For the seventh time, ILM creates innovative CG effects for a Star Trek
film, but this time the director causes a break in tradition. Gene
Roddenberry’s fictional Star Trek universe embedded itself deeply into
the pop culture long ago
For
the seventh time, ILM creates innovative CG effects for a Star Trek
film, but this time the director causes a break in tradition. Gene
Roddenberry’s fictional Star Trek universe embedded itself deeply into
the pop culture long ago. So, when director/producer J.J. Abrams
considered taking on the 11th Star Trek feature film for Paramount, he
didn’t follow the Star Trek tradition of going where no man has gone
before. Instead, the 11th Star Trek takes audiences to a frontier the
franchise characters have visited before, but we haven’t—to the
beginning, the time before the first episode in 1966. “J.J. didn’t want
to make a movie for just the fan base,” says Industrial Light &
Magic’s Roger Guyett, overall visual effects supervisor and second unit
director.
ILM, which had created visual effects for six of the
previous ten Star Trek features, produced 850 of the approximately 1000
shots in this film, with Digital Domain, Evil Eye Pictures, Lola Visual
Effects, and Svengali supplying additional digital effects. The first
Star Trek film for which ILM created visual effects was Star Trek: The
Wrath of Khan in 1982, and to bring a dead planet to life for that
feature, Lucasfilm’s computer division, which would spin off to become
Pixar Animation Studios, created the now-famous “Genesis Effect.” It
marked the first use of fractals, particle effects, and a 32-bit RGBA
paint system in a feature film.
For this latest film in the
franchise, Lucas Digital’s ILM used particles again, but this time in
combination with state-of-the-art simulation systems to destroy two
planets. In addition to building and demolishing the planets, ILM
created the Starship Enterprise and the other space vehicles, which
were always CG, a mining platform and other objects, two creatures,
digital matte paintings, and animatics and previs for many of the shots.
Find out how ILM created these fantastic effects in the May issue of Computer Graphics World.