Have you seen the Tim Russ directed "Star Trek: Of Gods and Men" yet? If not, we suggest checking out the first installment of the three-part series. We had a chance to discuss the making of "Of Gods and Men" with the CGI team and get an insight on what exactly goes on in production.

The following is an exclusive Roddenberry.com interview with two individuals from the CGI team: Scott Nakada, Property Master and Assistant Art Director and Peter Christian, Associate Producer/Visual Effects Producer, for Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. Also featured are special media created by the CGI team so you can see the affects mentioned. 

RB: Can you describe what CGI is?
Scott: CGI is Computer Generated Imagery. It's a way to make photo realistic objects and events seemingly photo realistic on a flat 2 dimensional display, such as a computer screen or television. Traditional minature modeling for these special visual effects shots to depict large crashing or exploding objects, such as starships or more realistic objects is replacing, or being enhanced by this technology. Soon we may see all practical model building and filming replaced, but there are just somethings that practical models just do better than CGI at this time. In Star Trek: of gods and Men however we are using straight CGI for all the effects shots. 

Peter: It’s an acronym. Computer Graphics Imaging. It is literally a process that uses mathematic algorithms to create 2 dimensional images that simulate a 3 dimensional environment.

Here's a tease of two shots: one is a Final and one is a CBB. Can you tell the difference?

Download Clip 1
Download Clip 2

RB: What is your favorite modeling program?
Scott: I poke fingers at the guys for that :) Seriously though the Team uses a wide variety of modeling programs to bring the 23rd century togther. I believe platforms being run are Blender, 3Ds Max, and Lightwave.

Peter: Each major platform such as 3D Studio Max, Lightwave, Blender and Maya each have their own unique qualities in different areas.  I am formally trained and certified in Maya, but the pipeline we painstakingly created for this film uses a proverbial kit-bash of 3DS Max, Lightwave and Blender. 

RB: What kind of computer hardware makes up your team's network?
Scott: Nearly everything has been done on relativley high power (by typical home standards) home computers. Yes, it's true the family PC will do this stuff.

Peter:  Wow. That’s hard to say. I am not certain what individual hardware each member has installed, but most of us have custom builds. I am running a terabyte of storage with 2 GB of memory, a quad core processor and a high end video card. As far as networking is concerned, the studio (Trinity FX Productions) is virtual and the networking takes place through a series of ftp servers I lease out of Texas.

RB: Tell us about some of the work you've done professionally with 3-D modeling and CGI.
Scott: Most of the team have done work as amatures. Chris Dawson, our Visual Effects Director, has been involved with a multitude of films such as Titanic, Men in Black, the Patriot, as well as helming the camera for effects shots for Star Trek: the Next Generation, and Nemesis to name just a couple more. Our Big Boss, the Visiual Effects Producer is Peter Christian. He's done work that has shown up on a multitide of shows for discovery channel, and is uncredited for his work on the pilot episode for Enterprise, and work for private companies. Again just to name a couple. Personally, I'm just scraping the surface here.

Peter:  I am more of an optical effects guy, like lasers and explosions and such that would be placed on live footage, but I have done some freelance CGI work for commercial divisions of many national companies such as The History Channel, The Discovery Channel and A&E Biography.

RB: How do you take the idea of a general screen effect and transform it into a CGI effect?
Scott: CGI starts with the script, the ideas and motion that it conveys for a given shot. For simple shots we can just give it to an animator and take a look later and approve or disapprove, but most of the time these shots are approved as they are a warp by, or planet orbit. For more complex scenes, and sequences these need storyboards to plan out all the sequences that occur. Granted through developement and changes in scripts and CG models, etc. these boards are changed through shot developement and animation, but it all is for the better. These storyboards are then distributed to the animators, and animated in low resoultion models. Then we as directors sit back, and watch the shots to see if they work or look good. Once approved, the shots are a go for final render, and temp pyro. Again we review the pyro effects and tweak until approved. Then we make notes of anything that is outstanding through the course of shot developement, and place in into CBB, or FINAL status. The CBB is a shot that is good and usable but needs slight tweaking the Final shot is the one placed into the film.   

