BEHIND-THE-SCENES : [THE 37'S]

Dan Curry, visual effects co-ordinator, and Ron Moore, visual effects supervisor, explain how the visual effects in [#20 The 37's] of USS Voyager landing on the Briori planet and taking off again were created.

This is a styrofoam foam core of Voyager, and it was larger than the available toy which gave us the opportunity to photograph it as a force-perspective miniature so we could see how it would look in frame and we could compose frames to allow for the landed ship.

Rick Sternbach (Star Trek's senior illustrator and designer of USS Voyager's exterior along with input from Richard James and others) designed the feet mechanism.

click for full-size picture

click for full-size picture

And we did CG because they had to be mechanical and there was no way we could make them fit the five foot miniature and actually work. But we had little stand-in feet that we could put on that too. And then we shot the miniature, Ron Moore was visual effects supervisor on that, we put brown paper underneath the miniature so that it would match the colour of the ground so that it would have a true reflection of what a ship in the real context would be like by putting in an environment to reflect light into it that was similar to where the location would be. In [#20 The 37's] we shot in Bronson's Canyon. The physical space there is not enough to allow Voyager to land there so we used the mouth of the entrance to Bronson's Canyon and then did a matte painting (I think I did that matte painting in Photoshop) and so that it extended the space. We got rid of the Hollywood signs and the other things that are normally there, so that it looked like a desolated planet.

[#20 The 37's]

Ron Moore: We went out, did shoot references, that was all out of Bronson Canyon, so we had to paint a lot of stuff out. Dan's just a genius at doing that kind of stuff, and we put this altogether, and we didn't realise until much later that we'd really made the ship too small. It's the kind of thing that we're aware of now, painfully aware of it, although in a situation like that, we know where we were, where we were when we shot it, we know how much room was there even when you open it up on the back, and so to us it became obvious, although I don't think you could tell in the show because there's nothing really there to relate it to. The people are in the foreground, the ship's in the background and we kept it that way.

However, fans immediately noticed the wrong ship scale many of whom discussed it on the Internet.

Dan Curry using the Photoshop graphics program

Picture A

Picture B

Picture C [#20 The 37's]

Picture I

Picture II

Picture III

Picture IV for final aired result see Picture V below

Picture (a)

Picture (b) for final aired result see Picture (c) below

Screenshots from the aired episode:

[#20 The 37's]

[#20 The 37's]

[#20 The 37's]

[#20 The 37's]

USS Voyager, landed
[#20 The 37's]

Picture V
[#20 The 37's]

Picture (c)
USS Voyager takes off
[#20 The 37's]