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Before there were laptops, cell phones or space shuttles, Star Trek: TOS (The Original Series) was boldly charting a new era of science fiction with its tricorders, communicators and shuttle craft. At the time, the show’s special effects were state-of-the-art, inspiring a generation of visual effects artists to come.

But effects technology today is light years ahead of the campy, in-camera 60s-era special effects. So to mark the show’s 40th anniversary, Paramount Studios recently went back into the vaults for the original 35mm camera negatives of the show and remastered them in HD, replacing the visual effects shots, such as ships, planets and background matte paintings, and cleaning up the live-action shots.

Producers (and veterans of almost all of the Trek spin-offs) Michael Okuda, Dave Rossi and Denise Okuda are overseeing the project. Michael Okuda served as technical consultant, graphics designer and scenic art supervisor on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise, as well as several of the films. His wife Denise’s credits also include Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and four Star Trek movies.

Rossi spent several years with the Star Trek: The Next Generation production company, reaching the rank of supervisor of Star Trek projects for Rick Berman Productions. In this capacity, Dave worked on theme show attractions, licensed product, movies, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager. He also served as an associate producer on Star Trek: Enterprise.

For VFX supervisor, Niel Wray of CBS Digital, the chance to work on the original series, was both an honor and an immense responsibility. “Star Trek got a lot of people into doing visual effects,” says Wray. “I’d say I’m evenly divided between Star Trek and Star Wars as an influence on me getting into the industry.”

He explains that, “basically our mandate is to replace any space-based visual effects, and any matte paintings, updating the effects while still maintaining the look and integrity, so that it matches the original style of the series. The last thing we want to do is go from a live-action shot of somewhere in the ship, cutting to an effects shot that feels out of place, like it’s two different shows. So one of the big challenges was to maintain the look of the overall show.”

CBS Digital is also delving into some shots that didn’t necessarily fall under the banner of ‘planets and matte paintings.’ For instance, in one episode Scotty fires his phaser, but inexplicably in the original there’s no beam, or in the episode I, Mudd, where the innards of an Android look like the insides of a 1960s Sylvania TV set. “In that situation we went ahead and replaced it with a much more plausible interior for this guy,” explains Wray. Another example is the episode Arena, where Captain Kirk has to fight the reptilian Gorn lizard man. CBS Digital’s effects artists made the alien blink occasionally.

The remastering project began in 2006 with the first season of Star Trek TOS. CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment released a DVD/HD-DVD hybrid just in time for the 2007 Christmas season. But at press time, they had not yet announced any plans in light of Toshiba’s recent decision to abandon the HD-DVD format altogether.

Until they come to some decision, the HD masters are more a matter of ‘future proofing’. The series is being aired in 4:3 SD in US syndication and in 16:9 HD in Japan, but according to Michael Okuda, even though most viewers are currently seeing it in SD, “the transfers are just beautiful. Certainly, the HD component is important, but so is the new color correction. We’ve seen the 35mm film from the original and the new transfer looks so much closer to the original film.”

The producers (who are currently in the middle of the third season) stressed that staying true to the original intent was a prime concern. “Fortunately, we all understood that it was a slippery slope,” says Rossi. “You start to look at something and one person would want to inject an idea and fortunately there were two other people there to say, ‘you’re nuts’ to keep us all grounded. So it was a great committee of three. We never really wanted to change the story or presume something that wasn’t there. We followed the dialog and what we saw on screen as to what the original intent was.”

But when it came to space-based visual effects, Michael Okuda explains that the original series often reused the same stock shots of the Enterprise, (not to mention recycling props and sets). “In a typical episode, they arrive at a planet, they orbit the planet, and they leave the planet. The original Star Trek had basically a handful of stock orbit shots that they used over and over again. So often – for the first three or four shots – we would use the same camera angle that they did so that people who know and love the show will have that sense of familiarity. But later on as they keep orbiting, we’ll push in closer to the ship or show a different angle or show a different camera move – things that they didn’t have back then,” says Michael Okuda. “By that time you’re so into the story that you don’t notice.”

Among the series’ many space battles, the episode, The Doomsday Machine stands out as one of the most intricate and challenging. The Doomsday Machine is one of the most popular episodes of the series. “It quickly, even among the fan base, became this kind of litmus test, starting a dialog beforehand. ‘I can’t wait to see Doomsday Machine!’ ‘What are they going to do with Doomsday Machine?’” explains Rossi. “So there was a lot to accomplish – things such as damaged starships and the look of the doomsday machine.

“One of the things that always bugged me as a kid watching the show, was that Captain Kirk would lay out this elaborate plan of what they were doing, but then when you cut outside the ship, it was just the same stock footage of the Enterprise that’s in every show – flying left to right or right to left. So this was a chance to really try and accomplish what was happening in the dialog.”

But, Rossi explains, the biggest challenge (aside from the deadline of delivering almost an episode a week) has been that all of the cuts were locked 40 years ago. “So we can’t add any film or lose any film. If there’s a three-second shot, that’s what we’re confined to, so we just tried to fit into those slots,” he says. He reports that often they’d find themselves saying, “If we only had two more seconds in this cut or 80 more frames for that one.”

“It’s not just the shot length, it’s the pacing,” adds Okuda. “A lot of the times, you want to show the Klingon ship zooming over here or there, and it’s really easy to add so many components to a shot that it’s confusing or it draws too much attention to itself. So we find ourselves pulling each other back.”

