main view screen.

Also, in Spock's Brain as Chekhov and Kirk are reviewing the solar system on the main view screen it is apparent that once again the helm/navigation console is not properly aligned and off to the side somewhat.

Yes--here's that shot from "By Any Other Name" with a rotated helm/navigation "command module." After they got a shot of these crewmembers over at the Environmental Sub-Systems Check-Out Station being reduced to cubal-octahedron things:

...they needed to get a shot of Chekov being similarly reduced. Rather than lighting the background behind Chekov's seat (which would be the Main Viewing Screen area--which would also mean, of course, that they would have to matte in stars and stuff onto the viewscreen) , they instead simply rotated the Helm/Navigation console about 45 degrees so that the background that would be visible behind Chekov would be the already-lit section of the bridge:

 

[sbk1234]

Man! If they new that 45 years later we'd be recording and scrutinizing these shows, they would have probably payed MUCH better attention to continuity.

 

[GSchnitzer]

Man! If they new that 45 years later we'd be recording and scrutinizing these shows, they would have probably payed MUCH better attention to continuity.

Oh, I don't know: if it had been done as an important cost-saving measure because they couldn't afford to do it the "right way," it's not like knowing their work would be so scrutinzed decades later from a continuity standpoint would suddenly have made them able to afford it.

 

[Christopher]

Right. They weren't making these for posterity. They were making them to sell ad time and make a profit.

 

[Maurice]

Also remember that the bridge was rarely fully closed up (as Bob Justman related). The area from the viewscreen to the station text to Spock's was typically pulled out. So, it's not just lighting the background, it's wheeling the set piece back in for a single shot.

 

[Green Shirt]

Further proof that the bridge doesn't face forward.

 

[AtoZ]

To each of you that responded, thank you. Scrutinizing this show is fun and each of your perspectives adds to it for me.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Jim Cawley told me that when Nichelle Nichols walked on to the Phase II bridge she looked across at the main viewer and exclaimed, "that was never there!"

 

[Christopher]

Also remember that the bridge was rarely fully closed up (as Bob Justman related). The area from the viewscreen to the station text to Spock's was typically pulled out.

Yeah, it always bugged me when the camera angle exposed the bare edge of Spock's console where it was supposed to be flush with the adjacent console.

 

[Mytran]

Maybe the console next to Spock's broke down a lot and constantly had to be pulled for maintainence?

 

[gomtuu20]

Hah! I've been watching these things for more than 40 years and never fought that. I LOVE stuff like this.
There is an episode ("The Man Trap" maybe, or "Mudd's Women"?) when they show a close up of McCoy. Sickbay is in the background, but the scene didn't take place in sickbay.

 

[Mytran]

Yeah, it's Mudd's Women when the lovelies first beam on board. I just attribute that to McCoy's delirium - Sickbay is his happy place.

 

[Timo]

Since McCoy also changes his shirt for that single shot, perhaps we're supposed to think of that as a dream sequence - the sentimental old fool is seeing the arriving women and fondly flashing back to the previous afternoon when Nurse Chapel dropped the laser scalpel to the sickbay floor and had to bend down to look for the inconveniently rolling-prone object under all sorts of desks and cabinets, one after another...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SchwEnt]

Yes, the section next to Spock's station was frequently missing as that was the camera placement for filming. We rarely got any shots of that area of the bridge, which contained another navigation station and also the weapons station.

Which makes me ponder... since we rarely saw the bridge weapons station, we never got to see who would have manned it--probably a weapons or security officer, which TOS never really had. Coincidental?

If the bridge scenes were filmed from another angle, so that we always saw the weapons station, would we have had a more familiar face amongst the crew? Some quasi-regular guy manning weapons? Would that have meant even fewer lines for Sulu and Chekov?

Or maybe it's meaningless, because we always saw the environmental station next to Scotty and never any kind of environmental engineering guy.

 

[plynch]

I always freeze it on those stations in the rare eps that show them. Kudos to directors who budgeted time and money for abnormal camera angles and blocking.