American Cinematographer - December 1996 - 72

ally odd, raking three-quarter
backlight coming from the right or
left side, which I balanced out with
nets and a couple of little lights. I

wanted it to look scary

and myste¬
point, and
we
always had the camera dutched
to it; we never just had it coming
straight at us. The neon core and
some small wheat-grain lights on
its surface made it more interesting
and beautiful, and really helped
create scale. We gave it a slow, de¬
rious,

so

it

was

lit like

a

termined movement; we never see
real speed."

Speed is something re¬
ships in¬
tercepting the Borg. While Starfleet
has primarily been represented on
the big screen by the Enterprise-B
served for the Federation

as

3-D

wireframes, realis¬

tically painted and textured in the
computer, and then put through
their paces, along with the Enter¬
prise and Borg Cube miniatures, in
the film's dozen Return of the Jedistyle space battle shots. The impact
of multiple phaser hits, plus the
Enterprise's new Quantum torpe¬
does, eventually decimate the
Borg Cube. Individual hits were
achieved using a 60" Borg Cube
model that had specific areas
which could be blown up again
and again without damaging the
miniature. For the final annihila¬

ships plus the Enterprise. Remarks
the effects supervisor, "Starfleet
would probably throw everything
it could at the Borg, including ships

tion explosions, effects cinematog¬
rapher Rosenberg shot some ten
30" cubes, with lightweight skins
packed with explosives, over sev¬
eral nights. The Cubes were sus¬
pended from pipes some 60' above
Rosenberg's high-speed anamorphic camera, which was on the
ground pointing straight up at the
exploding models and shooting at
300 fps. Safety glass placed over
the lens prevented optical damage,
while the camera was protected by
a
piece of plywood with a hole cut

before. And since

out to accommodate the matte box.

(a.k.a. the Excelsior), the Reliant
from Trek II, and the

Farragut built
by Greg Jein for Next Generation,
Knoll insisted that First Contact's

space battle should prove that this
armada was bigger than three

we've

never seen

a lot of the background
action in the space battle would be
done with CG ships that needed to
be built from scratch anyway, I re¬

Notes

alized that there was no reason not
to do some new designs."
Alex Jaeger, who lent his

we

we

figured

skills to Congo and Mission: Impos¬
sible after joining ILM's model shop
fresh out of

Rosenberg with a grin, "At
the end of each take, the matte box

was

maybe 4" deep in plastic! We

knew the shot

was finished when
couldn't see anything!"
As the Borg Cube ex¬
plodes, a 5" motion-controlled
hatch opens, deploying the time¬

traveling Borg Sphere. The Sphere

by showing this bowshock forming
in front and continuing to grow
and expand as the sphere dives
down through it. We always show
the Vortex from the outside. Like
the Deep Space Nine wormhole, we
see the effect
happening around
the singularity, but never the sin¬

gularity itself. We wanted a sense
of urgency as the Enterprise-E fol¬
lows the Sphere, so [the Enterprise]
just dives through before the Vor¬
tex collapses. The script demanded
that the Vortex emit something to
protect the Enterprise - 'chronometric particles' in technobabble."
Using a CG model of the
Enterprise-E for the shots entering
the Vortex, ILM's team employed a
particle Tenderer to automatically
create interactive lighting and
shadowing on the particles them¬
selves and the Enterprise's geom¬
etry within Renderman.
The miniature EnterpriseE again comes into play as several
crewmembers go for a stroll on
the starship's exterior in order to
thwart the Borg's plan to recon¬
figure the deflector dish into a
homing beacon to signal reinforce¬
ments. Although maneuvering the
new
Enterprise model has been lik¬
ened to carrying around a station
wagon, it's hard to make even a 10'
miniature appear convincing in
an extreme
close-up. That was
Rosenberg's mission for the am¬
bitious spacewalk sequence, in
which Captain Picard and Lt.
Commander Worf creep along
the Enterprise's hull toward the

design school last Feb¬
ruary, was appointed visual effects

model, covered with lots of

art director of First

gree, was

deflector. After the animatic

this

approved by the producers and di¬
rector, Rosenberg devised a mo¬
tion-control pullback on the Enter¬
prise which would serve as the
backdrop to the live action.
Says effects cinematogra¬
pher Rosenberg, "The shot starts

Contact, and

assigned the task designing
four other starships to expand
Starfleet. Says Jaeger, "Paramount
wanted ships that would quickly
was

read as different from a distance.
The Akira class features the tradi¬
tional saucer section and engine
nacelles combined with an offbeat

catamaran-style double hull. The
Norway class is a Voyager-esque
design. Saber class is a smaller Re¬
liant-sized ship whose nacelles trail
off the tips of its saucer, which is
molded into the fuselage. The final
design, Steamrunner class, has
twin nacelles trailing off the top of
the saucer, which are connected in
the back by an engineering section
at the deflector dish."

Jaeger's designs

70

modeled

American

Cinematographer

were

surface detail and

some

coarse

brass fili¬

26" in diameter. But as
globular ship was supposed to

be much smaller than its craft of

origin, it was shot separately and
digitally composited to exit the
Cube. Once released, the Sphere
conveniently generates its own
time-travel gateway, the Vortex,
the design of which was dictated
partially by its actions. Since the
Borg Sphere nose-dives toward
Earth, Knoll and company opted
for a rocket re-entry effect with a
bowshock forming in front and
then streaming backwards at high¬
speed. The bowshock had to con¬
vey the notion that it was a timedisplacement field generated by
the Sphere to open a time tunnel
lying ahead of it.
Recalls Knoll, "We started

December 1996

over

was

the characters' shoulders

as

they come over the edge of the hull
and walk toward the deflector

dish, which in reality would be
several hundred feet away.
shot lasts 10 seconds, and
camera's

the

pulling back the whole

time. To make the shot
had to get

The

work,

we

really close to the model;
we were
probably Vs" away. Be¬
cause
they're so aerodynamic, the
Enterprise models have never had
lots of surface detail compared to
American Cinematographer - December 1996

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