BIRTH OF EDEN

One of the new company's most important assets was its relationship with [Star Trek: Voyager]. Six years earlier, when he was working at Amblin Imaging, John had helped build the CG model of USS Voyager and persuaded Star Trek's VFX (visual special effects) team that computer effects were an essential part of the show's future. After producing VFX shots for [Star Trek: Deep Space 9], Digital Muse had moved on to [Star Trek: Voyager], where they shared the workload with Foundation Imaging. Work was just about to start on [Star Trek: Voyager]'s seventh and final season when Muse fell apart, and John knew that Eden FX had to move fast to fill the gap.

John Gross: "We were up just in time to start the season. We started on [Production number] 248, 'Imperfection,' (episode number #148) which was a fairly decent-sized show in terms of effects. Some of the guys started working on stuff out of their homes, then, once we had the equipment in here, we got our render farm in and started rendering and delivering right away."

MODEL LIBRARY

Luckily things were fairly easy because Paramount, not Muse, owned all the computer models that had been produced for Star Trek. Eden's team were able to simply copy the models on to their new server while Paramount ordered Muse to delete the original files. The models are an invaluable resource; one of the advantages of computer graphics is that a CG artist can take a model and make it radically different by manipulating it. This is far cheaper than altering a practical model and as a result new alien ships have now become a regular feature of [Star Trek: Voyager]. John says that in order to make [Voyager's] VFX supervisor Ronald B. Moore's job easier they have made up a catalogue of the models so he can see what he has to work with.
"We create books for the Star Trek people so they can see the models and say, 'OK, take the Akritirian, but let's change it to blue and let's modify the pointy things on the front.' One of the things we don't have, which we want to do, is one for planets and space nebulas and the gravity wells and things like that. And environments: we've built the Jefferies tube, the corridor, the turbolift, all that kind of stuff."

The list of models continues to grow as Eden and Foundation Imaging build more and more ships. Sometimes these are completely new, such as the Hirogen Dreadnought, which debuted in [Flesh and Blood], (Behind-the-scenes: Designing Hirogen Ships) and once in a while Eden or Foundation find themselves creating a CG version of an old practical model. This happened on [Inside Man] when Eden built the first CG model of the Ferengi Marauder, first seen as a physical model in [TNG Season 1: The Last Outpost]. Ron Moore had the original model shipped up to them for reference, and weeks after the show had finished it could still be found sitting in a crate in their kitchen.

WORKING PROCEDURES

Ron works with Eden in exactly the same way he did with Muse. The first thing that happens is that he, and perhaps his boss Dan Curry, drops in with the list of shots required for the next show. Ron will provide Eden with the exact length of the shots he wants, not just in seconds but down to the last frame, and offer some suggestions about what he would like to see. From this point on, Eden's end of things is run by one of two supervisors, David Lombardi, who had the same job at Muse, and Fred Pienkos, who stepped up to the role when he joined Eden.
David Lombardi: "Ron is a wonderful client, and Dan as well. Both of them are very knowledgeable and very willing to sit down with us. They're also willing to do something most clients don't do, which is give us flexibility. There's a fine line in our work between being a CG artist and a CG operator. There are people who are artists, but the work they're doing is operating; the client is giving them absolutely every piece of information about what they have to do, down to almost the button push, which can be frustrating. It's one thing to work an 80-hour week when the client is telling you exactly what to do; it's another thing where you're designing your own shot. You're willing to do it, and with a smile on your face. That's what we get working with those guys. Sometimes, Ron will have a very specific idea of what he wants to see in the shot and he puts it down, but 90% of the time he says, 'Here's the script, here's the action that needs to happen, this is the story we're trying to tell; you figure out what you want to do.'"

Next, the supervisor and his team work out how the camera should move. To do this they produce animatics. Animatics is the term in the industry for simple animations with low-resolution models that show how the shot will be composed and how the camera will move. This gives everyone a chance to agree on what they are doing before Eden expend the effort needed to render out high-resolution versions of the shot, and it can lead to some important changes.
David: "Ron might have said, 'We think about four seconds for the shot.' If we start out early enough we may say, 'You know what? It needs six.' Or perhaps it only needs two and he'll change the edit. He trusts ourjudgment as long as we show him something."

PRODUCING THE 'ANOMALY OF THE WEEK'

John adds that it is also important to get going on the R&D process at an early stage. Modifying ships may be easy, but many episodes of [Star Trek: Voyager] also require an 'anomaly of the week', which has to be completely unlike anything seen before.
John: "Oftentimes, Ron and Dan will come to us and say, 'This is kind of what we're looking for. We really want something new and exciting. It can't look like this, because we've done that a thousand times.' Then we'll start the R&D process and sometimes it goes quick, sometimes it doesn't. For 254 [Flesh and Blood] we started R&D on the nebula early, and that went really well. We were able to get some stuff out that they liked right away, whereas the gravity well stuff in 252 [Inside Man] took a lot of R&D."
(The spatial anomaly in [Inside Man] is actually a geodesic fold. He is confusing it with [#107 Gravity] which features the phenomenon called a gravity well or gravity sinkhole.)

