Teh PW
Self Impossed Exile (This Space for rent)
Member # 1203
posted
quote:Originally posted by Mark Nguyen: Okay, here's a fun one. We're spreading the word of our project around, in search of modellers, etc. Here's one message we got back:
"i've been thinking about this project a bit, and i have a real annoying question for you:
how is watching 39 ships getting effortlessly destroyed by a big cube going to be entertaining to anyone but the creators?
i understand the enjoyment, skill and tallent that will be involved in creating those ships, but, really...
why?
you'll ultimately need to answer this question to get the kind of support you'll need."
I've got my answer - part "it hasn't been done", part "it's ITCHING to be done", and part "like Pearl Harbor, as a tragic battle it has many dramatic possibilities beyond a crappy Michael Bay movie". As a point of conversation, what would YOU say? Given the tools and the time, why would you want to create such a film?
Mark
is it possible to get live action acting help too? between Exeter, TOS:NV and HF, someone could help to flash out the story...
Registered: Jan 2004
| IP: Logged
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
Chicks.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
Registered: Jun 2000
| IP: Logged
posted
I think there is maybe a slight point, though, in that the whole narrative, you know, thrust of the event, as it were, is dependant on it being totally one-sided and brutally quick.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
We know it was over quickly, but do we know how long the battle took? On a related note, do we know approximately how long the end product of the project will be?
And to answer Mark's POC: I think lopsided battles are fascinating to watch. (Like when Don Johnson pulls on the calfskin gloves and proceeds to beat the living snot out of William Sadler in The Hot Spot.)
No, but like it would be great to see Admiral Hanson's great plan with the primary defense and flanking force and then all that thinking just completely going to shit with cutting beams. And the lines being broken, ne julienned, and some crews foolishly/bravely preservering and then panicked, hopeless retreat...blah, blah, blah. Just the mechanics of that would be cool to see, but I do suspect to really sell it you'd need some sort of live-action, human element going on to make us care about everyone getting all blowed up. Oh, but there's definitely a cool story in there.
Registered: Sep 2000
| IP: Logged
posted
It would be amazing if the Cube never completely stopped moving toward Earth during the entire fight (this is not completely contradicted by Emissary- it would have been at impulse) and just swatted the starships as they arrived- leaving no real chance for a coordinated attack like in First Contact.
Also, attacks from "above" and "Below" the cube would be cool.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
Live action elements wouldn't just be necessary to make us care about what was happening, I think they'd be necessary to tell us what was happening.
If you watched the battle from The Emissary without the live action parts I suspect you'd have a lot of snazzy effects, but all the ships wizzing around wouldn't really mean much. You wouldn't have any clue what their plan was, or what that funny blue beam coming from a deflector was meant to achieve, or why some ships are grouping together in a particular formation, etc.
In the case that you do decide to use live action, it might be worth contacting seanr about his CGI bridge modules.
posted
You guys are correct, it simply wouldn't do to have just straight CG for this project without some sort of human narrative to it. However, personally I'm wary of incorporating true fanfilm live action - all credit where it's due for trying, but I've not yet seen a fan live action piece that is sufficiently convincing in the TNG era. One reason fan films have stuck to the TOS era is that it's so much easier to create convincing sets, props and effects... I'd see the same here.
While I (as director) have not ruled any live-action component out as yet, my idea revolves around instead creating a narrative mostly through background fleet chatter. Remember the haunting scene in "First Contact" which had the initial battle played out IN WORDS ONLY, and the effect seen on the faces of the bridge crew? That's what I have in mind, and we'll need the help of fans like yourselves to create that chatter. From readiness reports to damage reports, from the sounds of confident men and women charging into battle to the sounds of people dying and being assimilated, that's the way I want to principally create this story, to work around the CG shots of starships doing their thing. This allows us to incorporate existing audio clips of the Saratoga and Admiral Hanson, which will give the product some air of legitimacy.
