On Jan 05, 2015 I had the great pleasure of talking with Tracy Tobias one of Star Trek's most ardent fans. Tracy is a writer and archivist of all science fiction subjects but it's fairly safe to say he has a big passion for Star Trek and in particular the 1979 release of Star Trek : The Motion Picture. Tracy is also a major contributor to the Facebook page "STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE APPRECIATION SOCIETY" In 2001 Tracy interviewed Richard Taylor for the website Forgotten Trek and here by kind permission he has allowed me to publish that interview once again.
Richard Taylor was the
art director on Star Trek: The Motion Picture during the
timeframe when the Clio Award winning studio Robert Abel and Associates was
assigned the task of bringing Star Trek‘s twenty-third century
universe to the silver screen. The interview that follows is his unique
perspective on the art direction for the film as well as the groundbreaking
visuals that were planned by the studio.
In addition to art
directing, such design greats as Andrew Probert and prominent alumni of motion
picture design, Taylor was solely responsible for the redesign of the USS Enterprise‘s
warp engine nacelles as seen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and
contributed design decisions in other aspects to the Enterprise seen
in every subsequent film featuring the original series cast. Much of his work
remained a fixture of Star Trek long after Abel and Associates
discontinued its work on Star Trek‘s first cinematic odyssey.
 |
| Richard Taylor at the time of production of The Motion Picture along with Andrew Probert and Con Pederson. Photograph courtesy of Andrew Probert. |
Taylor went on to work
on other groundbreaking feature films such as Disney’s 1982 film, Tron, Looker and
others. He also redesigned the classic Columbia Pictures logo that opens all
Columbia films.
He has since gone on
to work as a director on several prominent and award winning television spots.
You might have missed some of his finest work while running to the refrigerator
before commercial breaks. Today, Taylor works for Electronic Arts — one of the
mainstay computer gaming design studios — as a cinematics director.
He kindly and
graciously devoted quality time and vintage Star Trek: The Motion
Pictureproduction artwork to the detailed interview below in 2001.
Part One: The Human
Adventure Is Just Beginning
First of all, thank
you for taking the time to share your experiences working on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. When and how
were you first approached to work on the film?
I was at Robert Abel
and Associates, which, at that time was really quite an innovator of special
effects–especially for television commercials. We did all the 7-Up “UN-COLA”
and “SEE THE LIGHT” commercials which used some of the latest special effects
techniques such as slit-scan, back-light compositing, animation and opticals.
Michael Eisner was heading up Paramount, at that time and Jeff Katzenberg was a
first time producer. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the
first film ever produced by Jeff Katzenberg. It seemed that after Star
Wars came out there was a kneejerk reaction by the studio to turn what
was going to be a television series (Star Trek: Phase II) into a
theatrical feature.
What can you tell us
about your background and that of Robert Abel and Associates?
At Abel studios, Con
Pederson was one of the main people there. He was one of the effects directors
on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Doug Trumbull generally gets more credit,
but Con was one of the main forces behind 2001. He had worked at
Graphics Films for years and had done the Encyclopedia Britannica films
on the Universe. So, Con was a big hero of mine because 2001 was
my favorite effects film when I was in college art school. Not until Star
Wars was there another significant groundbreaking effects film and
that spurred Paramount on to do the Trek feature. They
contacted the Abel studios because we were pretty much cutting edge at that
time. At that time however, there was Apogee and Trumbull ‘s Studio, so I don’t
know why they contacted us specifically. I don’t know if you know my background
but it had something to do with the work we created at the Abel Studio. In the
late 1960s I co-created a lightshow and graphics company called Rainbow Jam.
Our light show was not like any of the other light shows in it’s technique or
design. We toured with the Grateful Dead and did shows at The Fillmore, The
Family Dog, Winterland and other San Francisco concert venues. Our show used 32
Ektographic slide projectors and four motion picture projectors. The projectors
lined up graphically with each other so it created a scene on the screen that
was in a proportion of one high by four wide by six levels deep. My partner and
I basically drew all the scenes by hand with Rapidiograph ink pens and used
original photography to create the images in black on white illustration board.
We would then make the next layers of images by using the same techniques only
on frosted Mylar overlays. Once we were finished with what we called “a Wall ”
we would reduce the images to hi-con film (opaque black and clear) and make
positive and negative images that we then mounted on glass slides. Each
projector had an on/off key, a color wheel, dimmer, focus and zoom that were
operated by the two of us from control consoles. What we were doing was
projecting lithography with light. We were painting with light. In essence that
technique is what I brought to Abel studios; the difference was the artwork was
on an animation stand with a light box and I was making multiple exposures onto
film. This back-light compositing technique became known as “candy-apple neon.”
