I thought the energy probe on the bridge was Abel's work, one of the only things they did that made it into the final film, if not the only one.
TMP V’Ger flyover
- Thread starter FredH
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I thought the energy probe on the bridge was Abel's work, one of the only things they did that made it into the final film, if not the only one.
Chuck Jones said something similar, about the self-imposed constraints in a proper "Roadrunner-Coyote" short (i.e., no dialogue, the Roadrunner never leaves the road, the Roadrunner never makes an aggressive move, the Coyote's schemes are always unnecessarily complicated, and always backfire, &c.)
Or in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie: for the entire movie, the soundtrack consists of music and (as I recall) intentionally silly Foley. Except for exactly one word of spoken dialogue. Uttered by Marcel Marceau. "Non."
Or in my unpublished, work-in-progress-for-nearly-three-decades novel: every chapter has a title and a brief "argument" before the actual narrative begins, every chapter title has a musical term, every chapter title alliterates, my protagonist never utters the phrase "pipe organ," because to her, it's an absurd tautology (as far as she's concerned, organs have pipes by default), &c.
Constraints on art should be self-imposed.
And FWIW, the V'Ger flyover is just one of many things I felt worked far better in the Director's Cut.
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Interestingly, that's one of only two visual effects in the original film I always felt looked bad. Not talking about the arguments over pacing or editing or whatever. Just purely whether they look good or not. I never thought that effect worked.
(The other was the scene of the crew on the outside of saucer section.)
I don't disagree, but "should be" is usually a far cry from what actually is. Artists have always had to work within externally imposed restrictions as well as self-imposed ones, and figuring out how to make something work within such restrictions is a basic skill. For instance, having to keep a story or novel within a specified word count is a skill I've had to master a lot in recent years. But pulling that off without compromising the quality of the work requires having time to do as much editing as it takes to get it right. Just because art can thrive on restrictions doesn't mean it automatically will in every case. Sometimes art is hurt by restrictions, particularly restrictions on the available time or resources to do the work. It's like taking on any other challenge -- it can push you to elevate your game to achieve success, but success is not a given.
Yeah, the energy probe effect never quite worked, what with the mismatch between the images on either side. It was rationalized as the probe distorting the image like a lens, but it just looked like a misaligned split-screen shot.
Indeed. The proportions of the saucer on the matte painting were all wrong, and IIRC it omitted the module under the bridge dome.
You noticed that, too.
There actually is one constraint on my novel that isn't voluntarily self-imposed: Since I'm keeping it continuously set in type (formatted as a hardcover book), using software that, even though I regard it as the best digital typesetting program ever written, is still 39 years old, and unsupported for 30 of those years. And if I want to be able to start chapters on both recto and verso sides of the leaf, I have to have (and maintain) separate recto and verso versions of the style sheet file. Which is a pain in the ass. Hence, every chapter but the last has an even number of typeset pages.
You get no argument from me on the fact that just because constraints should be voluntarily self-imposed doesn't mean they always are.
(I quite literally can't remember the last time I counted words in an opus of my own creation, other than to form a ballpark estimate of word-count for the purpose of negotiating my editor's fee.)
Chuck Jones said a lot of things, not all of them accurate, but as he was a big fan of Twain, his exaggeration is unsurprising. It's pretty apparent he made up those rules after looking back on those cartoons instead of when making them, as the cartoons violate them pretty frequently (the Road Runner goes off the road quite a number of times, sometimes directly messes with Wile E., some of whose traps are really simple, etc.).
re the Energy Probe: the practical xenon light strobe used on the bridge set was Abel's, but the mylar mirror trick to squeeze the thing out of shot and the clumsy slot-mask animation supered atop was done later, I think by Apogee, but I've been traveling for 6 weeks, visited six counties, am jet jagged AF, and don't have access to all my research to check.
The one for-sure-done-by-Abel effects sequence that I know made it to the film is all staggered streaking seen in the bridge during the wormhole.
re the Energy Probe: the practical xenon light strobe used on the bridge set was Abel's, but the mylar mirror trick to squeeze the thing out of shot and the clumsy slot-mask animation supered atop was done later, I think by Apogee, but I've been traveling for 6 weeks, visited six counties, am jet jagged AF, and don't have access to all my research to check.
The one for-sure-done-by-Abel effects sequence that I know made it to the film is all staggered streaking seen in the bridge during the wormhole.
With small presses, they often have an 80,000-word maximum on novels, which I had to struggle to keep my Arachne books within. And my novella "Aleyara's Flight" in the current issue of Analog and its upcoming sequel "Skin in the Game" both come very close to the approximate 20,000-word limit specified in its guidelines (though they take serials of 40-80,000 words).
With my Star Trek novels, there was a lot more flexibility. There was always a target length in the contract, typically 100,000 or 85,000 words, but there was leeway of up to maybe 20% in either direction.
Still, it's generally a good idea not to be self-indulgent, and to trim any story or novel down to the minimum length it needs to be. When I revise a first draft, I'm often surprised by how much needless verbiage and repetitive content I end up cutting out. Stephen King's book on writing recommended cutting every first draft by around 10%, but I've rarely managed that (though I surpassed it with Only Superhuman, cutting it from over 130,000 words down to about 115K).
I used to have the impression, or the belief, that it was a split screen shot -- that first they filmed it with a stagehand holding the light on one side, then filmed it again with the light held from the other side, and matted them together, hence the misalignment.
Which was very well-done.
We don't live in a world where the only art that exists is self-financed.
