BEHIND-THE-SCENES: [#145 THE HAUNTING OF DECK TWELVE]

VISUAL EFFECTS

screenshots are from [#145 The Haunting Of Deck Twelve]

Ron B. Moore, visual effects supervisor

It was really scary, because it had to do with smoke that's floating through the ship and trapping people. That's very very difficult. They had talked a lot about trying to shoot it with practical smoke, but you can't colour the stuff. Every time you start putting colour in it, it starts to become poisonouse. For some reason, they get real snickerty about that! Then they went to the idea of maybe doing a little bit of practical smoke and a little big of CG. And we're like: No." My boss (Peter Lauritson) especially, because he's been through that on the last picture or two. The only way to do it right is to go 100 per cent CG, which is real scary.

below 5 pictures: what is later determined to be an alien lifeform appears in cargo bay 2 and attacks Seven

Ronald Moore: Dan (Curry, visual effects producer) worked a lot with me on this episode. We spent a lot of time at Digital Muse, and I have got to tell you, from the very first time they showed us the tests, it was just fantastic. We knew it was going to work. The smoke stuff they had looked believable. Then it became a problem getting all of the elements. For me, it was just a quesion of sitting back, keeping my mouth shut, and handling all these pieces to the editor Paul (Hill) and hoping we were right. He made it work - they never just fit in, they need a lot of finessing.

Bruce Banit at Digital Muse, on the fact that Digital Muse did not possess the software required to make the smoke look so realistic: We had probably about 30 shots that called for smoke to be added to live action footage, and they wanted the smoke to do specific things. We were faced with the task of finding a way to animate the smoke for that many shots. There's several different methods. There's the true 3D method, where basically you build an animate particle system. We did that for a shot in [#121 Equinox, Part Two]. Then there's another method based on what's called sprites, where, instead of actually figuring out the three-dimensionality of it, you put small pictures of smoke in and you layer thousands and thousands of them together to start creating a realistic smoke volume. A similar thing was used for the tornadoes in 'Twister' (a film). We used a program called Illusion that virtually allows us to interactively paint smoke nto each shot in real time and be able to adjust its colour, density and behaviour, as per Star Trek's needs.