Inside Star Trek Beyond’s Amazing Visual Effects

(“Sabotage” by Beastie Boys)

We got no ship.

(loud crashing)

No crew.

How are we going to get out of this one?

[Spock] We will find hope in the impossible.

Well, at least I won't die alone.

(transporter jingles)

Well, that's just typical.

Hi, I'm Mike Seymour from fxguide.com for Wired.

For 50 years, fans have enjoyed the Star Trek universe,

and a near constant in all that time

has been the crew's home in space

on the Starship U.S.S. Enterprise, NCC-1701.

Of course, the Enterprise has not always

actually been that well-treated,

and we count about nine that have appeared on the screen.

The visual effects in the new film

are headed by Double Negative in London

who did quite a lot of the exterior work that you see.

They were helped out by Atomic Fiction

who did about 350 shots, and many of those

were building out the inside of the Enterprise.

The job of making the Enterprise is an interesting one.

The team wanted to be faithful

to the history of the franchise,

but they're also operating in an environment

where they absolutely knew that

the fans would be pulling apart every detail.

Ryan Tudhope and Kevin Baillie supervised the work

of building up much of the interior of the ship

which included new areas such as the manual release room

and the new engineering spaces,

the previous engineering room in the film Into Darkness

having actually been shot in a real brewery.

As the ship would be ripped apart

and we'd see inside it in graphical new ways,

the team had to work out all the internal logic and layout,

the construction, where everything went.

There are thousands of things,

including thousands of screens

in front of almost every crew member.

An enormous amount of work goes into

making a believable, working Enterprise.

For example, every one of those screens

needs to be filled with something that kind of makes sense,

though, of course, it's completely made up.

It needs to have a logic that is

understandable while not being distracting.

The audience needs to see these screens

and believe that they are of that world

even though they have no idea what they do.

Display graphics gets almost no credit in feature films,

but it's actually a really important area,

and there is an entire design team

responsible for doing them.

The lead designer on Beyond was Gladys Tong

of G Creative Productions in Vancouver.

She heads up an on-set playback and design team

that produces all of those graphics,

from the practical archive screens

to the nebular holograms that the team walk around.

These are all designed by G Creative

and then handed over to companies like Atomic Fiction

as still, flat art, and they then

animate them and bring them to life.

The secret in making environments in the Enterprise

or just graphics on a prop is to respect the culture.

In a sense, these are all historical items

reflecting both the fictional

and filmic federation ancestry of the last 50 years.

There's a kind of a D.N.A., and the science and engineering

has to respect that sense and the world that it inhabits.

Of course, this all starts with the concept art

that works out the looks that the team builds from.

So much of the Enterprise is, of course, digital

or done with digital set extension,

but the work doesn't stop there.

In fact, there's a lot of character work, as well.

(loud explosion)

[Krall] This is where the frontier pushes back.

When the aliens attack and board the Enterprise,

almost all the aliens apart from Krall himself

are in fact, C.G. characters.

There were stunt men filmed on set to give eye lines,

but then Atomic Fiction digitally replaced all those actors

with fully-C.G. aliens.

(loud crash)

Now, this is all happening while

the principal plate photography is being filmed

on giant motion-control, multi-access gimbals.

So, the set extension, which was already quite hard

was made even more difficult by adding in

a large number of digital characters to the scenes.

Well, it's great to see the Enterprise back on screen in

this thirteenth Star Trek feature film, Star Trek Beyond.

Don't forget, please subscribe

for more behind-the-scenes action.

I'm Mike Seymour, for Wired.

(“Sabotage” by Beastie Boys)