EXPERT ADVICE

When it comes to designing these kinds of effects, Ron and Dan are an invaluable resource. As John explains, the effect may be computer-generated but it often uses practical elements that the modelers have 'painted in'.
John: "Dan Curry has a lot of great shots of liquid nitrogen that they've used for years and years, (there is information about liquid nitrogen effects in the PERSONAL LOG entry for [Season 5: #103 Thirty Days]) so we'll take those because they have some really nice motions. We'll do whatever it takes; for [Critical Care] we went out and shot cloud footage and painted that in. There's nothing as real as reality, and if we can use it we will. The explosion elements are all shot explosions that we map in there because they look more real than CG explosions."

the Dinaal cityscape with (the lefthand part of) the hospital ship in the clouds above. [#151 Critical Care]

When they're developing the look for something new, like the Kraylor cloaking effect in [#154 Nightingale], Eden will normally come up with several different looks for the effect.
John: "If you just show them one thing they'll say, 'Well, we don't like that. What else do you have?' So if we show them two or three different things, they'll say 'I really like the edging on that, and the colour of that one.' It gives us the feedback that we need to make it work. Then we do a couple more. Eventually one thing comes out at the end."

LEARNING

For something really difficult or unusual, Ron or Dan will often visit Eden and to help work out exactly how something should look.
David: "[Critical Care] Dan and I sat down for a solid day going over atmospheric haze and how the lighting should work in an environment; the final shots were beautiful because of that. I had a pretty good idea to begin with, but not to the detail that he knew. It's very nice because we are a younger generation in the effects industry and these guys came through being camera assistants and getting into the nitty gritty of positioning cameras, lights, and everything else. [They have] years of visual effects experience; a lot of us come from design backgrounds, some film school, some computer graphics, but none of us have visual effects training. We understand the digital part of it because we've immersed ourselves in it, but it's great sitting with these guys going over exposure, lens bloom, and stuff like that. It's a learning experience for both of us, because we can explain what we can do with the available tools."

MATTE PAINTINGS

Sometimes Eden will work even more closely with Dan or Ron. In [#154 Nightingale] they added a CG model of Voyager to a matte painting to represent the ship landed on a planet surface undergoing a major maintenance overhaul.
John: "We saw Voyager on the surface with the nacelle taken apart. There are little platforms with workers floating around, which are all digital. For something like that Dan Curry paints a 3D matte, then we just put the digital Voyager in there. [Then we'll] add shadows and stuff. We'll also have some foreground elements, so as we go past the ship there might be some rocks or something which all tie into a 3D environment."

Eden produce simple animations, called animatics, to work out how the camera will move in a given shot. In [#154 Nightingale], for footage of Voyager undergoing maintenance on a planet surface, they used a detailed model of Voyager because it already existed, and untextured blocks to represent the mountains they knew would be there in the final shot. The mountains and other background would be inserted onto the plain blue backdrop - this is the technique known as bluescreen. The animatics were then approved by Ronald B. Moore, one of the VFX supervisors for [Star Trek: Voyager].


[#154 Nightingale]
In the final shot, the CG model of Voyager was added in a matte painting created by Dan Curry. Eden also made the CG models of the shuttlecraft and of the people who can be seen repairing the ship's warp nacelles.

A shot like this can be put together in a very similar way to a traditional visual effect. In the days of model photography, a ship would be filmed several times in a number of different passes. Each pass (or element) would capture a different aspect of the image; one would capture the basic shape, another the lights, yet another the shadow that the ship casts, and so on. This is not necessary in CG animation because the computer can 'draw' all these different elements at once, but Eden normally render their shots out as different elements even if Ron has not asked them to.
John: "We generally render in different layers. They'll have a key pass, and a ship pass, and a star pass, and a planet pass. Even if we're compositing, we'll still render it out in layers but we'll just ship them the final."
This was something they started doing when they were working on [Star Trek: DS9], the series previous to [Star Trek: Voyager], giving them the chance to match with CG technology what had been done in [Star Trek: Deep Space 9]'s editing bay, and also the opportunity to learn how that show did the lighting.

See also about non-Eden FX matte paintings: Behind-the-scenes: STARTING THE SERIES: [Caretaker] Matte Paintings.

SAVING TIME

Creative considerations aside, Eden soon discovered that working this way had some major advantages. During the course of an episode most VFX shots need to be changed in some way. Often the changes are relatively subtle. For example, the stars may not look quite right or the highlights on a ship may be too bright. If the shot has been broken down into different elements, Eden will probably only have to change one element, which can save a lot of time.
David: "The elements themselves render pretty fast. The advantage is that a lot of the corrections we need to make are to an element and that's where it saves us time. Say they don't like the direction of a key light: that's only one element of five. That's an easy fix." Helping out In most cases, Eden will combine the elements themselves. In fact, they have also found themselves taking on some of [Star Trek: Voyager]'s other compositing work.
John: "Sometimes we've done a lot of animation sequences. For 252 [Inside Man] we did a lot of the phaser beams because it was a specific effect that had to work with the gravity well." (The spatial anomaly in [Inside Man] is actually a geodesic fold. He is confusing it with [#107 Gravity] which features the phenomenon called a gravity well or gravity sinkhole.) It is more efficient for Eden to do that kind of work, instead of senior supervisors, as it can save them four or five hours.

At the time of ST:M's interview, Eden were approaching the midpoint of the season, and were looking forward to moving into more permanent headquarters. Work was progressing on the holographic image of B'Elanna's child in [Lineage] and the team were looking forward to the challenges of February sweeps and the season finale. They expect to share the work for those with Foundation Imaging. And when all that is done they've already started thinking about possibilities for the fifth Star Trek series [Enterprise].

SUMMARY BY JOHN GROSS