THE BADLANDS

André Bormanis, [Star Trek Voyager]'s science consultant (and author of several [Star Trek Voyager] episodes) explains the concept and why the name Badlands was chosen: I don't know if that term has ever been used specifically with respect to some astronomical phenomenon, but one could imagine regions of space that would be extremely inhospitable to human exploration. We see things like this in images that comes from telescopes like the Hubble all the time - regions of space where you have fierce stellar winds. Most people assume that space is a vacuum, space is empty, well in fact, in between the stars it is mostly vacuum but there are a lot of regions in space where there a lot of gas and dust complexes, some of it quite dense, some of it dominated by very fierce stellar winds that travel at millions of kilometres an hour. There are shockwaves in space, ionised particles, all sorts of radiation fields. There are places where stars are born, for examples - stellar nurseries where the stars are cocooned in these thick blankets of molecules and dust particles, and they're invisible, they're opaque to visible light. So there are some really extraordinary regions in space that one would be a little bit reckless or foolhardy to fly a spaceship through, even something that has the kind of shielding and engine technology that we proposed on Star Trek and, again, it's easy to imagine that some day when there's interstellar travel and they're navigating some of these regions of space that they might call some particular nebula complex or some place where there are these fierce stellar winds a 'badlands' kind of a region.

Six examples of real space given by Bormanis: (You can download wallpapers of USS Voyager in real space, not necessarily these examples, at WALLPAPERS: subsection 'Voyager in Real Space'.)

The Badlands visual effect was formed using a combination of CGI for the background images. Other elements employ the use of liquid nitrogen and compositing - see BEHIND-THE-SCENES: Liquid Nitrogen. Dan Curry: We shot a lot of liquid nitrogen elements that we then gave to Amblin Imaging; they assembled them into layers and that became one of the building blocks of the Badlands sequence.

From the Badlands sequence:

[#1 and #2 Caretaker] the Maquis raider flees the Cardassian starship

[#1 and #2 Caretaker] the Cardassian ship is hit by a plasma storm

Dan Curry: The pilot of [Star Trek Voyager] required something called the Badlands which was an area of plasma storms so what we decided to was mix the CG technology and traditional technology. We had elements of fields of liquid nitrogen photographed over black velvet, and we thought it would be interesting to kind of synthetically build them in virtual-force perspective. And then we had these tornadoes of fire that were then created by computer-generated technology, it was computer animation, and it also combined motion controlled ships which we then needed to do several passes so that the interactive light when it first went by one of these tornadoes of fire would look more convincing. So at that time we were working with Amblin Imaging and they put together the Badland shots, partially with elements that we had already photographed on 35mm motion picture film then transferred and made available as computer data, and stuff that was generated directly in the computer. And then later on in the edit bay we composite in the ships, and using the tornadoes and other aspects as separate elements that we were able to use them almost as if we'd been compositing the motion control elements, the ships could fly in and around them.

Dan Curry sketched out his ideas.

the handwriting in the top right reads "generally like a starfield"

Dan Curry made a series of sketches, known as a storyboard. This detailed the effects, camera angles and camera movements to be used in filming. Click the image numbers below to see the selection displayed by Dan Curry in his interview.

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With motion-control footage of USS Voyager composited with those background images, the result looks as if the entire scene was filmed at the same time.

See also Slideshow: 14 screenshots from the Badlands sequence.