The f/x of TOS....

We need to acknowledge an inescaple fact. TOS was made at a time when television was largely disposable. Still is actually. Anyway there was no idea the show would go on to such success in syndication and become so well regarded and scrutinized for decades on end. There was also no real idea of the direction of television technology and how far it would advance, at least not for the then forseeable future.

So TOS was made for the medium that existed. The fact it was done on film rather than videotape is probably a large reason why so much of the show's visual aspects hold up. But the resolution of '60s and '70s era TV sets served to hide a lot of production shortcuts. TOS' f/x were stellar for the medium they were intended for.

I think a bit more time and money could have made a difference, but I don't think it would have been that apparent across the board. It would have been noticeable in some aspects and others not so much if at all.

 

It looked fine on our sweet 1968 black and white TV

http://boxcarcabin.com/Packardbell-black-white-tv.jpg

Better on our 1980 Sears COLOR model.
http://s7.photobucket.com/user/jedo1507r/media/Sears Sanyo TV/011.jpg.html

It was a more innocent age and I never remember thinking the effects were anything but fine. Because they were.

But I was a child.
In love.
With a starship full of heroes.

 

Starting with the two films TOS so liberally "borrowed" designs from: Forbidden Planet & This Island Earth.

Or, if the regular series had the budget of the pilots, perhaps we would have had a taste on screen what TAS or Franz Joseph provided in his unofficial tech manual.

In fact, I wonder why the TOS team did not modify another AMT kit for use as a sister vessel? The kits were cheap, so they could use several to cannibalize in order to create a unique Starfleet vessel.

 

Certainly, the kits were inexpensive, but the optical processing required was what "run up" the bill.

I'm sure Harvey, Maurice and Shaw can provide all the insight on that one.

Sincerely,

Bill

 

The original effects for "The Doomsday Machine" show one of the problems with using the AMT models in film productions. They're about 2 feet long, smaller than was commonly used in miniature effects photography. Camera lenses back then had trouble keeping a model that small in complete focus. They're fine as set decoration, like the model outside the K-7 window.

 

In fairness I think the Constellation could have used a bit more work to allow it to make a better impression. Look how good the Klingon battle cruiser looked and it wasn't even lighted internally.

 

More like a foot-and-a-half. We model builders like to refer to the classic AMT Enterprise kit as the "18-incher."

 

Correct, there is a lot of animation stand work. I fully understand that. Note that I put quotes around "animation" and then gave examples of the types intended—phasers, engine glows, id monsters, etc. 2001 had none of that kind of thing, unless you want to count the stargate created by slit-scan (later used for the titles in DOCTOR WHO). Frankly, the slit-scan stargate looks better than all the computer generated "wormholes" I've seen in later films (STARGATE, CONTACT).

I wanted to counter the argument that STAR TREK did all the heavy lifting, and that 2001 simply took the ball and "ran with it." Also, using THE ANGRY RED PLANET as an example of pre-TOS visual effects was disingenuous and an insult to many fine VFX shots from film history—whether or not those films were sci-fi.

TOS is a landmark in science fiction/science fantasy production for many reasons—including the quality of its visual effects in the context of a weekly TV series. Roddenberry knew that cheap ANGRY-RED-PLANET-style VFX would compromise the dignity he was trying to bring to his creation. He wanted STAR TREK to be above the "throw-away" thriller/horror aspect of many other "sci-fi" productions of the time.

 

I never said Star Trek did the heavy lifting, Metryq. I said it was the inspiration for advances in effects that made earlier efforts look like what they were: done on the cheap. 2001 did take the ball and run with it, as did Silent Running, and many others including Star Wars, and eventually, even Star Trek itself, in films and later series. But that running was only possible because the runners were inspired by those that walked before them, and showed them a starting place much farther along than they had been led to believe possible. Star Trek didn't show them how to do it; it showed them that they didn't have to do it the way it had been done before.

 

That statement doesn't make any sense. Perhaps you can name some effect pioneered by TOS, or used in some radically new way that pushed the rest of the VFX industry forward? Rotoscope and bluescreen (or other matte extraction techniques) existed long before TOS.

As others have noted, contemporary shows, such as LOST IN SPACE, featured some excellent VFX work. (Although LIS did make abundant use of flash pots in front of the camera and other stage magician's style pixellation effects.)

What TOS did that few had done before was treat "sci-fi" as serious drama, rather than children's fare. The visual effects were not the draw, they were a supplement to stories that had something more to offer even after repeated viewings... an intangible something that outlasts the VFX techniques used.

