My first day on the job working DS9 – I slid the makeup case under my desk and never looked back.
Mike hired me to design graphics, but as soon as Herman found out I could sketch, he had me designing hand props. Mike had an idea about hand props that would snap into walls or consoles.
An unused variant of my cover for the Pocket Books Trek novel, Kobayahi Maru. This model of the NX was the original approval model of that ship, which I built in the art department. It had one important difference from the final CG model, the windows were larger. I preferred the larger ports, because it made the ship look smaller, and more vulnerable.
A few happy snaps I took of the set, in preparation for decking the it out with graphics. I figure at this point we had 1-2 days before they would be shooting in there. Put the spurs to ‘er, Chuck!
Somebody up there likes me – Mikey O gave me the assignment to finish off this set of the Bajoran interceptor bridge on DS9. It’s all about speed, and knowing your topic. The camera waits for no one, and it never blinks. I had designed all of the Bajoran emblems and etc, so I was the man for the job. Bajoran interfaces reflected the culture, and it was all based on the wormhole. Wheels within wheels. I also broke up some of the white ceiling plexi with graphic gingerbread that made use of the Bajoran military emblem.
Wow… Ds9. Can it really be that long ago? What once was work has now passed into the incredibly nostalgic for me. What an adventure. It was exciting and scary. This makeup guy had a lot to prove, and I owed it to Mike Okuda to not fall down on the job, as he put his rep on the line for me.
Ops was a lot of fun, and the expressive Cardassian graphics were almost predatory in their design ethic, composed of claws and entrails.
20 years ago, and probably wondering what 20 years will bring. Relax Drex, it all turns out.
Since today is all about celebrating the 2012 Ships Of The Line Calendar, it’s a perfect opportunity for me to shake out some odd ‘n end happy snaps that never fit anywhere before. They make for jazzy spacers between the articles, and also make great coasters for your drinks!
(Above) I’m really starting to miss jumping behind the glass and getting lost in the wonderfulness of it all. The Runabout cockpit was economical and straightforward. In the DS9 pilot, the set was built on hydraulics to shake it for real. Silly rabbit! That never works! It only succeeded in shaking the set apart, and never looking any better than shaking the camera. It was funny to watch, though, reminding one of a low rider with hydraulics bouncing down Sunset Blvd.
(Below) This was a conversion of the DS9 Saratoga bridge into the bridge of a Romulan Warbird. What I remember most was incorporating art deco lighting sconces into the standard backlit panel. For all the work, Director David Livingston shot up everyone’s noses and missed the set entirely. We did our duty and teased him about it the next time he came up to the art department.
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Here is the latest and fourth D-TV, a time machine if you will, a window looking back to our old school Star Trek roots… the roots which begat new school Galactica. Working on Trek those 17 years was some of the best fun I’ve had. Picture it: A starship right downstairs… calls from Gary Hutzel at Image G to come down and see the D lit up and on the stick, or building a space station out of junk… all as if your life depended on it.
Old school, new school… in show business it pays to be both. At this very moment, a couple of old school guys and a team of CG madmen (who I will be profiling here soon) are pushing that upper right hand corner of the TV VFX envelope. Some of you know we’re working with Gary Hutzel on the upcoming Blood And Chrome, the decidedly new school spinoff of Battlestar Galactica. B&C, except for the actors, has been built in V-World. The leash is off, and if you think BSG was big before… well, let’s just say that we’ve shifted into huge. Gary and I are old school guys who are having a new school blast, and the roots to our metamorphosis are firmly embedded in the firmament of old school Star Trek.
We are in tough economic times. Even the motion picture industry is feeling the pinch. Today, shows with sprawling sets, like BSG and TNG, are a hard sell. The studio doesn’t want to invest millions of dollars in sets for a show that may or may not hit. If you know that you are going to go seven years, then you can amortize the cost over the run of the series. That kind of guarantee rarely happens. Ultimately you get less science fiction happening on television. The fantastic thing is that television science fiction is being saved by a creation that in itself is the very stuff of science fiction: computer generated environments. It is now cost effective to build virtual soundstages, in fact it’s even desirable. No upkeep or storage, infinitely malleable, and no limits.
First up is some lost handycam footage shot at Image G. It was Gary’s task to uncrate the Reliant\Saratoga and see if it still worked since the last time the teamsters tossed it on the back of a truck and bounced it along bumpy roads to the storage facility up north. Naturally, work it doesn’t. In a classic example of roll with the punches, Gary invents another class of ship. Whenever I see old footage like this, I kick myself for not shooting more.
You know that crack about having a starship right downstairs? Second up is a classic illustration of that. Mike Okuda knocked on my door, “…They’ve lit the Voyager sets one last time before they strike ‘em! Grab the cam, and meet me on the bridge!” It’s funny the quiet reverence you experience when saying goodbye to a make believe spaceship. The show over seven years becomes a family, and the starship sets are where that family lives. Sure, it’s the family you see on the screen every week, but even more so the collection of quirky, talented and lovely human beings behind the scenes that you fall in love with, too. Enjoy!
I had Ygor search the bottomless pit that is the Drex Files, and he didn’t turn these up, so I’m running them now. Today is a good day to be a modeler!
When Mike and I originally detailed the physical model of the Defiant, it was all done so fast that we didn’t have a template of the model to create the markings with. What that meant was that Mike and I would put together a “kit” of markings that bracketed a wide range of possible configurations, then go over to Image G and wing it. Once we established what it would be, and we had more time, we created an official sheet of press on markings that we gave to Gary for emergencies. This sheet was later sent to the VFX house that built the CG model.