Of course, they are playing to one tough audience, trying to please Star Trek’s notoriously nit-picky fan base. “Certainly when this project was announced there was an immediate knee-jerk reaction. People equated it to what George Lucas did with Star Wars, where he went back in and changed the story and character responses, and so there was a fear that this is what we were going to do,” says Rossi. “Of course,” adds Okuda, “George Lucas was the original filmmaker, so he could do what he wanted with it, where we saw ourselves as caretakers of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision.”

Wray admits that he has also been keeping an eye on the blogosphere of fan sites. “At the beginning of the project I was really addicted to all of the fan sites and what they were saying about our work, and initially I was afraid to walk outside the building, because I might get egged, but as time progressed, it seemed like the fans really warmed up to what we were doing, because they understood that we weren’t going to be changing it.”

Michael Okuda explains that to get the dimensions of the Enterprise right, exacting measurements were taken of the 11-foot miniature, which is now housed at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution. “We actually got permission for our researcher to go over there and literally go over the ship with measuring callipers, and he obsessively came up with blueprints that they turned into a really accurate geometry,” he says. “The Starship Enterprise is probably one of the most recognizable images from film and television, and we knew we had to get that right.”

But while the effects artists kept the design of other familiar ships like Klingon and Romulan Birds of Prey, almost 10 new ships were designed. “The original Star Trek was brilliant,” says Okuda. “Even though they were, at the time, cutting edge visual effects, they were in fact, severely limited in what they could do. So a lot of times when they approached a space ship they’d point to the viewscreen and say ‘there it is. It’s just out of visual range’ or they’d put a flash of light that zoomed by. It’s easy to criticize that today, but in fact these people were brilliant in what they were able to accomplish.”

In the original episode Arena, the viewer never sees the Gorn ship that the Enterprise is chasing. It remains forever “just out of visual range.” So for the re-mastered version, Wray got to design a Gorn ship from scratch. “You try to put your head in the mindset of a Gorn, just based on the way you hear about them in that episode. It seems that the ship would be very militaristic, and so I ended up designing the Gorn ship more like a battleship – it was engines and guns basically.”

Michael Okuda explains that when it came to designing new starships, “one of the first things we would ask ourselves is: ‘what would Matt Jefferies have done?’ We want something that looks like it might have come off his drawing board. At the same time, we try to look at what’s coming out of the story and go from there.” Jefferies was the show’s original mechanical artist and set designer, and the inspiration for Star Trek’s ‘Jefferies tubes’.

Wray stressed that the resuse of elements was simply a necessity at the time. “From what I’ve been told, the big issue they had back in the ’60s was the lack of time, not that we have the luxury of much more of it,” he says.

One example of a recycled shot is a shot in Journey to Babel, where the shuttlecraft is coming up from the planet Vulcan. “In the original shot when they say ‘the shuttle craft is approaching’, what you see when they cut is basically the shuttle in the middle of deep space. Clearly, that doesn’t really help the story very much. So we created a shot where you see the planet Vulcan behind the Enterprise and you see the shuttle craft coming in to land, so it tells the story better.”

The original series also reused matte paintings, for example the iconic matte painting of a castle in Requiem for Methuselah is a reused painting of the Rigel VII fortress from the series pilot, The Cage. “We wanted to use that matte painting because it’s such an iconic one, but we only wanted to use it in one episode not three different times. So in that situation we’ll replace them,” explains Wray.

He adds that to augment the original castle matte painting, which appears in The Cage, “we punched up the shadows a little bit, and punched up the color a little bit. The detail in the rocks and foliage was minimal, so we went in there and brought that up a level. We detailed out the planet in the sky a little bit more. We replaced the water with actual moving CG water, so it doesn’t look like a still.

“In some cases there were perspective problems with the original, so we went in and fixed the perspective issues. You now have computers that assist in laying out the underlying structure of a matte painting, whereas it was all hand-done before.”

The series also called for a lot of new planets to be created. Wray explains that, “the planets were a kind of learning experience for us. Originally, we tried to do them all CG. We created planet textures and then a lot of times we’d use textures of land and textures of sea and then create a cloud pattern and rendered it out as a separate layer – but I was not a fan of the results. So ultimately, for the majority of the project, the planets are done as full 4K matte paintings basically projected onto a sphere and then rendered out. Ultimately, it ends up becoming a 3D shot, but it starts life as a matte painting and then is projected on to a sphere.”

He explains that matte artist Max Gable has developed a whole workflow for creating planets. “He’s got the process of doing planets down to an art form. He’s done it so often now that he’s got this library of textures polar caps and cloud patters – whatever it is, he has all of those elements to pull from. He’ll come up with something, render it out and then basically go back in PhotoShop and embellish everything.”

Wray explains that for 3D work, CBS Digital is relying on Autodesk’s Maya. The company uses Autodesk’s Inferno and Apple’s Shake for compositing. For motion tracking the company is using 2d3’s automated motion tracker Boujou, as well as Andersson Technologies’ SynthEyes. The company also has three seats of Autodesk Combustion for 2D paint and rotoscoping.

Overall, Rossi reports that the results have been able to win over even the most skeptical fans. “There are in fact a lot of fans who would have preferred us to make even greater changes. We’ve been pretty conservative. We consider ourselves purists,” he says. “But then again, of course, there are fans who are saying ‘don’t change a single pixel!’”

Back to the future

Chris Goff