We tend to put about double the production value into these final episodes, so in a sense we're doing four episodes in the scope of two in terms of the budget, in terms of the amount of visual effects that are going into it and into the amount of production value on the stage.

Foundation Imaging is a special effects company employed regularly on the show. For [#171 and #172 Endgame], the company was required to produce a substantially larger number of high-quality effects shots on an unusually tight schedule.

Foundation Imaging's visual effects supervisor, Rob Bonchune: The average time we have is three weeks to do an hour segment. In those three weeks we usually do between 12 and 18 effects shots.

Rob Bonchune: I think there were 72 effects shots that involved us, including all the Borg assimilation tubes and everything that John Teska and [compositors] Sherry Hitch and Pam Vick did for the Borg Queen sequences. Most of the crew worked 12- to 16-hour days for almost four weeks. I've never been on any Star Trek episode where there was that kind of output. But if you look at the quality of that final episode, it looked as good as any other episode we did. Considering the number of shots and the time [constraints], Peter Lauritson], Dan [Curry] and Mitch [Suskinj were really accommodating; they gave us leeway to work things out, and without that leeway it would have been a much tougher process. This episode could not have been done if not for everybody agreeing on the look of everything quickly.

Dan Curry: The ultimate confrontation between Captain (he means Admiral) Janeway and the Borg Queen had to be shot in one day, because the show was done, and there was a huge amount of work. And part of the work entailed the Borg Queen falling apart. In order to get different body parts away from Alice (Krige), who was playing the Borg Queen, we put pink stockings on, or pieces or pink tape, so when we wanted to rodoscope - or paint away - that part of her body we would have something that would be clear to see in the dim light and a colour that didn't appear anywhere else on the set which was primarily dark greys and greens and blues.

Dan Curry: There were a couple of moments when the Borg Queen would fall down and have to stand up, and the natural movement when Alice stood up is her arm would kind of shoot across her body to get her balance. One of the critical issues was that we couldn't have Alice's real arm pass in front of her body because it had to be gone, so I would have to stand there and help her up. So it was critical that we prevented her arm going in front so there are moments when Alice would stand up and I would stand next to her out of frame, knowing I would be able to get myself out of the frame by splitting the screen, and help her up, but the real reason was I wanted to make sure her arm didn't cross in front of her body.

Dan Curry: And sometimes she would throw a rubber arm down and, again, John Teska (of Foundation Imaging) was able to track in CG Borg junk kind of sticking out of the stumps as her body was falling apart.

excerpt from the storyboards used in production:

Dan Curry: Both ladies performed admirably. We started early in the morning on Friday and shot until 4 o'clock in the morning on Saturday, and Kate was in extreme old age make-up and Alice was in her Borg Queen make-up, which takes about 6 hours to get in and about 4 hours to get out of. And, despite the fact that toward the end those of us in the crew were getting really tired and flagging and we didn't have all that stuff on, both ladies were remarkable in their stamina and good spirits. So even at 4 o'clock in the morning they were both great, and they had more energy than the rest of us, so the entire crew, myself, were very appreciative of their good spirits and cheer and it kept the rest of us going.

John Teska, who worked on the film [ST: First Contact] in which the Borg Queen's organic components dissolve, and who also worked on Borg Queen effects in [#109 and #110 Dark Frontier] and [#146 and #147 Unimatrix Zero]: It was definitely a challenge, because this time we couldn't just dust off the stuff we had done before. It was a whole new sequence. It was storyboarded originally by Dan Curry, so he and the director [Allan Kroeker] had worked out in advance what they wanted to see. They didn't want that scene to be too driven by the effects. They really wanted to make sure the characters were front and centre. So we slaved on that for quite a little while getting everything to track in exactly right. While I was watching the show, I was more interested in the dramatic theme that was playing out than the fact that her lips were falling off.

Rob Bonchune: And Paramount accepted it pretty much as it was. Mitch [Suskin] was pretty happy with it and Peter [Lauritson] accepted it the first go round. I think Mitch had asked for a slight colour change. I think I had chosen orange, but the blue ended up looking a lot better. So it was a good call on Mitch Suskin's part.

Voyager deploys anti-Borg armour. (pop-up window)

Rob Bonchune: It was really hard to get the look of the inside. We were struggling back and forth, and Mitch [Suskin] contributed some ideas as to what he wanted it to look like, and we got something pretty close at one point, but I still wasn't that satisfied with it. Then one of our animators here, Bob Quinn - without even being asked - spent a morning putting something together, and he just nailed it. Without spending months of research on volume metrics, he nailed a look that was relatively easy to do and had just the right sort of 'foggy' feel to it. He used a nebula background that we had created from a real NASA image, taking sections of it and layering them. I looked at it and said, 'That's it!'

Rob Bonchune: Jarrod Davis worked out that big, huge, evil-looking transwarp hub. This is another case where I was really nervous about the effect beforehand. Looking over the whole episode, it's always hard to tell in advance which effects are going to fly and which aren't. But it turned out really great. Paramount asked for only a minor change; they felt the shot we had done initially was a little too white, so we subdued that a little bit and made it darker.

Rob Bonchune: The Klingon ship was brand new. It was the first time we did the Negh'Var-class cruiser in CGI [computer-generated imagery]. Previously, it had only existed as a practical model. Based on this, we thought that Paramount would defer to the Vorcha-class ship and just say, 'Use the one you have.' But they didn't. They actually said, 'No, we'll pay for it. Build it.' Peter [Lauritson] was insistent on that. So we got the model up here and built [a CGI version of it] just for this episode. Trevor Pierce is the one who built in [in CGI]. He did a wonderful job and took stills of the model. He's built two of the Klingon ships here, and they're both among the best CG models we have. It was nice to have the practical model up here. It was kind of a last hurrah with that, because with the new show, [Enterprise], that's gone. There will be no more practical models. It's all going to be computer graphics.