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How ILM came up with the new Enterprise for J.J. Abrams' Trek

Artists at Industrial Light & Magic, who worked with Star Trek director J.J. Abrams to come up with the new design for the iconic starship Enterprise, said that Abrams' directive was simple.

"He wanted a hot-rod type of vehicle, but they also wanted to preserve the Enterprise kind of look," model maker John Goodson said in a presentation at ILM's San Francisco headquarters earlier this month.

"J.J. Abrams kept saying, 'Make it a bigger movie. Make it a bigger shot,'" creative director David Nakabayashi added. "I think that's one thing you see in this film, at least: The stuff I've seen is just everything is big."

Following is an edited version of the designers' talk. Star Trek opens May 8.

Goodson: It was really interesting working with J.J. for this ship. They gave us a lot of latitude to kind of play with it. They had some specific ideas of what they wanted. He wanted a hot-rod type of vehicle, but they also wanted to preserve the Enterprise kind of look. They gave ILM a tremendous amount of leeway in terms of the design. ... It's got this sweeping line that's kind of giving it this real hot-rod kind of car feel. It's ILM's job to sort of take this and start to flesh this thing out and make it more real and convey the scale and all those things that you need, so it's just a leaping-off point for us. ...

How updated is the Enterprise?

Roger Guyett, visual effects supervisor: When I was a kid—when I bought toys or when I built things—I always wanted stuff to move. And one thing that frustrated me about the original Enterprise was that nothing moves on it. It was just a very static thing. ...

I don't know how familiar you are with all of the terminology of the Enterprise, but there is a main hull, which is the big disk. There is a secondary hull, which is a tube, and then you have two engines. And at the front of the bottom sort of cylinder there is this thing called the "collection plate" [aka the navigational deflector, in Trek parlance]. We made ours move, so it actually sort of comes out, and it grows, and you can move it around. We just made the whole thing much more contemporary.

And also when the ship goes into warp—of course, we had to create our version of warp, too, but you'll see the fins actually split apart slightly. So it goes into kind of like a warp mode, and from my perspective, all of those things add a level of interest and ... design to the whole process and make it so much more fun to work on every aspect of the process of the Star Trek world.

When you are on the Enterprise, you got to see a lot of the Enterprise. You can set different moments in the movie and different places— ... the engineering room or corridor or medical bay—so that you feel the enormous extent of the Enterprise. ...

Goodson: On the original TV show Enterprise, there were some patterns that were on the bottom. There's a rectangle and a circle and a T shape, and there's these big geometric forms, and I always try to sneak them in when I can, and I got to put them on this ship, too. It kind of connects us back to the original TV series a little bit. It's a subtle thing, but it does actually bridge those two ships together. ...

The pattern on the saucer is what we've always referred to as "aztec," which is what it's always been called, and that dates back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and we wanted to pull that in on this ship and make it very subtle.

One of the things about the [Star Trek: The] Motion Picture Enterprise that was really cool for a practical model is they used the type of paint called "interference paint." This paint has little tiny [mica] prisms in it, and when you look at it from one angle, it would be red, but if you walked across the room to look at it from the other side, it appears green. There's gold and blue. There are a variety of colors you can get from this paint, and they painted the Motion Picture Enterprise with this paint. In the beginning of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, they've got, like, 20 minutes of the camera scrolling over the ship looking at all the stuff, and you see these very subtle iridescent effects.

We wanted to put that into this ship [for 2009], so we played around with some of the shaders and created, in the [digital] paint, these colored maps that look like Wonder Bread wrappers almost. Where one map would have red, the other map would have green in exactly the same spot. Where it would be blue on one map, it would be gold on the other map. What this would do, as the model moved through the virtual light, depending on where the light hit it, would affect the color. So we would get that same kind of effect that they had on the practical model in the digital model ...

Even though this technology is all fictitious, we spend a lot of time talking about it and trying to make sense out it so that when you're doing something on the ship, like putting a door in or something like that, it sort of makes sense. We'll spend a lot of time going around and around looking at it and trying to work out what you would expect to see. Even though it's all fictitious, what would you really want to see?

Did something in particular inspire you to create the newest Enterprise?

