The Recycled Battle Scenes From WYLB SUCKED!

[StarMan]

I know, the real story was with the characters. Sure. But hey, it was the god damned series finale. I recall Behr and co promising "the mother of all battles". Like fuck it was. There were four or five new shots but the rest were easily identifiable from earlier episodes.

Given what we saw on Voyager's CGI front, DS9's finale should have been SPECTACULAR.

Why did they not deliver? Too much money to foundation imaging for the cheesy fire cave sequence?

Thoughts?

 

[mythme]

i'm pretty sure there wasn't anything recycled during any space battle scene on DS9.

 

[DonIago]

There was plenty of recycled battle footage.

And to _not_ use recycled footage would have unfortunately been a budget-breaker. Yes, it's a shame, but there wasn't any way around it.

I still consider the BoP explosion in Generations to be the worst Trek use of stock footage though. Far worse than anything in DS9.

 

[MyCylon]

I've always thought they should have scrapped a VOY episode and invested in WYLB instead

 

[M'rk son of Mogh]

DonIago said:
And to _not_ use recycled footage would have unfortunately been a budget-breaker. Yes, it's a shame, but there wasn't any way around it.

It's the last episode of the series! Break that budget!
What are they gonna do? Cancel the show?

 

[DanTheGrey]

The wife and I just watched WYLB and there were lots of battle scenes that were direct lifts from previous episodes and even ST VI. There were some new shots put in there but I recognized some of them from the season 5/6 era.

To be honest I would have rathered they either just talked through it and built up some tension and saved the budget for key scenes. Or have at least interspersed some Romulan ships doing something in the battle.

 

[kv1at3485]

Strangely, I figure they could have saved a lot of money if they had made the battles 'smart'. They could have forgone showing bundles of ships on screen at one time that way.

I can just imagine in SoA with Sisko ordering: "Open fire!". The scene changes to a shot of the Defiant, gradually zooming out, the camera angle changes. You can just make out little whitish dots (representing the closest ships to the Defiant) and then hundreds of torpedo streams appear, many from 'nowhere' and most very tiny.

And if you really wanted to milk it, they could have panned the camera to follow the torpedoes until, somewhere far on the other 'side', you see a flurry of almost imperceptible point defence fire and a whole sparkle of explosions as the torpedoes are destroyed and hit their marks.

Then they could have concentrated on what the characters were doing rather than focusing on the glorified and meaningless Star Wars style lightshow.

 

[Photon]

I know when a group of Vor'Chas and BoP broke off to attack a wing of Jem ship, it was used 2x.

 

[Computer]

WYLB for me was an enormous let down, sure the flash back scene was beautiful but it was a poor way to end the series.

My issues in no particular order:

1. Allot of build up not enough bang.
2. Dukat should have been killed in a more glorious style than "burning in hell"
3. Too much stock footage used.
4. The end of the great galactic war comes when Odo links with the female for 3 seconds.......wow.....
5. Sisko is apparently Antakin Skywalker concieved by the "mediclorions"

 

[Temis the Vorta]

4. The end of the great galactic war comes when Odo links with the female for 3 seconds.......wow.....

Don't remind me. We fought that battle when the show originally aired. Took the whole summer and a good chunk of the fall it still hasn't entirely quieted down.

The whole series was resolved by some VERY sketchy logic. Namely, why didn't Odo think to do that a long time ago? And if he couldn't do it before because the Founder was persuadable only because she was sick, doesn't that validate the Feds' "genocidal" virus, which in effect won the war for them?

My pet explanation (and I wish I could claim I'd thought of it, but it was someone else's ingenious idea) is that the Founder, even sick, was still more than a match for Odo. SHE brainwashed HIM into switching places with her.

The Founder, in Odo's shape, returned to the GQ to rebuild Dominion forces (which explains why Odo abruptly decided to terminate his relationship with Kira and tried to scram without saying goodbye to Quark - the Founder was worried she'd give herself away to people who'd known Odo for years). Odo, in the Founder's shape, dutifully reported to prison for the good of the Dominion.

Bwahaha. Now doesn't THAT make a lot more sense?

 

[Dream]

Yeah I hated the recycled footage. I would have prefered shaking scenes on the Defiant instead. At least they would have been new.

The worse offender was the recycled footage in Generations. They had no excuse since they had a movie budget!

 

[DWF]

Dream said:
Yeah I hated the recycled footage. I would have prefered shaking scenes on the Defiant instead. At least they would have been new.

The worse offender was the recycled footage in Generations. They had no excuse since they had a movie budget!

That was ILM's decision to reuse the explosion of the Bird Of Prey but they did go back and spend more money to film a new ending.

 

[Navaros]

I agree that the space battles in WYLB were way too brief and underwhelming and even moreso because of being recycled. They did indeed suck. Fair criticism of DS9.

 

[mrs260]

Personally, I don't understand why anyone cares about battle scenes. They serve basically the same purpose as exterior establishing shots, and so for me the re-use of footage in them--if I even notice--is no worse than the re-use of establishing shot footage.

The way I figure it, re-using some exterior footage gives them the money they need to pay Andy Robinson. I like Garak more than I like shiny new footage of some random ship blowing up.

 

[Clym]

they weren't as good as Sacrifice of Angels or Tears of the Prophets battle scenes, which was one of WYLB's letdowns as a finale.

personally, I think they should have scrapped the last two seasons of Voyager, and used the budget to create the mother of all space battles for DS9's finale

 

[Clym]

having just rewatched some of the battle footage from WYLB, I'm not so sure they were recycled from earlier episodes. A lot of shots involve Breen ships and the Dominion Super-Warships.

 

[Jack Bauer]

A lot of the WYLB battle footage is from Sacrifice of Angels. The Starfleet, Klingon, Romulan and Dominion ships were mostly stock footage. IIRC the air date was moved to a week earlier which forced them to use alot of recycled effects.

Generations may have been a movie but it's budget wasn't all that big hence some reused footagewhich we also saw in at least one DS9 episode.

 

[nx1701g]

DonIago said:
I still consider the BoP explosion in Generations to be the worst Trek use of stock footage though. Far worse than anything in DS9.

According to the Companion that shot is somewhere in the episode as well, but I haven't seen it.

 

[Bishbot]

Which film? (at least I think its a film) is the shot that they used at least once more on DS9 - maybe even this episode, maybe more than once, where everything explodes on a Klingon ship and the Klingons are all being blown up in interesting ways. You'll probably remember it from my vague description, as it was so well done.

 

[Hermiod]

nx1701g said:
According to the Companion that shot is somewhere in the episode as well, but I haven't seen it.

The shot from The Undiscovered Country of a random Klingon soldier being thrown forward by an explosion from behind him was reused in Generations when Lursa and B'Etor's ship blows up and was also reused during the battle scenes in this episode.

There were lot of reused shots in this episode. Most noticably, a number of SFX shots from "Sacrifice of Angels" are reused. This is a slight problem as the Defiant's registry number is incorrect in these shots as a result.