Additionally, a prologue to the film could be some 3D LCARS graphics laying out Hanson's original battle plan (perhaps the original presentation transmitted to each ship in the fleet before the fight?), letting viewers know what to expect - and how it goes to hell in very short order. Most fandom discussion accepts that the battle begins with the Saratoga's group as the first of several "waves" of ships. There's plenty of room in this fight for other squadrons of ships to attack from different angles and with different plans.
As for how long the battle lasts (and as such, how long the product will be), do a search for "Wolf 359" on Flare for some answers. The beauty of this forum is that there has been a LOOOOOT of Wolf 359 disucssion here over the years, which will form much of the body of knowledge from which the script will be written.
posted
You could always have the live action stuff re-enacted by The Bunnies.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
What if the whole thing is framed as a historical record or an actual set of recordings and telemetry from the battle. It might make the scenes more interesting if they're don in a Galactica/Firefly style on 'in universe' camera shots & POVs. That could give you an excuse to slip in some LCARS animations and an excuse not to show the crews. You could even throw in some gun camera overlays to give it that authentic news footage feel.
P.S. From a dramatic point of view, it's better if the Endeavor was present and did survive. Remember Hanson had already called the retreat before his transmission was cut off and by the time the Enterprise was on the scene all the lifeboat had already gone (otherwise you'd think they'd make some effort to look for survivors.) But that's just my opinion.
posted
We've made allowances for that - but it wasn't the Endeavor. I'm perfectly happy assuming that Amisov and crew ran into the Borg somewhere else and survived.
posted
Some of the assumptions we're running with:
-We will account for BOTH Melbournes, and assume the production error was just that. Timo, we might just use your NCC number. The Excelsior Melbourne will have a special mission assigned to it, to explain why it wasn't firing anything despite being first in line to be wrecked.
-Hanson's flagship will likely be the OTHER Melbourne (as it was waiting for a CO), one of the other Excelsiors, or possibly the Princeton (where one of Hanson's adjuncts is based in the script). These were the largest ships known to be there. We won't be putting any Galaxies at Wolf 359, and probably no more ships as large as the Princeton, Bellerophon, Melbourne or Yamaguchi.
-There were Klingons there, in addition to the forty Federation ships. The 39/11K numbers will include them, so we will assume that more than one ship was "adrift but salvageable" at the end of the day. 'Cuz if you think about it, more than one of the wrecks seen were pretty intact.
-We will plop an Akira or a Steamrunner in there too, just to twist the tails of anyone who doesn't think that NCC numbers are sequential in TNG.
-We will account for how the assimilees (and possibly the queen) got off the ship after the battle. It won't be an assimilated ship, but it won't be a sphere, as this cube didn't have a big door to eject one like the "First Contact" cube did.
-The current draft of the script includes nods to Peter David's Borg novel "Vendetta" (the only one of his books I actually liked), as well as to the work that Mojo and I did on "Unseen Frontier", which was going to have a whole chapter on W359.
posted
Vendetta has the very best description of how the Borg are and how they'd assimilate a world. Not much of real value after that though....the whole idiotic rivaly of Captain Korsmo having to out-do Picard was just awful. No one so obviously unstable could reach command rank.
The Queen does not have to be physically at the battle- her presence is part of the shared collective, so mabye she was only in Picard's mind.... Or, she can easily swap consiousness into waiting bodies in various locations as needed via the collective's sunspace link. They do in on Ghost in The Shell, so why not?
Mabye several assimilated ships clump together into one large vessel and leave that way.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
WizArtist II
"How can you have a yellow alert in Spacedock? "
Member # 1425
posted
Now there's you a modeling challenge...a Borg/Starfleet gestalt.
If I remember right Vendetta introduced the "Big Daddy" version of the planet killer right? If it is , then I remember thinking that would actually be a plausible explanation for the thing to be a Borg Planet Cuisinart.
-------------------- There are 10 types of people in the world...those that understand Binary and those that don't.
Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Really it was very good.
Printer-friendly view of this topic