Broken Bow - Diane Carey [71]
“We ended up with a design that is definitely a Star Trek vessel in that it has a saucer section and warp nacelles, but it doesn’t have an engineering section at the bottom,” Braga explains. “It’s more shiny and chromelike on its exterior—more metallic and less kind of a flat gray. ... It’s a little bit more like a cross between a stealth plane, a nuclear sub, and a Starfleet vessel.”
With the design in hand, the next step in the ship’s evolution was to determine the physical aspects of the ship for filming. “The ship as seen on the screen will probably be entirely CGI,” Zimmerman says. “There will be models made, but they won’t be the principal photography models. We have found, since 1987, that the state of the art has changed dramatically. One of the things that model photography does is give you a very realistic bounce of light. One of the drawbacks of model photography is that you have to build a model for everything. If you have to articulate a torpedo launch mechanism on the exterior of the ship, you have to build it. You have to make it work. And you have to do it in a scale that can be photographed. ... With the computer-generated images you can be infinitely more flexible. Everything takes time, but once it’s built you can look at it in twelve different ways and they’ll all be perfect. They’ll all be correctly lit. The moves will all be correct for timing and correct for size and shape. All of that is very useful when you’re doing a new one-hour episode every seven days—which is what an hour TV show schedule ends up being. So the CGI modeling has come, since 1987, to a state of the art that is not only as good as but better than model photography.”
INT. ENTERPRISE—BRIDGE
Far more basic than future starships, this command center lacks the “airport terminal” feel of Enterprises A through E. A central captain’s chair is surrounded by various stations, the floors and walls are mostly steel, with source light coming from myriad glowing panels. No carpets on the floors, no wood paneling on the walls, high-tech gauges, dials.
Zimmerman recalls his basic direction for the most familiar interior set of all Starfleet vessels. “Rick and Brannon particularly liked two pieces of equipment from the classic Star Trek series bridge: Spock’s viewer and Uhura’s communications earpiece. They thought some earlier versions of these objects might be found to be useful. Well, we did indeed do that, but we did not go so far as to use Uhura’s earpiece. It was proven to be an unnecessary device. We did, however, use a modernized, but retro, version of Spock’s viewer, and I think the fans will both identify with it and enjoy the connection.”
“As far as the interior goes,” Berman adds, “we visited a submarine and got the idea of what confined space was like. We tried to make it a little bit more confined but at the same time a hospitable place that the audience would want to come visit every week.”
The rest of the set grew out of that directive. Deeper and slimmer than the familiar bridges of Star Treks past, the design appears more functional than comfortable, but still warm and inviting. Though the ever-present captain’s chair may be the cozy refurbished seat from a Porsche, most of the surrounding chairs are metal mesh and, as Hoshi notes during a particularly rough patch of turbulence, they do not have seat belts to keep the crew strapped in. There are, however, strong metal guardrails encircling the bridge, similar to the one seen in The Original Series, for the crew to clutch on to as they are tossed about.
“It’s more hands-on for the crew,” Zimmerman says. “There are knobs