Tng Vfx Motion Control

so we could talk about it. Oh, great. If you were still working on the show, you would've used it. Yeah, probably. Rob and Ron and I had probably spent many, many hundreds of hours working with a rig like this, so this is a... Bigger though. A little bigger. And basically the rig works like this. Slides forward and backwards, east-west and north-south, so the camera can rise. So all illusion of motion comes from what the camera is doing relative to the model, rather than the model moving from its position, so we would only have to light one spot. ROB: Yeah, we came up with this other way, it's remotely novel, is we used ultraviolet light to actually light an orange screen or red screen. Which, generally, people do blue or green, we ended up using orange 'cause it was faster and we could just light it with fluorescent black lights. So blue light would spill on the ship and only the orange light would be exposed there. So it made the matte process that much faster 'cause we didn't have to block all the light from hitting that or worry about the spill and stuff like that. So we ended up doing-- We found very fast innovations that were novel. People didn't really do it that way before. Every time we shot it, it was seven different passes to get the lights, the warp engines and the various other things that we would need beauty pass. So the camera would repeat seven ti. I... We got the ship and I was sort of remarking it had very little surface detail on, so it was really difficult to make it look like it came to life. And so I never knew what anything worked or what it meant, still don't. And so these little red things on the front of the ship were there. And Andy Probert designed them that they only go on during, I guess it's in warp speed or something like that. So at any rate, it looked better with them on, so I left them on. So he apparently was very upset that in geosynchronous orbit which I didn't understand what it meant, still don't, that the warp engines are on. He's like, "Why are they on?" I was like, "Because it looks cooler with them on." Those are the Bussard collectors. Oh, really? I didn't know that, I still don't know that. And I will forget moments after this, by the way. And so I was responsible for actually destroying the science behind this. Oh, Rob. In all things, I was responsible for poking a hole in the science of Star Trek. While we're talking about the motion cont, we should talk about the seventh pass, the star pass. So in order to do the star field efficiently, Gary Hutzel built a... A piece of milk Plexiglas, and painted the inside black, and with a pushpin, one star at a time, scratched a hole in the paint. Then we would light it from the back and the same pan tilt that would be used on the ship without the track move, we would stick the camera in here, in the centre of this, and use that same pan tilt, and that would make sure that the stars properly locked to the move of the ship. You know, the main limitation with motion control is that there's a mount. And so you could only move the ship so far before you'd see the mount, so-- And then there were limitations of the track length and stuff like that. And how close you could get on something. You couldn't get close because the model wouldn't hold up or, physically, you can't get a camera in that tight.