 

Yep, 2001 didn't do an anything very much like Star Trek. The only "animation" being the computer screen graphics, and, certainly, the slit-scan photography was unlike anything TOS ever attempted.

 

There was plenty of animation in 2001 and not just computer displays. The very first shot of the Pan Am Shuttle rising up in frame is a still photo filmed on an animation stand then composited onto a background plate of the earth. Many shots of the Aries 1B Moon Shuttle are also still photographs as are many of the shots of the ship that carries Dr. Floyd to the excavation site.

Many of the shots of a ship approaching or going away from the camera were done on an animation stand. If you look carefully, you might notice that the perspective on the model doesn't change, only its size as it moves across the screen.

Using this approach makes a lot of sense. The model is photographed with a large format camera lit as perfectly as possible. Many photographs are taken at different exposures until one is considered appropriate. That photograph is then used on the animation stand.

All the spaceship shots done on the animation stand were then composited onto backgrounds, most likely rotoscroped frame by frame to create holdout mattes so that the ship could obscure whatever it was flying over, whether it was a star-field or moon landscape.

The bulk of the Discovery shots were clearly not done this way because you can see the perspective shift as the ship moves across the frame.

All computer readouts used in the film were done on an animation stand as well. Many of these were done by Doug Trumbull using multiple exposures to build up technical displays and even create faux 3D grid effects for landing sequences.

While the Star Gate is certainly an animation effect, it was created with a special rig devised by Doug Trumbull to achieve that effect. It was not filmed on a standard animation stand used for the ships and displays. The rig used was a purpose-built horizontal animation stand of Trumbull's own devising.

 

One more thing about the TOS effects. Certainly TV shows used composite photography before to achieve certain effects but not on Star Trek's level.

Most of Irwin Allen's shows achieved their effects "in camera". For Lost In Space, the J2 model was flown on thin, invisible wires against a star background using an overhead rig or the Lydecker method that provided maximum stability. The Lydecker brothers often used horizontal wires. The models simply slid down the wires from point A to point B which is how the J2 crashing shots were achieved. Oddly enough, many of the shots from the pilot episode appear to be optical composites but this appears to have been abandoned by the time the J2 was relaunched into space during the second and third seasons.

Star Trek was certainly ahead of its time even though the blue-screen compositing techniques had been used for decades. I still marvel at the beauty of some of the Enterprise shots. The design and execution of the Transporter effect still takes my breath away every time I see it.

 

As I understand it the moving stars effect created problems for the f/x houses contracted to do the work for TOS. Roddenberry was insistent on this (as he was right to be) as it not only livened up an otherwise static looking sequence, but also helped convey a sense of greater speed as the ship passes. It was an interesting idea to try conveying the idea of the starfield changing with perspective as the ship speeds by.

It's actually a subtle thing that makes a big difference.

 

... except when they were approaching a planet, and we still see moving stars behind the planet. Oops.

 

Yep. Oops.

 

There was plenty of discussion on this earlier in the thread, too, if you bothered to read it.

 

One of the things that people today don't do is put themselves into the situation that the producers of Star Trek were in originally. Here is the thing... for these people, they had seen two pilots and a couple episodes all as film projected onto a screen. This had pushed many of them to try to get the best possible quality. But once these same people saw Star Trek on TV for the first time, they saw just how much of their efforts were missing by the time most audiences saw the episodes. For example, Space Seed...

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And we aren't just talking about effects, it effected all aspects of the production...

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So I think it is understandable why more stock footage was used and less episode specific effects over the course of the three seasons. And why in some later episodes effects where the matte wasn't aligned with the model footage were allowed to pass.

Think about the effort it took to make this shot...

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In that shot Kirk and McCoy are being lit by alternating colors to make it look like they are viewing the cube. The cube doesn't yet exist when this was filmed, but they took the time to make sure you thought they were actually looking at it on the screen.

We see that today, but that wasn't really visible back in the 60s when the episode aired for the first time. And that episode (The Corbomite Maneuver) took a long time and a lot of work to produce, with much of that effort wasted on the original audience because of the medium.

 

I know that much of what I mentioned was already discussed but one person mentioned the Lydecker brothers but really didn't detail their methods.

With regards to my comments about 2001, I only wanted to clear up Maurice's comment that the "only "animation" being the computer screen graphics". As had been previously mentioned, quite a bit of effects work showing the ships flying around were done on the animation stand as well.

Sorry if I went off the deep end in clarifying what had already been discussed.

 

I count myself quite fortunate that when I first started watching TOS in 1970 we actually had quite good reception. The Greater Toronto area was a good place for television through rotary antenna in those days. So the picture was a lot better than the examples posted above.