Peter: Well, first we have to go through the final shooting script and highlight the needed virtual assets, such as what shots need to be created entirely CG and what shots only need opticals placed over live footage. Once that is completed it typically is sent to a story board artist. We only used a story board artist for the more critical space battle scenes in Act III (Scott Nakada) and the rest of the shots were pretty much shot from the hip on the fly. They talk about this film being the essence of true guerilla film making, there is certainly no exception with our VFX team. These guys are phenomenal.

RB: What is a blue screen and why is the color blue used?
Scott: The color Blue is used as a color that can be removed from background of a given shot. Specifically the color is typically a color that is not present in the areas of the shot you want to keep. Thus if you see a meteorologist on TV that is faded out or replaced by the graphic behind him or her, it's because they're probably wearing that color blue. However in the last twenty years or so orange and green screens have been used as replacement colors for these "Blue" screens. There are several "Green" Screen shots used in Star Trek: of Gods and Men such as many of the monitors on Enterprise, and Conqueror.

Peter:  Well, blue screen is really a layman’s term.  It’s referred to professionally as a “chromakey stage.”  There a many colors used actually depending on the projected lighting and virtual environment expected.  These colors include red/orange. Blue and green.  The idea is that a solid color is placed behind the subject/s being filmed so that a compositor can later digitally remove the contrasting color background without removing the subject or any part of them thus creating an alpha channel (an alpha channel is scripted information that tells a compositing program what parts of a picture or footage need to be transparent) mask that can be used to tell the compositing computer program, “Hey, this person goes here.”

RB: What was the most challenging CGI effect you had to create for the film?
Scott: I point fingers at the guys for that. I think the most Challenging CGI effect though is the climatic series of events *No Spoilers*  involving Conqueror. 

These are shots from the set showing some of the less obvious uses of CGI, in auxilary control, using an animated monitor which is active in the pictures, and a CGI generated printed panel back lit via light box built into the set piece. 

Below are storyboards and first pass animatic for Conqueror. The Final will be seen in the final cut!

Click here to load the animatic clip for Conqueror 

Peter: Well, I only managed the CGI artists on this team, I would take their rendered CGI layers and composite them together for a final clip.  As far as the most challenging clip/clips I personally worked on…
 
I would have to say that compositing the very first shot in the movie with the run down space station was quite challenging to get just the right look.  It was very early on in post production and we had still yet to flesh out our productions pipeline so I didn’t have the fine tuning capabilities that we now have.  But I think we pulled it off nicely.  The next was the transporter beams for the aternate timeline.  Not because it was a particularly difficult effect to create, it was actually quite simple, but mainly because no one could agree exactly how different/similar the effect should appear to the established transporter effects we have all come to know and love in the varying Trek incarnations.  I think we came up with a nice amalgam though.  The Transporter effect for the normal timeline was also challenging to get everyones approval on because they wanted this museum ship that looked every bit like Kirk’s original Enterprise, but the script stated that all the innards and technology were totally up-to-date.  There was actually a line spoken aboard the museum ship that was left on the cutting room floor that addressed this.  They wanted it to be “classic Trek” but with a more advanced technological flair to show a transitional effect that could believably bridge the technology between Star Trek 6 and Star Trek: TNG.  I am particularly pleased with how that effect turned out. 

RB: Does each artist have his own area of speciality or do they work on one shot from beginning to end and do everything for that shot?
Scott: We have artists that model, animate, and apply visual effects such as lighting and pyro in layers, and those that composite live action as well.  

Peter:  I brought them all on board because of their individual specialties, but we all (myself included) had to quickly learn new areas of the craft for everything to come together they way it has.  It has taken 8 people using their personal computers the same amount of time to make as many shots as a full length feature film as it takes hundreds of people to accomplish at a major studio with every bit as much cinematic quality.

RB: What are CGI deadlines like?
Scott: Frantic, and overrun. They are really, really tight. If you reason that a typical big budget feature has say twenty or up to several hundred effects people working on it at any given point in time, and it still turns a film around in two years of so. Then what the CG effects crew has done here is nothing short of a Herculean effort. For most of the CGI effects we have had about 6 people as the core group. These are people who are wonderfully talented, and that I would more than willingly work with again. 

