BEHIND-THE-SCENES: [#162 AND #163 WORKFORCE]

screenshots are from [#162 and #162 Workforce]

VISUAL EFFECTS

words are by Dan Curry

[#162 and #163 Workforce] is one of my favourite episodes of the Season which entailed our crew being kidnapped and brainwashed by people who needed high-tech workers in a great industrial society. And it entailed doing a lot of shots to create this city, the world of the workforce.

The opening shot was very interesting because we had to show the elegant downtown area where the elite class of the society lived, and do a camera move over to the more industrial area where the workers lived. So we came up with the idea of using a fully CG environment and we follow a train crossing a river and it arrives at the station where our crewmembers get off the train and begin the day's work.

And at the studios here there is a large sky-cyc, but on the back of the sky-cyc are some very industrial girder-like structures and a big outdoor staircase, and we had the idea that if we shoot that staircase as a locked down camera move and ask our people to descend the stairs, they would look like they were getting off the train.

So in that opening shot which is very elaborate, the only real element in the shot is the last moment where we arrive at the back of the sky-cyc and see everybody descend the stairs.

the only real architectural element of the opening sequence

Then David Morton at Foundation Imaging at the time did some wonderful matte shots of buildings and so we get to see the city.

matte painting of the city's main power distribution plant, where Janeway and the kidnapped Voyager crew work

But my favourite shot is one that was my homage to one of the reasons that I'm working in this field today, which is the great MGM production of 'Forbidden Planet'. In 'Forbidden Planet', Leslie Nielsen as the space captain comes upon an almost abandoned planet where there's the ruins of the city of the Krell, a structure that we never see what they look like. There's this wonderful underground world filled with great technology, and I remember as a kid seeing 'Forbidden Planet' and I began to realise: "Well, that's not real, but it looks real," and movies are a medium that you can create that kind of reality which can't happen in any other way, and that was one of the reasons I decided to get into visual effects. And there's a great shot in 'Forbidden Planet' where we look downward and see this huge depth of the shaft in the city of the Krell and see Krell and you see lightning moving up and all these huge devices. And I thought: "That's the kind of shot we need."

the shot, which includes large moving machinery, which Dan Curry and his team put into [#162 and #163 Workforce] - this introduces the scene where Chakotay begins work at the plant

sketch of shaft

click to enlarge, 104Kb - more detailed sketch of shaft

We photographed Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway and some background artists as generic alien workers on a blue screen pointing down, then with tape marked off where everything would be. And John Teska (of Foundation Imaging), one of our wonderful animators, created this three-dimensional CG environment for us. So Kate steps onto this elevator and then we were able, in the digital world, make it look like the elevator was descending by taking a chunk of the floor and reducing it down, and on the way down the elevator morphs into the CG environment including the people, so when you see them get off the elevator at the bottom of their descent they're actually fully CG in a fully CG environment.

Janeway and the aliens are real at this point but.....

.....when they disembark, it is a fully CG environment including the people

Even though it may appear the camera is moving in that shot, it really isn't. It's a synthetic camera move made after the fact, once the real portion of the shot is composited, or put together, with the CG portion of the shot.

Source: ST DVD