Of course at the Abel Studio Con Pederson was the expert in slit-scan and
streak photography as well as other animation and compositing tricks. These
unique animation and compositing skills kind of melded together there and I was
lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. We evolved some new
effects tricks and created the “SEE THE LIGHT” commerctography.
Part Two: Designing A
Living Machine
Tell us about your
concept of V’Ger.
I have a really great
collection of V’Ger drawings and other conceptual work that was done by David
Negron, Tony Smith and myself. Tony was an artist I brought in to help with the
conceptual design. Tony is a good friend of mine and is a fabulous painter. He
can paint photo-realistically and has a great imagination. I did the original
drawings of the exterior of V’Ger. I designed it with the idea that you would
not ever see the entire object. Roddenberry and the committee wanted it to be
massive in scale. The only way to see the entire thing would be from some
incredible distance or silhouetted against a planet. It was to be a dark object
not some light covered mother ship from Close Encounters. It’s
always more mysterious to show less and leave it to the imagination. When the
maw opened up, it really did not look like a “weird fish”. I think it’s a
pretty sophisticated design. There’s a part of V’Ger toward the tail section
where there is a huge sphere that rotates and in the center of that sphere is
the old Voyager 6 probe. Our V’Ger design is much more complex
and much more mysterious. For one thing, it would have been a lot more
interactive with the Enterprise .
Even though I highly
respect the work of Syd Mead (the designer of V’Ger as seen in the released
film), your version of V’Ger sounds very interesting as well.
Well, my whole
philosophy on V’Ger was to make it a living machine. It would have “morphed”
and on the inside the walls would have been iridescent and changed as the Enterprise moved
past them. You would have seen images of the Enterprise along
the walls because it was being analyzed by V’Ger and there would have been
parts of walls that would break apart like a flock of birds or a swarm of
insects. The swarms would go from one place to another and reassemble. You
could think of the particles as digital energy or digital information. I wanted
it to be a very metamorphical and very mysterious place. For the exterior of
the thing one of the design concepts I had was to photo-etch thin metal plates
so that the outside surface would have multiple levels which would continually
move creating different patterns. We found a material that you could apply like
paint that when heated with warm air from a blower would change color. It had
an irridescent color quality that I was looking for like a beetles’ back or
butterflies wings. I wanted V’Ger’s skin or surface to change color near
the Enterprise as it moved over the surface. I wanted the
image of the Enterprise to be left like glowing phosphor
images along the walls of V’Ger.
I have recently read
that the upcoming Director’s Cut DVD has a different V’Ger transformation scene
at the end of the film than what was released in 1979. Can you tell me what the
original plans for the evolution of V’Ger into a higher lifeform were?
What we had storyboarded
was that the whole V’Ger craft unfolds and turns into this incredible object in
space. That effect would have started where Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the Voyager
6 was and would have radiated outward from there through the ship.
There would have been this change the goes through V’Ger’s interior and then to
the outside, unfolding into a big flower kind of thing with all these radiating
colors and such. I think V’Ger more than anything was incredibly compromised
because the effects had changed hands and they had to come up with their own
solutions in a very short period of time. Doug was not going to use my solution
because that model had not been built. We had built test pieces and had done
extensive tests of processes we were going to use when we finally began
construction. I was told Trumbull described the exterior as a “weird fish” (Cinefex
Magazine, issue 1). That’s a pretty subjective description… I don’t think
many would agree. I have the drawings and one can make their own analogy. My
point was that one would never really see the entire shape of V’Ger because the
ship was so big… it really wasn’t that important. Just show glimpses of the
exterior and let the audience’s imagination do the rest. The important design
elements of V’Ger were the entrance, the interior and the Voyager site.
Part Three: Into The
V’Ger Maw
There are some images
in the TOPPS Star Trek: The
Motion Picture trading cards and elsewhere of the Enterprise model
with some strange green glow FX and what appear to be cloud tank effects–none
of which appeared in the final film. Are these stills from RA&A footage?
