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[HOPE AND FEAR] : BEHIND-THE-SCENESPost-production: visual effects |
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Dan Curry, visual effects supervisor: "Time is television's greatest enemy so we have to make quick decisions and move fast. So we limit storyboards to where they are an important tool in helping to find the way to tell that story with images. We only storyboard things that are technically difficult or critical. Say, in [Voyager], there was a phaser-shooting contest between Seven of Nine and Captain Janeway. Because they were shooting at things that didn't exist and nobody really knew what people were pointing at. Storyboarding it meant we could efficiently do the principal photography to make that sequence work." pop-up: storyboard excerpts 254Kb
below: temporary post-production sequence of pictures from the game of Velocity:
below: end result, screenshots from the episode from the game of Velocity:
By 27th April 1998 Ronald B. Moore has been working in the compositing bay at special-effects company Digital Magic for a week. On 27th April he is completing his work on the opticals (visual effects shots) for [One] and hoping to finish today, while Senior Visual Effects Compositor Paul Hill is working on [Hope and Fear]. Forty miles north, Foundation Imaging has partly completed rendering the visual effects shots for [Hope and Fear], but the shots they have completed or almost completed are already in the computer files here at Digital Magic. Mojo regularly delivers the information via the Internet using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. An FTP program is a common method of transferring files onto or across the Internet. Ronald B. Moore has to complete all the optical shots for [Hope and Fear" by 30th April, i.e. within three days. The visual effects include Voyager and/or the Dauntless racing through the quantum slipstream.
Visual Effects Co-ordinator Elizabeth Castro lays a stapled manuscript next to Ron Moore's keyboard. Even though an image from [One] is on his screen, he is also discussing [Hope and Fear] on the phone with Dan Curry who is at the Paramount lot directing second unit photography for an episode of [DS9]. Ron Moore looks at the manuscript on which short scene descriptions are listed next to scene numbers, frame numbers, and time-codes. He is looking for blank spaces as these tell him exactly which shots he has or has not completed.
Ron Moore: "For Scene 97, we enhanced some energy discharges on Seven of Nine by digitally compositing squibs (stock footage of small explosions that Dan Curry and Ron Moore photographed years earlier) onto the practical sparks (the ones shot on the stage). There are two shots in the scene, so I used the squibs to bridge the cut. It ties the two together."
The next visual effects shot is Scene 99, a six second shot with Voyager careering towards the Dauntless. Mojo at Foundation Imaging cannot finish them yet as he did not find out what the ship looks like until several days ago. They will have two days to do all the shots involving the Dauntless. In another office, artist Greg Rainoff is animating the phaser fire for Scene 101, but he already has the torpedo element for Scene 99 prepared.
Ron Moore: "We have Janeway doing a beam-out in Scene 101. The transporter element was developed by Dan Curry back with the pilot. We do a fade and add the element on top of it. It's pretty standard, but this one is a little different because we cut to do an animated shot of Arturis's phaser fire." As Arturis' weapon is of course alien, he has decided to animate his phaser fire in a non-Starfleet color. "We picked up the orange motif of the Dauntless (used on the bridge). I like to do things like that when I can, because it just adds to the flavor of the show."
 | Janeway tells Arturis, "Come with us. It's not too late." The transporter beam starts to take her. |
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| "It is for you!" cries Arturis, but he fires his weapon too late. Janeway has been beamed to Voyager. | |
Ron Moore: "Now, Scene 103. Whooee. There was a whole lot of talk about that one. The script says that Voyager does a U-turn in the slipstream. I never thought it was going to look good, and Dan and I didn't want to do that, and instead we wanted to have the ship break out into normal space. But Rick Berman sent a note saying he wanted it to turn around in the slipstream." He asks Paul Hill to put up Scene 103 on the monitor. Voyager chases a bland-coloured temporary image of the Dauntless, but the slipstream effect is there. "Finally, I figured out what the effect needed to look like. I explained to Foundation that I wanted them to essentially lay two dimes on top of each other and then move the top one to the right and see what happens. Now there's a double exposure of the slipstream, then one veers to the right and Voyager takes this hard, knife-edged right turn into it. Well, we're almost finished with it, and it looks a heck of a lot better than if we'd followed our initial instinct."
Elizabeth Castro: "The average Voyager show has about forty optical shots. And one show only had twelve. [Hope and Fear] has seventy. And that's not counting the stock shots."
On 30th April, the deadline date, Peter Lauritson supervises while the editors cut the visual effects into the show, in what is termed the optical on-line session. When they finish, the show is "locked" i.e. completed.....except for the audio tracks.
What the final version looks like in the finished tv episode:
 Voyager in the slipstream, firing torpedoes. |
 Voyager veers off to the right, in another direction from Arturis' ship. |
 USS Voyager, in flight in the quantum slipstream, fires torpedoes at Arturis' ship and scores a direct hit. (pop-up window) |
Credits:
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