THE USS VOYAGER MODEL

Dan Curry: This is the Voyager. It's our hero ship for the new series. Voyager was designed by Rick Sternbach, under the direction of Richard James our production designer, and it's a five foot model constructed by Tony Meininger to the rigid specifications provided by the design team.

Here are over 50 pictures of the USS Voyager model.

Rick Sternbach, the series' senior illustrator, finished the blueprints for the five-foot Voyager miniature near the end of July 1994. He gave the blueprints to Tony Meininger to build the actual model. During the design process, Dan Curry observed closely because he would be responsible for the motion-control filming at Image G. He was therefore very much involved in the procress, particularly in offering suggestions on the placement of model mounts. Curry wanted to make sure the surface features of the ship were designed with mounts in mind. Since so far we do not have antigravity devices amongst available technology, something has to hold the scale model ships suspended in mid-air during filming, hence the need for mounting brackets. The trick is to place them in such a way as to be unnoticeable by the all-seeing eye of the camera, and this is extra important because Star Trek fans are some of the most observant there are and they are nowadays aided by freeze-frame video recorders. Curry is very inventive in suggesting surface features and concepts to hide the mounting brackets. His ideas often result in a wider choice and greater flexibility of camera angles meaning in turn good camera angles that might not otherwise be available for him to use. That, in its turn, allows him more creativity in the design and filming of the motion-control sequences. Accordingly Curry frequently provides ship-design input to the art departments, particularly in regard to the placement of mounting brackets for the scale models used in motion-control photography.

USS Voyager model - fore view

Source ST Mech

During the third week of October 1994, Tony Meininger delivered the five-foot Voyager model to Andrew Millstein and Tim Stell at Image G, in Studio City, California, USA, who were waiting to begin the motion-control photography. Image G was also scheduled to film other miniatures for the pilot, including the Caretaker's Array, the Maquis ship, and the Kazon battle cruiser. Filming would be done under Dan Curry's direction, although Curry already had an enormous workload due to all the other optical and blue-screen work needed for [#1 and #2 Caretaker]. David Stipes ended up supervising much of the late-night work at the Image G facility (not just on [#1 and #2 Caretaker] but on subsequent episodes). It was partly a matter of insurance that a senior [Star Trek Voyager] direct employee be present during filming at Image G: because visual effects can be filmed weeks after the live action footage, timing and content of the visual effect must be exactly as specified - there is only so much time allocated to it in the master cut. The final videotape^‡ recordings which get distributed to the tv networks must not run over by even a second. In addition, for believability the visual effect must match the live action footage and/or dialogue; if actors react to a visual effect and they do not match, the discrepancy will be glaring.

USS Voyager model - aft view
Source ST Mech

^‡ [Star Trek Voyager] is shot in 35mm film, then transferred to videotape for all the post-production work, and the final finished result is distributed to tv stations by videotape and many by satellite uplink. The videotape aspect comes from [TNG]: it was considered a bold move at the time (1987) when Paramount decided that [TNG] would not be finished with a cut negative but instead while shooting onto 35mm motion film the finished product would be on videotape, and it was Dan Curry's first exposure to video compositing.

Dan Curry: The Voyager hero model was a five foot miniature and one of the things that we did with that is that inside the larger windows we had gone around to the set and taken slides of various sets and then bent them in little arcs like miniature cycloramas inside the window, so in tighter shots of the ship flying by you'd get a sense of perspective shift as the ship moved by, which helped the verisimilitude, rather than just having white backlit windows.

The size of USS Voyager and believability had been a matter of considerable thought. Part of those thought processes are inferred from the memo quoted below. Note that the design drawings that accompanied the memo cannot be identified as they are not given with the source, but they are probably amongst those in BEHIND-THE-SCENES: DESIGNING USS VOYAGER: exterior and interior.

STAR TREK: VOYAGER Technical Memo To: R. Berman   M. Piller   J. Taylor From: R. Sternbach Date: 26 Apr 94 cc: M. Okuda I'd like to get a clarification as to the scale of the Voyager prior to beginning the next phase of the miniature design, that being a preliminary set of drafted plan and elevation views of the ship, necessary to settle on major hull contours, deck lines, and locate surface details.     The accompanying drawings show two possible sizes of the ship, compared to the other Starfleet vessels we've seen. The first pegs the Voyager at about 1,000 feet, similar in length to the 1701-A Enterprise from the features. That ship had a crew compliment [sic.] established around 435.     The second drawing expands the scale to roughly 1,250 feet, halfway between the feature Enterprise and the Excelsior (which is also the Enterprise-B from "Generations"), which supports about 600 crew. Mike Okuda and I both opt for the 1,000 foot version, for two reasons. First, the smaller crew would tend to "fit better" in a ship of that size, especially when one considers that the feature Enterprise held twice as many people. There would then be a more consistent proportion of ship length to crew. Conceptually, 200 people would find a larger Voyager to be rather palatial, when it was assumed that we were looking toward a no-nonsense destroyer or frigate type of vessel. Secondly, we would have a greater opportunity to achieve a true sense of human scale, which we really have never been able to see visually with the 1701-D series Enterprise, a ship we all know was far too big for its own good from the beginning. This human scale would be attained through the use of the windows and Bridge, which automatically will be larger in proportion. In the final 4'-5' miniature, Dan Curry has suggested that we will be able to insert small backlit sets and figures, visible through the windows from the outside. Of course, one of the best uses of scale of the Next Generation's Enterprise was the animated figure in the Obs lounge, only seen in the opening titles. Please let me know what you think.

Dan Curry: New with the Voyager which we didn't have with the Enterprise (the Enterprise-D in [TNG]) was a removable shuttlebay door. And inside, Tony Meininger built a wonderful miniature set, so that for certain shots we can actually fly around and get a look inside there so we know that there's a shuttlebay, so we'll be able to do shots where the doors there, the door is out, then we'd have to put an animated wipe to show the door opening like any roll-top garage, which indeed it is.

Curry demonstrates the removable shuttlebay door

[#3 Parallax]

detail of Voyager model to show the miniature shuttlebay set

detail of the USS Voyager model