Star Trek: Voyager’s best special effect was almost a disappointment

By Chris Snellgrove | Published 23 seconds ago

Star Trek: Travel It had many special effects, but possibly none was more impressive than when the ship landed on a planet in the premiere episode of season 2 “The 37’s”. This was the first time for the franchise, giving life to one of Gene Roddenberry ideas that had previously considered too expensive to show on the screen. However, this effect was almost a disappointment thanks to the production problems behind the scene, including incorrectly designed landing struts and a CGI model that was too small.

This particular Traveler The special effect was one that the team had been dreaming for a long time … for example, the graphic designer of Michael Okuda franchises previously recommended the executive producer Rick Berman that this ship should be able to land as a way of distinguishing it from what came before. Consequently, Rick Sternbach had developed several possible ship designs that would accommodate a landing capacity, and ensured that the finished design presented small chops in the lower helmet destined to the house of landing equipment. However, only after designing those struts, the producers realized that the “legs” of the ship seemed too thin to support their body.

Voyager landing on a planet in “The 37’s” was destined to be this great special effect, and the producers were understandably concerned that the spectators were disappointed if it seemed that the ship always omitted the day of the legs. In the great television tradition, they decided to solve this problem in postproduction … In this case, placing rock outcrops and other characteristics of strategically terrain around Voyager as it landed. Return and see the episode, and you will see how the public’s vision of those landing touches effectively obscured.

However, that was not the only problem with TravelerIt turns out that the digital artists of the program had made the CGI model of the ship too small. This annoying visual effects supervisor Ronald B. Moore (should not be confused with the Trek writer and Battlestar Galactica Restart the Ronald D. Moore showrunner), who was disappointed by the landing effect because “the voyager scale on the floor was incorrect.” However, I did not feel that the public necessarily noticed “because there is nothing to really relate it; people are in the foreground, the ship is in the background, and we kept it that way.”

For Star Trek fans for a long time, this Traveler The moment was more than another special effect … It was also the realization of a dream of decades that began with Gene Roddenberry. The creator of the franchise had originally dreamed that the company regularly lands on planets in The original series, But soon he realized how expensive the ship would land somewhere new every week. This is how the conveyor was born, since it allowed Captain Kirk and his former team quickly visit a new place and then return to the ship through a much cheaper special effect “Beam Me Up”.

TravelerThe producers reached the same conclusion that Roddenberry did, so the show was mainly attached to the special effect of the conveyor instead of constantly having the ship’s land. However, he landed several more times after “the 37”, and the producers had much more easier to give life to this ambitious effect on their subsequent attempts. They did it despite the CGI model so that the ship is too small, which possibly demonstrates that size really doesn’t matter in the fourteenth century. However, we do not recommend telling Captain Janeway about his morning coffee sizes, unless you want me to kill you faster than he killed Tuvix!