One of our staff was
an expert at shooting liquid and cloud tank effects. Some of the effects inside
V’Ger were going to involve tank elements that were shot with a small
black Enterprise model that made the liquids animate around
the shape of the ship. When we were building the motion control cameras we did
test shots of some of the models that were under construction to test their
lighting system. This shop was kind of a test lab for V’Ger effects such as the
V’Ger surface effects and other things we were going to do with tank footage
for the cloud and effects that were inside V’Ger. So I thought that analysis
and interaction with the Enterprise by V’Ger was one of the
things that didn’t make it into the final film. I thought that V’Ger was a
living machine and if there was a spaceship inside of it, it would be
challenging it, just the way any living thing reacts to an intrusion. V’Ger
would create obstacles or tests for the Enterprise and that
Spock and the crew would have to come up with clever ways to get through the
challenges laid down by V’Ger. I thought the way Doug reshot Spock’s spacewalk
was entertaining and dramatic, but I thought the Spock model looked like a
model. But, I thought Trumbull ‘s idea was good, dramatically. The memory wall
was something I designed from an idea that Tony Smith came up with. We wanted
to do something with a “bit” which would later come to be called a sensor bee.
There wasn’t going to be just one, there would have been billions of them
flowing through V’Ger. It would have been about the size of a Ping-Pong ball
and be alive with energy patterns and light effects. When we shot the memory
wall scene we used front-projection material on the bit. We designed a
hi-intensity projector with animating colors and patterns that were attached to
the camera to give the bits life in the wide shots. We tried to do as many
things as we could in-camera. Sometimes that thing would be flying on a
monofilament and Spock would grab it and look at it and it would take off and
nest with a bunch of other bees and form an object and break up and form
another object, etc. Anyway, he and Kirk end up following one of these sensor
bees to the memory wall and he mind melds with it. The mind meld proves to be
quite powerful and sends Spock to sickbay–as in the version that was released.
This was one of the things we were trying to bring to the movie that in
hindsight I wish we hadn’t tried to accomplish. The production was too
disorganized and under time pressures and that makes complex in camera FX difficult.
To do that effects now would be a piece of cake but at that time fixing it in
post was not an option.
From what I have read,
the memory wall stored the data patterns of the Klingon ships, the Epsilon Nine
station, the planet of living machines, etc.–things V’Ger had encountered on
it’s journey.
Exactly, and the
memory wall had a rear projection screen built into it to display that
practically, on set, as Kirk and Spock interacted with it. It was made of
vacuum-formed plastic pieces–hundreds of them. Some of them were made with
frosted plex and some of them from Stewart film screen that was vacuum formed
so that we could either shoot blue on it and composite V’Gers imagery later or
rear-project it onto the set. The main issue with this scene was “how do you
fly people around through this scene?”
That’s the big
criticism I have read about that scene–that it was ponderous; the spacesuits
unconvincing…
The spacesuits were
horrific! They were awful! We had nothing to do with their design. The costume
designer (Robert Fletcher) had no science fiction background; the spacesuits
were an embarrassment, I mean had anyone in the costume design team seen 2001.
We got involved in how they were going to shoot those practical scenes when we
should have just said “That’s your problem”. But I got involved in how the
interior of V’Ger worked and we were going to do the effects and guys from the
studio and the art department were saying “That’ll never work,” but at that
time the only way people were doing any kind of weightless stuff was flying
people on wires. But anytime you see someone on wires you can tell they are on
wires. The way ones motions are limited. There are axis you can’t turn on and
anyone who’s seen much film at all can tell immediately when someone’s on wires.
Now you put someone in a spacesuit on wires and it’s even more apparent because
they are heavier and it’s much more difficult to move. Then to build a track
and trolley system above that can move in X,Y,Z–that’s an incredibly complex
rig. Then they wanted to fly two people up there (Kirk and Spock) at the same
time. I don’t think the Cirque du Soleil could pull it off.
There were other ways they could have been shot from blue screen to front or
rear projection, but the studio guys wanted to do it in-camera so Robert Wise
could direct them. Robert Wise wanted to fly them live on wires against these
huge sets so that the effect would be done totally in-camera with no
compositing whatsoever. I was saying “We should put them on armatures like the
weightless scenes in 2001. We can build an armature that goes
through the bluescreen mounted with a counter balance crane. Then we could move
them up and down, rotate them and shoot the actors like models.” But Wise
wanted to shoot this scenes as practically (in-camera) as he could. So, the
first time we got into that memory wall sequence he got frustrated and everyone
got frustrated. The logistics were just nuts.
I am surprised that a
director with Robert Wise’s experience and credentials would not have seen the
potential pitfalls of this sequence and in shooting it the way it was shot.
