And you thought I wasn’t working on this project. Tsk tsk tsk.

Decker's Revenge

Beyond Apollo—Plans for the Exploration of Space from the Age of Apollo, 1959-1979

I’d always considered myself to be something of a space buff in general and NASA fanboy in particular—my best friend is a former mid-level executive at NASA and I myself used to work for a NASA subcontractor years ago—but I just finished the better part of this evening reading article after fascinating article at David Portree’s website on missions and space vehicles that I had never even heard rumors of before. (Did you know that at one point there were plans to soft-land spent Saturn S-IVB stages on the lunar surface for use as shelters instead of smacking them into the Moon? Or that as late as 1967 NASA was planning manned flyby missions of Venus and Mars after the Moon landings as a logical next step towards a manned Mars landing mission in the early 1980s?)

David Portree’s blog is a must-bookmark site for diehard space geeks and promises endless hours of fascinating (and depressing) reading, and interestingly enough, has helped me put Obama’s NASA budget cuts into stark perspective. When you step back for a second and consider the scope of audacious proposals like the NERVA Electric Mars Ship (see below) and compare those big-thinking plans to the relatively puny ambitions of the anemically underfunded Constellation program, it really makes you stop and realize something: we didn’t lose the Moon today. We lost it over forty years ago.

NERVA Electric Mars Probe (1966)

How did we get to this point? How did our dreams become so small and timid?

Starship Enterprise 1960s studio model at Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

So… I wonder how this picture was taken? I am fairly certain that the image has been edited somewhat to hide the background; here is what appears to be the original. Obviously the Enterprise model is suspended from the ceiling above, but the refurbished model (AFAIK) has never been displayed in public like this. Is this a photo taken right after the restoration at the facility where the work was done? If anyone has any clues about the story behind this photo, please post a comment below. Meanwhile, click the link below to view the original full-size version of this image at the NASM website:

1960’s Starship Enterprise Studio Model at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

By the way (and in case anyone’s wondering), I’ve been taking a couple of weeks off from my “Doomsday Machine” project to recharge my batteries, but I’ve resumed work and hopefully will have more progress to show in February. It’s hard being a one-man show… sometimes ya gotta take a break to get the creative juices flowing again! Thanks for your patience. :)

I figured out the problems I was having with radiosity—no more splotches. :) Still no major texturing changes here; just some noodling with saturation and contrast levels. From this angle I can also see where I need to add more visual interest to the hangar deck model, either with texturing, physical details or both. The CGI model is a pretty faithful recreation of the physical hangar deck model built in 1966-67 for the original series episode “The Galileo Seven”, but that means it’s also kinda bland and plastic-looking.

This will not end well

I probably could spend another week or two endlessly tweaking this 66-frame sequence, but I think this is the best it’s going to get. It’s a shame, because there are a few things that have always bothered me about this particular sequence… more after the jump.

Mkay, so first, it was a dumbass move for Kirk to order the shields lowered while the Enterprise was in the line of fire of a leviathan that fires antiproton beams to slice up planets. My initial thought for fixing this was to somehow re-edit the sequence to excise Kirk making such a boneheaded mistake, but it basically would have meant cutting to the attack sequence immediately after Spock says “I also believe the nature of this machine precludes the possiblity of easy access to its control mechanisms” as a communicator voice-over while the camera is on the Constellation. I gave it a test try, but the transition was just too jarring and abrupt. So, our brave captain stays a dum-dum for this one.

My next objection was a little less straightforward but bothered me even more: When the Enterprise was struck by the antiproton beam the first time with shields down, everyone onboard got tossed to starboard and the ship careened out of control. Yet a few minutes later (after Decker’s disastrous strafing run on the planet killer when deflector shields are damaged and gone for good), the planet killer fired three more times on the Enterprise… and it didn’t seem like a big deal at all! All that seemed to happen was the ship shuddered, the warp drive went offline, some Enterprise crewmembers were injured or possibly killed, and some hull ruptures occured (the latter three all occurred off-camera). But no one got tossed to the deck, and the Enterprise stayed pretty much in level flight. Maybe she stayed stable because she was caught in a tractor beam, but that presents another problem: she was probably CLOSER to the planet killer for those last three shots!

To fix these glaring inconsistencies, I storyboarded an initial attack sequence where the Enterprise (which was flying like an F-18 desperately trying to evade the doomsday machine) dived behind a largish asteroid just as the planet killer fired its antiproton beam. The beam would strike the asteroid instead of the Enterprise–protecting the ship from direct damage by the beam–but the megaBOOM!! explosion of the asteroid would cause the ship to ricochet off-course and toss our gallant crewmembers out of their safety-beltless chairs. My thought here would be that this would explain why the Enterprise didn’t suffer the extreme damage she suffered later on in Act II, and it would also explain why she spun out of control (because of the shock wave from the exploding asteroid). Yeah yeah, shock waves don’t travel through the vacuum of space. Well, warp drive’s impossible too, so :p

Unfortunately, no matter how I timed it out I kept bumping up against some hard limits storytelling-wise. Because I have to cleave to the original soundtrack, I only had 66 frames for this shot and I just couldn’t figure out a way to squeeze all that visual information into less than three seconds. I suppose if I was more proficient with sound editing I might have been able to stretch out the soundtrack (perhaps by repeating some of the beats) so that I’d have more time to show everything, but I just couldn’t justify spending all that time for what was originally 2.75 seconds of film. In the end, I felt it was more important to have the camera concentrate its attention on the first glimpse of the planet killer’s main weapon being fired… the interior shot of the Enterprise crew getting tossed out of their chairs was enough of a clue to the audience that some bad juju was going down.

Scott Suggestion from spockboy on Vimeo.

Some of the visuals he’s commented upon are from the aborted March 2008 effort, but many of them are not. In any event, I am immensely flattered that Paul has gone to this depth of effort to analyze and offer constructive criticism of my work, and I place a great deal of value in what he’s got to say. Paul just recently started film school (attaboy, SpockBoy!) and anyone who’s seen his immensely creative mashups at LiveVideo and YouTube know that he’s got a keen eye for all things Trek. He’s definitely given me a banquet’s worth of food for thought, and I’d also be very interested in hearing comments from the peanut gallery.

What you’re viewing in this clip is an assembly of visual effects footage in various states of completion. The opener to Act II with the Enterprise sailing through the debris field is complete but for a planned re-rendering of the planet killer–I tweaked the model’s textures after I released test footage last month, and now it doesn’t match the appearance of the Doomsday Machine in the following scene. Speaking of which… the next sequence where the planet killer cuts loose on the Enterprise is semi-complete; there are about 20,000 more asteroids and the glowy blue dust cloud that still need to be added, and I may re-render the planet killer itself to give a better angle on the antiproton beam effect (right now, it’s kind of hard to see all four of the beams that lance together into one unified antiproton beam).

The rest of the visual effects from that point forward are actually old shots from my March 2008 attempt to complete this episode. I haven’t shown this footage to hardly anyone until today, so I hope it’s of interest for–if nothing else–comparison purposes with the visual effects that will eventually replace them in 2010.

I’ll be online sporadically until after the new year, but I welcome your comments in the meantime–I promise I’ll try to respond as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Blessed Kwanza, Festive Festivus and Happy New Year, everyone!