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[HOPE AND FEAR] : BEHIND-THE-SCENESStarting to build and design Arturis' ship/fake "USS Dauntless" |
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Scans by Janet.
Additional commentary by production staff is in this colour.
On 9th February 1998, although no actual script exists as yet work begins on the episode. Budgets must be prepared, production designs must be submitted for approval, construction materials must be purchased etc. Therefore the department heads rely on the information provided in the beat sheet and on innumerable conversations with the producers, both on the phone and in person.
Richard James, Production Designer: "We start our work from the beat sheet, and the producers keep feeding us their ideas while the script is being written."
Richard James spots the part of the beat sheet that will be most crucial to his department. In deceptively simple terms, it reads:
Thrilling moment as we reach coordinates ... and discover
a sleek, sparkling STARSHIP (which we'll call the
"silver bullet") floating in space. Scans reveal
-- it's a Starfleet vessel!
Fortunately, that is all Richard James needs for his creative mind to start working out what the interior of such a ship would be like. "We have to work in such a fast way. It's not the best way, because without a script there are a lot of unanswered questions, like how many people we will be dealing with and what their entrances and exits will be. The many things that will happen within the space of the set dictate a lot of unknowns."
His usual approach is to begin with a floorplan and to work upward, in "elevations." "We have a limited amount of space on a stage, so we work with what we call 'stage conditions.'" To ascertain the stage conditions, he does a "walk-through," measuring the areas of available floor space on the three stages used by the show. Soon he discovers that the largest unused piece is located on Stage 16, sandwiched between the permanent cave set, "the museum set" (built for the episode [Living Witness] and later modified for [Star Trek: Insurrection]), and a set that is currently under construction for the Voyager episode [One].
After returning to his office, he makes some rough drawings. He gives the sketches to Set Designer Greg Berry. For several of the "silver bullet's" interior sets e.g. corridors, Greg Berry will simply "re-dress" corresponding Voyager sets. But two new sets will need to be built from scratch: the bullet ship's bridge and its engineering room and, from what the producers have told him about two likely story points, the design and construction of those sets will be difficult. For one thing, the fake Starfleet bridge will at some point "instantaneously change" to reveal its true alien nature. In addition, there is the matter of geometry as the beat sheet's description of a bullet-shaped vehicle suggests a curving exterior. The exterior shape has not yet been finalised but logic tells Richard James that the interior sets will need to organically reflect those supposed exterior curves. "The walls of the bridge will curve two ways, which is called a compound curve. Of course, building such walls out of wood is too difficult for the cost and for the short amount of time we have." Instead he decides to design the walls as a series of steel grids built in the proper arc and in the correct radius, and the grids will then be covered with muslin.
Greg Berry, Set Designer: "Muslin on gridwork takes the shape of a compound curve. They can put lights behind the mislin Federation-type colours, like red or blue. Then, when they do the change-over they will switch it to an alien color. Hopefully it'll be a powerful enough change to make us believe that it has become a different ship."
The blueprints of the bridge are still a work in progress but as Greg Berry completes specific aspects of them they are taken to the Special Effects department.
Full picture size 119Kb.
On 16th February the sets are built to the point where they just have to be assembled on stage. Paramount's Special Effects department is located in the Mill, an open floor warehouse-style building which houses the Construction department. For [Hope and Fear] all the wooden structures are the responsibility of the Construction department. Metal work, such as the bullet-ship's grids, is done by the Special Effects department.
Tom Mertz, head of the Special Effects department: "The designer's drawings supply us with the different radius of each grid. They're all at tapering radiuses, so it's pretty sophisticated. We draw full-size layouts on the floor of the Mill and then make forms out of wood." Mertz uses those wooden forms as a pattern to build the grids' ribs out of steel. "We have a programmable computerized metal roller. We feed 20 foot long raw stock steel sticks into it, tell it what radius we want, and roll the steel right over the wooden frame." Then the resulting &#frac34; inch by 1&#frac12; inch rectangular tubes are welded together. "It's kind of like building a boat. We're going with rectangular-shaped tubing because the flat side gives us the width we need to attach the muslin."
The Special Effects crew will screw strips of wood onto the backside of each rib before delivering the steel-grid wall panels to Stage 16. After the panels have been attached to the rest of the assembled set, the plan calls for members of the grip department to staple 800 square feet of muslin to the strips.
Al Smutko, Construction Co-ordinator, bases his work on the beat sheet information.
Al Smutko: "This is the biggest show we've done for Voyager so far. And even on [Star Trek: The Next Generation], except for the pilot, we never did anything this big."I sat down with Richard James and tried to pick his brain. I needed to know what he thinks he'll put up here, because the drawings do not come out fast enough for me to turn in a true budget. I asked Merri (Merri Howard, Co-supervising Producer)) if I could start with something that I know we'll definitely need, like beams. I work with the Art Department as closely as possible; they even ask me which part of the drawing I'll need first."
After getting approval from Merri Howard, Al Smutko starts his construction crew on what is called "pre-production" on the work schedule: assembling the platform that will become the floor of the bridge while he awaits additional blueprint information. There is a cacophony of construction sounds on Stage 16: the whine of electric saws, the rhythmic pounding of hammers hitting broad plyboard sheets; the rumble of a forklift transporting a stack of unusually curved iron grids, and the songs from a portable radio tuned to an oldies station.
Merri Howard: "Scheduling stage use is a little bit of a juggling act. The construction crew has been reporting in at times like 12:06 a.m. or 4.00 a.m., knowing that they'll have at least eight to ten hours before we come onto the set to start filming."
At that moment the episode [One] is shooting on several of the Stages, while construction of the alien ship's bridge is in full swing on Stage 16 and construction of its engineering room begins on Stage 9.
Wendy Drapanas designed the appearance of Arturis' control consoles.
Wendy Drapanas: "I had a rubber band ball that just kept getting bigger, so I did a sketch of it. It looks sort of metaphysical, don't you think? Like it's the brains behind the whole thing. I just started out with that shape and kept building on it, and then Scenic Artist Jim Van Over added the video animation." i.e. the "brains" were rendered using a computer. The design actually appears on the completed set's consoles the other way up.
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