I thought Robert Wise
was a strange choice for director. Robert Wise was not a science fiction
person. He’s a wonderful man and a great director but it wasn’t his cup of tea.
I don’t think he enjoyed the experience very much.
He did do The Day The Earth Stood Still, arguably one
of the best science fiction films ever made.
True, but that was a
different era and he was getting up in years by the time he did Star
Trek: The Motion Picture. I really respect Robert Wise but this whole
project seemed to overwhelm him. And I think he was just worn out by the
politics, indecision and change. The film needed a clear vision and as I said
earlier it was being created by committee.
Part Four: Designing A
23rd Century Odyssey
What can you tell us
about the design phase of the film, especially the ships and vehicles?
When I was designing
any craft, I would sit down with the art department and go through the ideas
and rough sketches. Different designers worked on different elements. I’d make
a decision on which designs we would refine and we do final presentation
drawings. The I would present these designs to a committee of 10 to 15 people.
The committee would consist of Robert Wise, Gene Roddenberry, Jeffrey
Katzenberg, a NASA advisor, etc. I’d present, say, Workbee #1 and the
discussions would break down into “No it wouldn’t do that because of this or
that reason. These discussions would go on and on–sometimes for a day or two
per design. I came to realize that the way to get the best design–the one I
thought was best–was to put it about eight deep in the stack because I knew if
I showed them that one first it would be rejected. So, I’d bury it in the stack
and by the time they got to, say, number eight they’d say “Yeah, that’s a good
one, we like that!” because by then they were worn out. There was nobody at
Paramount working on Star Trek who had a creative vision, like
a Lucas or Spielberg. They were all people who were theoretical experts and
that’s a death sentence to a film as far as continuity goes. It’s also what
George Lucas and Steven Spielberg didn’t have to deal with. I don’t think
Roddenberry had a vision for this film. Gene Roddenberry, I got along with but
I soon learned he had his own blind vision about everything from how things
looked at the speed of light to the size of the 12 ft. in diameter doors on
the Enterprise. I really think the most successful pieces on the
original series were the one’s he had least to do with.
I agree. I’d credit
Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana with creating Star Trek as we know it, more than
anyone else.
Gene Roddenberry gets
the credit, but I have to tell you a lot of other people did the dirty work. He
was in charge, it was his baby, but it was also a kind of rudderless ship. When
we were designing and shooting the memory wall, we were getting spread too thin
and Roddenberry was getting upset. Now, the original budget we were told we
could work with was 8 million dollars, but as the script changed we’d go back
and say “Ok, you’ve changed this so now we have to re-do all this so it’s going
to take more time and money”. So, the budget at Abel’s kept changing and going
up as the script kept changing from week to week. Time is money in this
business, like any other. Now, had the script remained the same or just changed
a little, we could have held to the budget. As they’d change the script we’d
re-storyboard and re-storyboard and reconfigure our game plan on how to get the
work done. I have 4 copies of the storyboard that are so different from each
other you’d hardly believe it was the same movie. They contain every drawing
that Ed Verreaux drew and I have to tell you storyboarding the Enterprise is
incredibly hard because it’s a complex object to draw. Just try doing a drawing
of the Enterprise from a three-quarter view sometime and
you’ll see what I mean. But Ed had to draw it thousands of times. He did a
great job and I know for a fact that most of the boards we created for the
movie other than the V’Ger sequence were used by Trumbull. We were
storyboarding constantly to keep up with the changing script. Then Robert Wise
came on and we had to bring him up to speed and Roddenberry would keep changing
his mind. As a designer, as someone who understands mechanical things and how
they work, I started doing all kinds of research on what would really be done
to build structures in space; foil folding mechanisms and the technologies that
were being developed at the time to build structures in space. The center of
gravity of an object is critical with objects built for weightlessness. Well,
the center of gravity of theEnterprise is outside itself. It is one
of the most unbalanced objects ever created for space. It would be a real
nightmare to actually maneuver the Enterprise in space. You’d
have more gyros onboard than in all the flying craft on Earth.
It could only exist in
the realm of fantasy.
Exactly! But it was a
mandate from Gene Roddenberry that the configuration of the Enterprise is
similar to that of the original series; meaning that there be a saucer, the
large dorsal, fuselage, two-struts at an angle and nacelles. So, it needed to
have a similar configuration, but not be exactly the same. My approach was to
kind of give it a stylization that was almost Art Deco. I spent weeks drawing
and re-drawing the nacelles. I mean the front-end of the nacelles is almost a
1940 Ford grill. But I tried to make it have a very art-deco feel; for example
I added the parallel lines along the edge of the saucer. Things became more
elongated and more elegant than the television series version. When we first
came on the project we had to look at everything that existed and Roddenberry
said, “Just use the sets that we’re building and the models we are building”.
