scans are from ST:M and Anders

Ships

PAGE 1

The words of [Star Trek: First Contact]'s concept artist and illustrator John Eaves are shown in this colour

this page deals with developments in

Before [Star Trek: First Contact] the only Borg ship we had ever seen was the giant cube, first seen in [TNG: Q Who?]. When the Borg came to the big screen, Star Trek's producers wanted everything to be bigger and better, including the Borg ships. The task of rethinking the Borg fleet for the movie was given to concept artist and illustrator John Eaves, a veteran of the [Star Trek: Deep Space 9] art department and one of the first people production designer Herman Zimmerman recruited to work on [Star Trek: First Contact]. For the movie he was specifically charged with designing two new ships - a sphere and a giant rectangular vessel. The sphere was always intended to be a smaller ship that the Borg Queen used to travel back into Earth's past, but at this stage the cube was nowhere to be seen, and in early drafts of the movie the assault on Earth was carried out by a large tetragon, even though no one in the art department actually knew what a tetragon was.

"They wanted different shapes that were kind of along the lines of a cube, but not really the cube. They thought we maybe needed a different look because we'd seen so much of that ship. Everyone who knows 'Star Wars' was thinking 'Death Star'. We actually went over to one of the producers' offices and said 'We're kind of concerned about the sphere shape.' I had this giant 'Star Wars' book and I opened it up to the Death Star and said, 'I think viewers might confuse the two.' He looked at it for a long time then he said, 'No one will ever remember this!' At one point it was going to be little spheres inside of a sphere, then it grew away from that. I actually came up with a sphere with open holes at either end; you can't really see it, but there is a sphere inside a sphere. My first drawing was of a staggered puzzle-piece looking sphere. It had a little escape pod inside of it and you could see this kind of undersphere under the surface. That was a good direction; Herman and Mr. Berman liked it. They told me to keep going and to keep the shapes really irregular; they didn't want any mathematical patterns whatsoever. So I took it a little bit further, and made the next one with really raised surfaces and very inset surfaces."

This design was very close to what everyone was looking for but it had a major flaw that needed to be corrected. The script described how the sphere would fire on Zefram Cochrane's complex on the surface, so he had designed a large weapons platform that was made up of a series of rings that went deep inside the ship.

They wanted an open hole with some rings, but that did look too like the Death Star, so we got rid of it. It's still there on the final ship, but it's covered by paneling. Finally, I did one with giant exposed pipes on. They seemed to like that."