Goodson: A lot of it was going back to the older ships and drawing inspiration from those to kind of bridge the gap for continuity, because it's a whole new vision of Star Trek, but at the same time you want to bring some of those older elements into it, because Star Trek's been around for over 40 years now. You just want to preserve some of that look integrated in with the new thing. I think that was the driving thing for me, was just being able to pull the old stuff in with the new and connect them together.

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Big Reaction To New Enterprise - New Designer Responds

The new USS Enterprise released yesterday has spawned dozens if not hundreds of articles across the globe in the mainstream press and the geekosphere. Reaction here at TrekMovie has been running at one comment every 49 seconds for 24 hours straight. In that deluge are a few notables, including former Star Trek designer Rick Sternbach and the designer of the new ship, Ryan Church.

Sternbach and Church on the new E
Rick Sternbach was a senior illustrator and designer for the Trek franchise going all the way back to star Trek The Motion Picture, working mostly on the TV series in the TNG era (Next Gen, DS9 and Voyager). He designed dozens of Trek ships and stations, including Deep Space Nine, the Klingon Vor’cha battle cruise, the USS Voyager, and the USS Enterprise C.

I get the distinct impression that to do the nacelles and secondary hull, someone stared at the USS Pasteur for a while. Just a thought. But even the Pasteur’s Bussard collectors had line of sight to open space, which the nacelles on this new ship don’t seem to have. Perhaps the designers didn’t know exactly how the different hardware bits worked (I violated this rule a little here and there, but I knew when I was doing it). Now I’m not being a whiner, just an informed critic. There’s room in this Trek world for healthy design criticism, as well as simply sitting back and enjoying a well made SF film. I -hope- the film is well written and clever and has good proportions of action, humor, tech, etc. but I’m also prepared to analyze the design work to see, perhaps, how far the shapes and colors and functions stray from 40 years of evolved gear.

This and the many other comments got the notice of the designer of the new Enterprise, Ryan Church, who has worked on the Star Wars prequels, the Transformers movies and the new James Cameron film Avatar. Church wrote in the TrekMovie comments:

I’m not going to get involved in the mud slinging, here, but needed to assure you guys and gals: we’ve built you a fine ship. To clarify: there’s a slight optical illusion occurring here, consequence of the “camera” angle. For Rick and others who worry the nacelles don’t have a clear line of sight over the disc — they, in fact, do. We were hardly working in a vacuum. I raided ILM reference photos like a madman. We were deferential to “inviolates” of Star Trek design vocabulary. Additionally, the profile here isn’t 100% representative, because, as you’ve noticed, the Bussards are dimmed. The true profile of the nacelles may or may not be revealed here, and that’s all I’ll say.

Sternbach replied back, noting that he has since had a chance to see a new angle of the Enterprise (lucky Rick!)

I went back and checked the Bussard clearance, and yeah, it works. I’ve seen a port side ortho[graphic] elevation, and I don’t have a problem with the mechanics of it, it’s the proportions and flows of the basic parts that look odd to me. Granted, no ship ever looks perfect in every ortho view, nor in every perspective view. We who have done this stuff in our sleep know that most vehicle and prop designs have their “best” faces. I’m not going to bore people with excerpts from my classical art and architecture books, though I will probably thumb through them here just to see if I can glean anything relevant. Like I said, I’ll wait to see how the film looks as a whole effort.

Which all just goes to show you that even the pros can take different views and even modify their views, especially when given more information. So far we have only two views of the new Enterprise and we have yet to see it in motion, that is worth considering.

Fan comparisons and mods
One of the great things about TrekMovie.com is our community of Trekkies and their creativity. Here are some comparison and modification images from our members (click to enlarge).

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And this for a little fun
The current poll shows that fans are split on the new Enterprise, with a bit over half ‘loving it’ or ‘mostly liking it.’ Although less than 1 out of 5 are voting that they don’t like it, it appears that some of that group are quite vocal to be sure. Our pal Spockboy Paul also put together this little video that encapsulates some of those fans reaction to the new Enterprise

http://www.youtube.com/v/E8B1GNCSfX0

Note on new image: it is not in the trailer
The new image released this week of the USS Enterprise is not a shot from the trailer. The Enterprise is seen clearly in the trailer being constructed and also going to warp. It may also be seen briefly in some of the quick cut battle scenes, but the specific shot released yesterday from Paramount is from a different point in the film.

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