So, I gave the models and honest look but had to tell them in the end that “If
you use these models and sets, you’re going to be laughed out of the theatre”.
The models would have been embarrassing at best. They were really old school in
their detail and were not built to armature and light the way we needed for
motion control. They looked like the old television show. Again, Don Loos built
the Enterprise and Magicam built the dry-dock and a few other
things but they were building for a television movie. The resolution of
television is forgiving; the big screen is not. I sat down with Roddenberry and
Katzenberg and said we are going to have to redesign the Enterprise because
it needs to be armatured from six sides and it needs to have lighting systems
in it. I told them “You saw Star Wars. You saw the quality of those
models and for us to shoot these models of yours with motion control; to put
that motion blur in there with multiple passes… it has to have lights that we
can control for individual passes”. If the camera is going to get close to the
model–say, up close to the windows, the model has got to be big enough for us
to give it detail. Trying to film a model that is too small is deadly. The
focus, lighting, depth of field, surface textures and much more come into play.
The Enterprise ended up being almost 12 ft. long. The model
that was under construction was maybe 4 ft. long.
If the miniatures they
wanted you to use were the ones pictured in the book, Star Trek: Phase II, I have to say I agree
with you.
Well, I think those
were the ones. I told them we were going to have to redesign them and the sets.
Well, Joe Jennings the Art Director at the time and the team who had worked on
the sets was not happy about that. There was resentment there. It was touch to
tell them that the sets had to match the new models and therefore the sets
needed to be redesigned as well. The sets needed to have a much more hi-tech
look and they needed to have a lighting concept built into them. Part of the
battle that we went through was that Gene Roddenberry had his ideas about what
these things should be. He’s one of the few people I’ve ever met that believed
he knew what things looked like at the speed of light. I did research on it and
got some film from MIT where they had done simulations of what things might
look like at the speed of light. The fact is it’s pretty boring! In the end
things have to look good and be entertaining. If you fly through a starfield at
the speed of light, the stars do not go whizzing by you, they actually go away
from you, they actually spread because the stars are so far apart they never go
whizzing by you. So, this whole thing about going through a starfield with
things coming by you in the Z-axis just looks good, but that isn’t what
happens. But then, if you design everything from pure science or practicality
it’s just boring. When designing the vehicles and sets I wanted to show
the Enterprise, work bees and drydock as an extension of the latest
kind of real space construction technology that NASA is using today.
Roddenberry, when he wanted to get involved in how we were planning to show the
23rd century technology would come in and just override it. For example, he
said the doors on the Enterprise are 12 feet in diameter and
round. I said “A round twelve foot in diameter door? That’s just monstrous!”
then he said we want this shuttle to dock with the Enterprise .
And I said “so, you are telling me I have to design a shuttle with a 12 foot in
diameter door?” And he said, “Yes, I want these big grand doorways to open up
onto theEnterprise“. I said, “can these doors iris open?” “No, they
can’t iris open”. I said “how can this little shuttle have a door that big and
open it if doesn’t iris open?” So, I finally came up with a solution that the
doors when docked with a station or other spacecraft open or slide into the
walls of the adjoining craft.
That concept made it’s
way into the final film.
Yes, well I designed
that shuttle. The first shuttles that I designed were really cool, but it just
turned uglier and uglier until it had what I call that “guppy” look because
Kirk had to fly around the dry-dock and “see his mistress” and you had to see
Kirk and Scotty in the window while they are flying around; he had to have a
big panoramic view, and it had to have a 12 foot door at the back to dock with
the Enterprise. It’s one ugly little spacecraft as far as I’m
concerned.
The final design of
the travel pod and other miniatures came from the Robert Abel and Associates
Design Studio?
Oh yeah! All of the
models built were almost entirely complete. Everything but V’Ger–and we were
just beginning on V’Ger when Doug Trumbull took over. All of those models Andy
Probert and myself designed. I drew the original blueprints myself and I had
those blueprints before Andy came on at all. Then Andy came on and he worked on
some more details and he made some suggestions and we went back and forth
exchanging ideas. And then Magicam, which was a division of Paramount, was
already working on things so it was a mandate that they would be the model shop
for the film. Joe Motza ran that company and Jim Dow was the technical director
of the model shop. We had to build up the model shop to deal with this project.