Peter: For major studios, they are usually immediate and intimidating, but for us, let’s just call the deadlines…malleable. 

RB: For the film STOGAM, what shots covered what the CGI team created? (here you can talk about interior / exterior backgrounds, action sequences, etc)
Scott: For STOGAM all exterior ship and planet scenes were created using CGI. The Omega Device loader interior was not a practical set even though it looks photo realistic (Courtesy of Bill). Monitors, on the Constituion Class were green screened using CGI. CGI also extends to the control panels used on the sets.

Download a preview of the Omega Device loader sequence

Some of the less obvious CG Generated Stuff was created on set, and was approved by Peter, and aided by the rest of the CG team. To elaborate:

During Principal Photography in New York (at the New Voyages Stages) we had also repeatedly used another PC monitor that plays different forms of computer information aboard Conqueror. That monitor was programmed and reprogrammed for various graphics. One of the most notable places it was used was in the transporter room. Using a photo for documentation, I recreadted the original transporter graphic for the film, digitally to mimic the operation of the original panel in the transporter set from 1966-69. I also did several other graphics that were used aboard ship, again live CGI  animation on monitors, in Auxilary Control, to represent an advanced operations monitor, which also displays the detection of a temporal anamoly. Also it became neccessary on set to use the same technology to print off panels for various control station readouts to change the look of the ship, or to fill in blank spaces where we needed some kind of control surface where none existed.

Again the need arose for CGI before we went to Los Angeles. Tim Russ contacted me and informed me that there were three monitors that need CGI, station readouts, the usual starfleet techno-babbling-graphics. Refrencing several screen shots of the station from the CG effects crew that had just started modeling at the time, and referencing Mike Okuda's work on Star Trek 5 and 6, I created the CGI, and the animated information Scroll that Charlie searches through with his mind. So during principal shooting, at Ethan Phillip's station on the Space Station, we played these animations, and they worked wonderfully. Tim Russ was very happy with it, and that's what counted for that animation at the end of the day. Chris Dawson, and Bill were impressed by the animations as well. 

Peter: I could write volumes to that question.  Basically, all of the above.  There was nothing in this film that wasn’t graced by our teams fingers.

RB: When creating a sequence, how important is it to make the effects look as realistic as possible? What types of techniques do you use to make an effect look realistic?
Scott: When creating a sequence making the entire thing look as real as possible is the most important thing for our CG crew. If it doesn't match the live action decently enough, it will look terrible on the final cut.

Peter:  For a film like this, it is paramount (pun not intended) that the visuals not only be as photorealistic as possible, but also that the digitally created footage match the look and feel of the live footage as closely as possible.  For example.  This film was shot on mini DV which has a VERY identifiable style of simulated film grain to it.  We had to “add” that film grain to all the CG sequences to match the live footage to make it all seamless from live shot to CG and back again.

RB: What were your favorite scenes your team created in STOGAM?
Scott: The end of act 1. I think it's better than the Death Star. Certainly the best looking planet disaster I've ever scene on film. There is also a scene involving the Constellation during combat, where we fly past it with the camera rocking from near explosions, that turned out fantastic. And also but not least the Climax of the film. At this point it is being finalized but even in the Pyro approval phase it is amazing! There are so many scenes, that are amazing it's just going to knock your socks off. 

Peter: The stunningly dynamic climactic space battle in Act III.  I mean, that space battle is HUGE.  I just LOVE it! 

RB: Were do you think the special effects / CGI technology will be 10 years from now?
Scott: More user friendly, more advanced, and perhaps pushing the commercially available level of a fully 3D enviroment of some sort. 

Peter: I think it will be nearly indistinguishable from live footage.  I also think it will be more of a cut and paste process as technology in the field moves forward.

RB: What new and exciting CGI projects are on the horizon for the near future?
Scott: Currently I am working on a new script with some of the STOGAM team for a possible feature film, currently titled Planet Fall. Of course, I am also always open to additional work for other films, television or just to build props for films or the public.  

Peter: I am going to be working on a WW II film with STOGAM’s principle photographer.  I am looking forward to making a major scene involving the airborn jump of the 101st Airborne on D-Day.