If I recall correctly, the Marvel Comics adaptation had the original spacewalk in it -- and in that, Kirk and Spock see the digitized K'Tingas during their spacewalk...
Yeah, and I think that maybe informed the new klingon ship sequence. If you have Cinefex 1, Trumbull talks about this stuff, and Dykstra does in issue 2. Trumbull says somthing about digitizing the ships being something that pays off later on (in the walk), but that the original approach to the ships didn't support that. At least that's how I remember it, I don't even have xeroxes of those anymore, curses (cut up the original copies to illustrate a book proposal, if you can believe it!)
I've got em both -- still have them (not in pristine or mint condition, but in decent shape considering it was printed in 1981 or so)...along with most of the Starlogs, some Cinefantastique issues, Enterprise Incidents and others... I collected Cinefex for a long time...until I got bored with the movies that were coming out and lost interest. I referenced Cinefex #1 during my interview with Richard Taylor. I wanted to get his reaction to the "weird fish" comment about V'Ger. LOL!!!
I wrote for them from 1990 to the end of 2000 (mostly freelance, only the last 30 months onstaff), and it was sad watching how uninteresting the process became during that time. All the pics in the mag being of people at workstations really hurt the visual part of the mag, and writing about software shaders was nowhere near as fun as doing it about foreground miniatures and somebody dragging nail polish across the the gate of an optical printer to create an interesting variation in thruster exhaust animation.
A bit off topic, but I don't believe that a G rating had quite the stigma back then that it does today. Alot of movies back from the time the ratings system was introduced until the late 70's/early 80's were rated G. I think it was only around the end of the 70's that the stigma started to take hold that "G" meant "children's film."
Ooh, that sounds interesting. Could you elaborate on that some more? Do you recall what film it was in?
Ding! Ding! Ding!! You win!! That's EXACTLY why I quit reading it. In the early issues, it was interesting to hear how they made those visuals -- as you say, using miniatures and all kinds of improvised techniques in the studio. Things like shining a laser at a rotating crystal to make the photon torpedoes (or something like that)...that made for interesting reading! CGI is boring (to read about -- unless your trying to learn some software to perform a specific task). It's basically the same techniques over and over (more or less) or some new proprietary software for this or that. I guess that's interesting the first time you read it...but it's not the same as the old days. Wow...you wrote for Cinefex? Cool. It was (and probably still is) the best magazine out there on the subject of visual effects.
Actually, I was 16 when ST:TMP came out and even then I thought a "G" was a strange choice for rating...even Star Wars and Close Encounters were PG. All the films I liked at the time were PG or R.
It is in 2010, and it is about doing something to amp-up the animation cycle on the DISCOVERY's engines when they're trying to get away from the big shrinkdown. There was an optical guy at Boss named Mark Vargo who was a big player on 2010 and GB, and he is probably the guy I'm remembering talking about this, so it is probably in the last 5 or 8 pages of the whole 2010 issue. I don't know if it was nail varnish or nail polish, but it was something of that ilk and he just put it on an animation cell or some clear surface and put it right in the gate to mess up / enhance the exposure.
Except for thumbing through the NEM issue at a newsstand, I haven't read it this century, but I imagine it is still pre-eminent (which is weird,since they told me they would shut the mag down by 2005 at the latest.)
Weren't they planning on having the Klingon ships "resurrected" from data and having them take on the Enterprise in a climactic space battle in some early-early version? I've seen concept sketches showing a damaged Enterprise separating years before the Enterprise D was even thought of. Maybe that was just for Phase II, but I know I've seen sketches and I think Andrew Probert might have drawn them. Could that have been the "pay off" Trumbull spoke of?
I am picking this up way to late! I think this cap is from TMPTDE and this is one of their new shots added to the film?
That cap IS from the DE, but I think there are other shots from that part of the pic in the regular version which still have the inboards lit (they're just not on trekcore, I don't think.) PhotoStory, anyone?
Why can't I remember significant stuff this well? Why does all the bad dialog and useless tech stuff stay in place but I still can't remember doctor apptmts or birthdays or notice the dog's nails need trimming?
My friends and I were just discussing how boring FX became to read about. We miss the days of Boss Film, Rick Baker, Doug Trumbull, etc. Now it seems theres just a bunch of people at keyboards. Some pretty "exciting" stories there, I bet! I have friends that do CGI work and I know how involved that work is, but they just don't have the excitment of the physical stuff, in my opinion.
The fact TDK triggered off a conscious reexamination for some of how much CG you NEED vs how much you actually should use (in tandem with physical effects) might mean the pendulum swings back the other way a bit, at least on some productions. There's too much inertia to avoid CG overkill for most thing these days now, but I think very high end AND very low-end artistic shows are going to be doing more with the physical (by physical I mean full-scale effects AND originating with old-fashioned miniature/photographic work) when it is smart to do so rather than everything whole-cloth CG as an automatic response. Until you've got CG that is routinely finished at 4K (with elements scanned at 6K or higher) and a better appreciation for photographic tonalities incorporated into the CG work, I think there's going to continue to be a marked difference between most high-end traditional vfx work and even the best CGI efforts (at least to my eye.)
Yeah, I do that from time to time...the newstand perusal thing... But I think the Alien 3 issue might have been the last one I bought.
The saucer separation and battle with the 3 Klingon ships was an idea by Probert -- if I recall correctly. The idea was that when V'Ger transforms into a higher lifeform/consciousness, Epsilon 9 and the 3 K'Tingas would be reassembled near Earth at the same time the Enterprise is released. The Klingons realize where they are and begin to attack the Enterprise. Storyboarding is as far as the scene got. I don't recall why the scene was abandoned.