They had to reorganize to be able to take on the project. Magicam was the first
model shop Mark Stetson (later of Digital Domain; SFX Supervisor on The
Fifth Element). Star Trek was Mark’s first project at Magicam. The group at
Magicam were great because they were really receptive to what I wanted to do
and they wanted to make state-of-the-art models. I had an art department that
had several designers working on several parts of the film; Michael Sterling
worked with us on all the graphics and alphabets, elements that remain in use
today in the current Star Trek series and films.
Part Five: Designing The
Future
I had actually seen a
photo of a Klingon ship (being worked on) that was in a magazine while Star Trek: The Motion Picture was in
production and this one was different from what appeared in the final film as
it had plating on it that appeared to be painted on in various shades of blue.
Was this the Klingon ship that your team designed and would have shot?
No that was built
before we got involved. I redesigned all the surface textures, the photon
torpedo tube and many other details. I tried to put a kind of bird-feather
design on the surface. One of the things we did with all of the models was to
give their surfaces details and interesting designs. A smooth object has no
scale so it’s important in model work to find ways of creating scale. Sometimes
it’s very subtle but it’s one of the most important elements in model
photography. We did re-build the Klingon ships and that was one of the first
things we finished, actually. Getting back to theEnterprise, I had this
idea of giving the surface of the Enterprise a patterned,
plated look and we made masks for the surface to create that surface effect. We
did experiments with Crescent Metal Powders and other iridescent and
pearlescent paints. So, in the end we made pearlescent body panels that varied
from each other by minute differences in color and reflectivity. There were
multiple masks that were used to give the surface the complex texture you see
on the screen. The painting was phenomenal.
It is! And I can tell
you as a hobby miniature builder that everyone who has built a model of theStar Trek: The Motion Picture Enterprise has
had a hell of a time duplicating the look. It’s totally unique and actually
very hard to match without careful study of the actual effects model.
Growing up, my father
was an Air Force officer; a fighter pilot, so I grew up building models of
airplanes, speedboats, racecars and the like. I still do build models but not
nearly as much anymore, but I do enjoy it. I was always involved in
techno-design; cars and things that are functional, mechanical. But with
the Enterprise for Star Trek: The Motion Picture,
I designed it so that the saucer could jettison and that the ion engine that
powered it was visible and was a cool design. The bridge was designed so that
the Vulcan shuttle could actually dock with it. The Vulcan shuttle was also
another model that Andy and I designed and was kind of a takeoff of a
catamaran. We kept in mind it’s function in that part of it was going to have
to detach from the warp sled and dock with theEnterprise. I had to
design a shape that was going to be able to physically dock with the docking
ring behind the bridge; so anything that had too much height wouldn’t work and
again, according to Roddenberry, it had to have a 12 foot in diameter door. I
got into the philosophy of how theEnterprise theoretically works.
The Enterprise behaves somewhat like a surfboard that rides on
a continuos wave created by the disturbance in space created by the anti-matter
in the nacelles. But again, the Enterprise ‘s center of
gravity is outside it’s actual body, so I put maneuvering thrusters all over
the craft, on the nacelles, the saucer, etc. Something I wanted to do was have
an animation effect for the thrusters working when the ship is maneuvering out
of the dry-dock. I also assumed that at some point we might want the saucer to
jettison–either in this film or another one–so we designed it so that the
saucer could maneuver by itself and land if necessary. So, the Enterprise had
lots of functions it had to accomplish in the movie. How things came in and out
of the Cargo Bay and how they were moved and stored. One of the things that was
really a battle for me was the design of the drydock itself. You know, to make
a big rectilinear thing in space made no sense to me. I wanted to make it
hexagonal or circular and give it a center of gravity that worked well, it
could orbit the Earth and we could have the whole thing rolling together. It
would have been much more spectacular and would have had the feel of the space
station in 2001.
That really didn’t
make sense to me either just watching the film for the first time–from the
standpoint of scientific visual accuracy. Your concept seems like it would have
given the viewer more of a “zero-g” feel.
