BEHIND-THE-SCENES : [SCORPION]
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David Livingston, director

David Livingston: That was fun, because we got to deal with CGI figures. Star Trek had not always been on the cutting edge of CGI technology. They continued to use real models and shoot motion control shots etc. And when it got to [Scorpion] there was no choice but to create a CGI model. We couldn't do something realistic.

The artists and the post-production people created this terrifying creature that you see sort of at the end of [Scorpion]. It was kind of played a little bit like 'Alien', you know. You don't really get a huge look at it, which to me is always the best way to portray these things. You look at them too long and too closely they start to fall apart a bit.

designing using a computer

SPECIES 8472 INDEX includes behind-the-scenes articles on building and designing Species 8472

Dan Curry: In the episode [Scorpion], which was when the crew of Voyager first encounters Species 8472, a tripod species, they are poking around on the alien ship and find a pile of dead Borg bodies. And we didn't have the budget or the time to create full-scale body chunks because of the cost and the time it would take to do that.

Dan Curry, visual effects producer

So I asked our licensing department for a bunch of Borg toy action figures which are about that big [indicates with hand gesture, see picture].

Curry indicates the height of the Borg toy action figures

And kudos to the person who sculpted those toys because the detail, especially the facial detail, was so good that I was able to take the toy action figures, cut them up with a Dremel cutting tool, and then I stacked them up with hot glue and shot them at home against a little blue screen. And then the actors knew where to look on stage, so that they would walk around and say: "Ok, it's over there."

And then by compositing the stack of action figures it looked very real, and the toys' faces were sculpted so well that I was able to do close-ups on a head that big, filling the tv screen with it, and it looked very good. Of course, it was in a kind of smoky environment. So the toys served us well and saved the production company lots of money.

[Scorpion]

extracts from [Scorpion] script