And you thought I wasn’t working on this project. Tsk tsk tsk.

Decker's Revenge

This will not end well

I probably could spend another week or two endlessly tweaking this 66-frame sequence, but I think this is the best it’s going to get. It’s a shame, because there are a few things that have always bothered me about this particular sequence… more after the jump.

Mkay, so first, it was a dumbass move for Kirk to order the shields lowered while the Enterprise was in the line of fire of a leviathan that fires antiproton beams to slice up planets. My initial thought for fixing this was to somehow re-edit the sequence to excise Kirk making such a boneheaded mistake, but it basically would have meant cutting to the attack sequence immediately after Spock says “I also believe the nature of this machine precludes the possiblity of easy access to its control mechanisms” as a communicator voice-over while the camera is on the Constellation. I gave it a test try, but the transition was just too jarring and abrupt. So, our brave captain stays a dum-dum for this one.

My next objection was a little less straightforward but bothered me even more: When the Enterprise was struck by the antiproton beam the first time with shields down, everyone onboard got tossed to starboard and the ship careened out of control. Yet a few minutes later (after Decker’s disastrous strafing run on the planet killer when deflector shields are damaged and gone for good), the planet killer fired three more times on the Enterprise… and it didn’t seem like a big deal at all! All that seemed to happen was the ship shuddered, the warp drive went offline, some Enterprise crewmembers were injured or possibly killed, and some hull ruptures occured (the latter three all occurred off-camera). But no one got tossed to the deck, and the Enterprise stayed pretty much in level flight. Maybe she stayed stable because she was caught in a tractor beam, but that presents another problem: she was probably CLOSER to the planet killer for those last three shots!

To fix these glaring inconsistencies, I storyboarded an initial attack sequence where the Enterprise (which was flying like an F-18 desperately trying to evade the doomsday machine) dived behind a largish asteroid just as the planet killer fired its antiproton beam. The beam would strike the asteroid instead of the Enterprise–protecting the ship from direct damage by the beam–but the megaBOOM!! explosion of the asteroid would cause the ship to ricochet off-course and toss our gallant crewmembers out of their safety-beltless chairs. My thought here would be that this would explain why the Enterprise didn’t suffer the extreme damage she suffered later on in Act II, and it would also explain why she spun out of control (because of the shock wave from the exploding asteroid). Yeah yeah, shock waves don’t travel through the vacuum of space. Well, warp drive’s impossible too, so :p

Unfortunately, no matter how I timed it out I kept bumping up against some hard limits storytelling-wise. Because I have to cleave to the original soundtrack, I only had 66 frames for this shot and I just couldn’t figure out a way to squeeze all that visual information into less than three seconds. I suppose if I was more proficient with sound editing I might have been able to stretch out the soundtrack (perhaps by repeating some of the beats) so that I’d have more time to show everything, but I just couldn’t justify spending all that time for what was originally 2.75 seconds of film. In the end, I felt it was more important to have the camera concentrate its attention on the first glimpse of the planet killer’s main weapon being fired… the interior shot of the Enterprise crew getting tossed out of their chairs was enough of a clue to the audience that some bad juju was going down.

What you’re viewing in this clip is an assembly of visual effects footage in various states of completion. The opener to Act II with the Enterprise sailing through the debris field is complete but for a planned re-rendering of the planet killer–I tweaked the model’s textures after I released test footage last month, and now it doesn’t match the appearance of the Doomsday Machine in the following scene. Speaking of which… the next sequence where the planet killer cuts loose on the Enterprise is semi-complete; there are about 20,000 more asteroids and the glowy blue dust cloud that still need to be added, and I may re-render the planet killer itself to give a better angle on the antiproton beam effect (right now, it’s kind of hard to see all four of the beams that lance together into one unified antiproton beam).

The rest of the visual effects from that point forward are actually old shots from my March 2008 attempt to complete this episode. I haven’t shown this footage to hardly anyone until today, so I hope it’s of interest for–if nothing else–comparison purposes with the visual effects that will eventually replace them in 2010.

I’ll be online sporadically until after the new year, but I welcome your comments in the meantime–I promise I’ll try to respond as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Blessed Kwanza, Festive Festivus and Happy New Year, everyone!

Onward with Act II!

And yes, I plastered a permanent “watermark” copyright on all of the live action footage from 1967. My intent here (indeed, my intent all along) is not to steal from Paramount/CBS Video or deprive them of a DVD sale. The original footage is posted merely to present my revised effects in the context of the original episode–nothing more. Hopefully, the constant watermark won’t be too annoying, but I feel that it’s necessary. ‘Nuff said.

Meanwhile, I’m going to do something I normally don’t do, and that’s to mix my personal blog with my professional life. Some of you may know that I work as a software engineer at Vovici Corporation, an enterprise feedback (read: survey) company based in Northern Virginia. Recently my colleague Jeffrey Henning—an opinion leader in enterprise survey feedback technologies and methodologies—wrote an excellent blogpost on the mini-rant I’m about to blast after the jump. If I can spread the word just a little bit to help nudge companies towards curbing what I feel is a particularly odious practice, I’ll have done my good deed for the day.

Have you ever visited your car dealer’s repair department (or, for that matter, any other type of service-oriented facility such as a bank or retail establishment) and found yourself on the receiving end of a hard sell from a customer service representative, asking you to be sure and answer “all fives” or “all excellents” on a survey that they say will be e-mailed to you shortly?

Something like this (OK, exactly like this) happened to me just recently at my local dealer, and it’s not the first time, either. In fact, it’s not the first time at more than one dealer—these high-pressure tactics appear to be employed at all of the company’s dealerships (or at least it’s definitely happening at the three I’ve been to in the Northern Virginia area over the past seven years). You see, the company ties all sorts of financial incentives to these surveys, and dealerships tie the salaries of their customer service representatives to the survey results. In lean times like these, dealerships (and employees at these dealerships) are scrambling for every penny—hence the hard sell at the cashier’s booth.

Maybe it’s just me, but when I’ve already dropped $500 to fix a seven-year-old car, I’m not particularly well-disposed towards being pressured into giving “fives across the board” when up until now the service manager hasn’t bothered to give me the time of day. It’s an irritating practice, and one that will cause me to vote with my feet and go to another auto brand when I replace my vintage 2004 auto next year. Unfortunately, I fear that I’ll find more of the same at the auto brands I’m considering: Buick (the LaCrosse), Chevy (the Volt), VW (the Passat CC) and Saab (the 9-3) (assuming Saab still exists next year!).

If you’ve been to your auto dealer recently and have not been subjected to the hard sell for high marks, I’d love to hear about it!