The drydock could have
been a phenomenal design, but Roddenberry insisted that it be rectangular. I
wanted to create a dock that in cross-section would be hexagonal or circular. I
wanted the same for the Enterprise when I first came on the
project. I said “Good, we’ll redesign it” and I was thinking of something
similar to what they came up with three or four movies later–a new, modern
shape. But Roddenberry said, “No, it’s got to have that configuration because
that’s the signature configuration of Star Trek“. The workbees and
the Vulcan shuttle were cool. The space office complex turned out pretty good,
but it wasn’t nearly as spectacular as I had hoped. One thing that I knew we
had to have a lot of design input into was the bridge and the engine room. I
didn’t care what Kirk’s quarters looked like, but the engine room with all the
fusion and antimatter? That’s got to be pretty amazing! Same for the bridge. I
got into this and one of the first things I did was tell Roddenberry and Wise
(and this probably ruffled some feathers) “Look, I’ve watched the television
series and I’ve noticed that every time there is an emergency everyone is
falling out of their seats. Even airplanes have seatbelts. You’ve got to have
seats that hold them in, in some way. So, I convinced them to do the thing
where the arms come down over your lap. I mean, here you are flipping around in
this vehicle that is going through a wormhole and to have people falling around
all over the Bridge would have been stupid.
Well, in the original
series, the chairs weren’t even secured to the floor and were basically chairs
that could be found in furniture stores and whatnot back in the 60s–with some
minor modifications.
I thought the chairs
we designed could have been even more interesting and hold the person in even
more. Another thing is, around the bridge, at Spock’s station, etc. Roddenberry
insisted that they have oval shaped screens and if you know anything about design
you know that’s one of the most inefficient shapes to put a lot of information
on because you are cutting the corners off the display area. I also said, “I
think the consoles should not have switches and knobs, they should be tactile
touch screens. You touch the screen and the things change and arrays come up,
etc.” I had been to Lawrence Livermore and had seen what was coming up down the
road regarding tactile display design and Roddenberry wouldn’t go for any of
that. He said “You’ve got to have round screens or oval screens” and the kind
of graphics they ended up using on those screens were very hokey compared to
what it could have been.
It was blinking lights
and the kind of thing they make fun of now in Galaxy Quest and the like.
(laughs) Exactly! It
was kind of strange swirly stuff and blinky stuff… It isn’t that what we wanted
to do wouldn’t have been entertaining or interesting. It would have been really
interesting and entertaining–and a lot more graphic. Chris Ross, Andy Probert
and my team were designing hand props; communicators, phaser, typeface, logos,
all kinds of things and it all had to have continuity. On the bridge they had
the viewscreen and that worked out ok, but I wanted to have another kind of
celestial sphere space navigation device that came down out of the ceiling with
concentric spheres of stars but they nixed that.
They did have a
navigation dome in the ceiling.
I convinced them to do
that because to have that detailed ceiling and with the circular design you
needed to have that dome up there.
I know at one point
there was going to be a transporter pad on the bridge. Can you tell us about
that?
There was an idea of
putting a transporter on the bridge but I convinced them otherwise, because why
would you need to have Spock dock with the ship if you had a transporter on the
bridge? Then I said “Well if you put that on the bridge you might as well put
everything on the bridge”. So, they backed off of that.
One of the things I
did with the Enterprise was design windows that go around the
exterior of the saucer that do not just have light coming out but used small
transparent images of the sets inside the windows so that when the camera got
close to the model it appeared that you could see something in the windows. By
the way, in some of those windows you can see photos of Mickey Mouse, Andy
Probert and others as a kind of in-joke.
Part Six: Exploring
Strange New Techniques
One of Andy Probert’s
illustrations shows a depiction of the officer’s lounge looking through the
windows. You can see the Enterprise ‘s engines and an energy effect
between the engines. What can you tell us about the plans for this effect?
I designed the
nacelles to have an effect added and to have light panels built into them. I
wanted to have an effect that radiates from the glowing panels on the nacelles;
something you could see. A distortion with a light effect as well. We would
have had that streak when the ship is in motion. Of course, that never happened
but probably would have if we had finished the film.
What was planned for
the actual warp drive effect? Was this going to be a slit-scan effect similar
to what was in the film as released?
I had always had the
idea of the Enterprise going through this incredible z-axis
color change; the stars and everything needed to break into the spectrum to
become streaks of color. So, there was another idea and it was a really quick
abridged version where it just kind of goes bam! and that was just a trick
filter effect. But yes, we were going to do a streak effect for warp speed.
