BEHIND-THE-SCENES : STARFLEET HEADQUARTERS

unless otherwise stated

The Starfleet Headquarters building was originally designed and created for , for the Season 4 episode [Homefront]. The location, the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, was also used in , in the Season 5 episode [#98 In the Flesh], from slightly different angles, and earlier in [TNG: Justice] and [TNG: The First Duty]. (In [#4 Time And Again] part is used to represent the aliens' power plant.)

Starfleet Headquarters, San Francisco, Earth Source: ST:M left picture: [In the Flesh]

Source: ST:M

The Visual Effects department asked the Art Department to design a scale model building. Scenic artist Anthony Fredrickson remembers they had "only a couple of days and a budget of zero," but nevertheless they managed. Doug Drexler obtained inspiration from a picture that was pinned to the wall in his office: by his desk he had a souvenir pamphlet from the 1965 New World's Fair, which showed the General Motors Pavilion

Doug Drexler: "I had the construction guys cut and shape me an appropriate piece of 'wiggle wood,' a bendable kind of plywood. To me, the building's facade looked like a curving venetian blind. It was a simple matter to walk across the lot and liberate a dusty set of blinds from an empty office. The front of the model was lined with the thin metal slats and the overall effect was like a tall, narrow, drive-in movie screen, hung with the Federation of Planets logo. At the front of the building we modeled Micro Machine starships to represent sculpture, like the way a military base will mount an odd jet outside the entrance. Mike Okuda brought in two freestanding compact disk storage racks he figured would make excellent high-rise office buildings. One of the racks looked to me like a tunnel for a high speed magnetic tram. We used it in the foreground horizontally along the ground. The perfect tram car was discovered in a plastic and aluminum hanging bird-feeder. Its streamlined shape fit nicely in the tunnel, and after a little paint and pin-striping it provided the illusion of expansive windows and sliding doors. The models were composited with live footage of the Tillman Water Reclamation facility in Van Nuys, which had already stood in for Starfleet Academy in an episode of

Source: ST:M Source: ST:M

[Pathfinder]

The building where Lt. Reginald Barclay works in the Season 6 story [#130 Pathfinder] was based on a real building. Mitch Suskin: "That building, I think, may be in Singapore or Hong Kong; it was a stock shot someone found. Dan Curry did the embossed text on the building and created the Starfleet logo. Then Foundation [Foundation Imaging] did us an element of the shuttle flying by. The original shot, I think, was a night shot, and I think we put some stars in the sky."