Another effect that would have been phenomenal was the energy probe that comes
onboard the bridge. Stuart Ziff (developed GoMotion, the process for animating
the dragon in the 1981 film Dragonslayer) developed the really bright light
source used on the bridge during this sequence that could be moved around. This
was incredibly bright and was actually kind of dangerous. We built a strobe
tube that was roughly four and a half to five feet long that had a strobe tube
that ran off a capacitor that was literally a semi-truck capacitor out on the
lot. A man wearing a black suit carried this strobe. The light itself was
hooked to a computer so that we could change the intensity and the pulsing of
the light. It was a phenomenal, phenomenal thing. It was so powerful. It was
really scary because it was crackling with power. We shot all of those scenes
before we left the project. What I wanted to do was animate over the
light–which is what Apogee did. But, what Apogee did was a Mylar trick of
distorting Mylar and shaping it and it really just ended up being white light.
But what we were going to do is–and I had done tests with this–is build an
armature of wire and bending it, painted white with S-curves connected to a
rotating base. If you spin that you get an oscillating effect and with light
projected on it, with streak exposures and it gives you spiraling shapes. Then
you’d do five passes with different shapes nested inside themselves. It would
have been cool!
It more interesting,
visually, than what was in the final film.
After the project left
Abel’s, the momentum we had going was stopped because they had to move all the
equipment and some of our personnel and divide it up between Trumbull and John
Dykstra. They were running 24 hours a day because they were running out of time
because they killed the momentum we had. They had to take the models and figure
out how they worked, etc. Trumbull had worked at Magicam before and he knew
those people over there. While we were building the models he used to drop by
and check them out. I knew he thought they were pretty cool. He was very
complimentary and said “Wow! That Enterprise is incredible!”
Anyway, that momentum shift of handing everything off to Trumbull and Dykstra
created lots of things that got done in just any way they could get it
done–such as the energy probe. Basically, they said “We’ve got to add something
over that practical lighting” and they went with what worked and what could be
accomplished quickly with the time they had.
Who were you planning
on using to complete the various matte paintings for the film?
I think I was going to
use Illusion Arts.
Is there anything else
you can tell us about the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture that our readers might
find interesting?
I’ll tell you another
little bit; it was one of the things that just drove me crazy! On Lt. Illia’s
neck there was a glowing thing on her neck that was a practical effect. We used
tiny hairline wires that went around her neck and were colored the color of her
skin and connected to a tiny battery pack on her back. Those wires would break
all the time. The lights for the thing on her neck were tiny grain of wheat
bulbs and the batteries would last 3 takes and then go dead and we’d have to
change them–all this just to have the glowing thing on her neck. It was one of
those things where I wanted to say “Fuck this stupid little light on her neck…
it’s not that important to the story, it’s not really adding anything
significant. But that’s what happens in filmmaking a lot. Someone gets carried
away with some minute detail that’s really not that important while some bigger
things that are really important get over looked. We could have rotoscoped it
in there and burned it in, but that’s another optical pass and you have to
track someone moving around, etc. I suggested they make it a kind of necklace,
but no, it had to be this thing embedded in her skin and it had to be
practical.
What were your
feelings when your tenure on the film ended?
It was the first
feature I was involved in and it was disappointing when the plug was pulled and
there was a lot of politics involved which I won’t get into. In a sense I was
relieved because it was such a reactionistic out of control way to make a
movie. What is really discouraging is that for all the design and creativity
that was put into it, it was all just swept under the rug and yet the general
public assumes that the majority of what they saw on the screen was created by
the Trumbull group. The fact is we had done most of the preliminary design work
and had solved lots of complex production and design problems. We had created
an awesome car and they pretty much just needed to put in the key and drive
away. Robert Abel and Associates, Andy Probert and everyone else deserves
credit for their work on the film and the Star Trek legacy. It would have been
fun to see how our approach would have turned out. It would have been fun to
finish something we started but Hollywood has it’s own momentum’s which
sometimes we cannot control. The movie was budgeted (effects budget) at 8
million dollars when we first got involved but had escalated to 12 million with
all the changes that were being thrown at us. Some said the project was out of
control. By taking the project out of our hands it escalated to 20 million.
Thank you very much
for your time, retrospective and incredible conceptual art from your tenure
on Star Trek: The Motion
Picture! This is an invaluable archive of artwork and will be of tremendous
interest to admirers of this film and visual effects in general.
I consented to this
interview in hopes that the Abel Studios and all the talented folks who worked
there might receive at least some small recognition for the work they created
for the film. We did a large amount of phenomenal design work and when the film
was released, I, Richard Taylor received the last and only credit in the movie.
It simply said RAA designs… Richard Taylor. I couldn’t believe it. So,
hopefully some of the people who created so much of the Star Trek legacy can be
appreciated and receive some of the credit they deserve.