Chaffee capitalized on Matt Jefferies idea to put Enterprise style nacelles on the Galileo. There was no doubt who the shuttle belonged to. The Defiant was a very different Federation starship, with very unusual nacelles. We decided to go with maestro Jefferies, and visually tie the Chaffee to the Defiant.
Chaffee was one of those things that came out of left field. I was in the art department lighting matches with my feet, when Gary Hutzel appeared in a flash of light and smoke. Shuttle! Yes? New! Yes? Today! Oh god! Hurry! Go like the wind!
And that’s pretty much how it always happens, except that I had just completed the diagrams of the Defiant for the DS9 Tech Manual. Gary! I blurted like a little kid who didn’t wanna. Where? Where is it supposed to launch from! It’s impossible! There is no place! And to prove it I unfurled the newly minted diagrams on top of the lightbox. See? I’ve worked out every nook! There is absolutely no place… no place… um… hey… it could go right here! I point to the circular ring on the bottom of the ship. Right here! Some modest adjusting and… it… could… work! There was another flash of light and a roiling of thunder and he was gone! His disembodied voice reverberated over me… Today…today… today…
(Above) Orthos of the CG model built by Brandon.
(Below) The diagrams that I provided to Gary.
(Below) A diagram I recently provided to the Trek BBS that puts the size of the Chaffee into terms that we can all relate to, especially if you own a BMW. I drive a ten year old Altima, but my other car is a battlestar.
(Below) Chaffee and mothership Defiant. From The Ships Of The Line.
What I really remember is us getting scolded by someone in the office for naming the shuttle Chaffee. Who do you think you are naming a shuttlecraft after your girlfriend! Now it was time for me to be impressed. Rick Berman jumped in and set the record straight. Don’t be rediculous! Chaffee is one of the Apollo 1 astronauts that died on the pad. Approved!
My all time favorite Master Systems cutaway. I originally created this as a foldout for the DS9 Tech Manual, but it was too fun to not swap out all of the earlier versions seen on the bridge and engineering. Doesn’t look like much here, postage stamp size, but give it a click, and have fun!
Tall tales of a time-traveling Tribble – A Tribble Travelogue
As transcribed by Jörg Hillebrand
Whenever I’m on vacation, my owner accompanies me. He’s been to all parts of Germany, London, Rome, Australia, St. Louis and Los Angeles. When I spent some time in Los Angeles (and some other interesting places all around the Milky Way Galaxy) last month, he kindly offered to take some snapshots of me at some pretty famous locations. First, we went to Santa Monica Pier, where Janeway and her crew beamed down in 1996 to find a way back home to the 24th Century.(01) Continue reading ‘Tall Tales of a Time-Traveling Tribble – A Tribble Travelogue’
(Above) George Brozak, who wrote numerous tales for Star Trek, recounts his experience as a Hollywood scribe, and how he broke into the biz.
Breaking into Hollywood always makes for a fascinating story, and George’s adventure is no exception. The odds of “making it” are so stacked up against you, that anyone who actually vaults the wall successfully is a hero to me. Meet George Brozak -
The wonders of Facebook. Though I initially resisted joining a few years ago, it has been a wonderful tool for reconnecting (and in some cases connecting) with friends and colleagues from the Star Trek offices on the Paramount lot. My friendship with Doug Drexler is just such an example. I spent many hours this past weekend pouring-over his wonderful blog, reliving my experience with the incredible production staff, producers and writers.
Understandably, I was very humbled when Doug asked me to recount my experience writing for Star Trek. As I told him, I am merely a small cog in a very large wheel – but I just couldn’t say no to his generous offer. It was another chance to relive those incredible times during Trek’s meteoric rise.
My writing career began with The Next Generation. TNG had created a triumphant presence to the Star Trek universe, taking us places we had never gone before. At the start of its third season, Michael Piller (a producer for shows like Simon and Simon, Cagney & Lacey and Miami Vice) joined the staff in charge of writing. Piller instituted a policy unheard of in episodic television by opening script submissions to un-agented writers. And though we had never met, Michael’s hiring was about to change my life. Continue reading ‘George Brozak – A Trek Writers Journey’
(Above) Looking south, Ben Sisko’s office in the DS9 Operations Center, or “Ops”.
Me, Mike and Denise have a lot of memories tied up in the DS9 Operations center. We spent a lot of late nights getting it ready for the first episode. It was a real departure. It was the first time that we had ever spent so much time developing the architecture of an alien race. Federation was curvy and round, while the Cardassian design ethic loved angles and corners. Here we are looking toward Sisko’s office, which had a distinctive eye-shaped window, easy to identify on Tony Meinenger’s DS9 station model. The office was intentionally grand by Cardassian standards, and framed with haughty arches. Unlike many of Trek’s command centers, Ops is punctuated with numerous levels and plateaus. This was considered extravagant because it slowed shooting the episodes. Marvin Rush our DP, bought a light-weight easy to maneuver camera crane to help move things along. Ops was notably the first big set where video graphics were used extensively. A departure from the “pola-motion” back lit graphics so prevalent on TNG. In the picture above, we are looking south toward Melrose Avenue and the famous Paramount Bronson gate. Of interest is the fact that the stage wall is only about three feet behind the window in Sisko’s office. The DS9 sets were enormous, and Herman Zimmerman took advantage of bit of the soundstage.
(Below) Moving clock-wise around ops from Sisko’s office brings us to O’Brien’s engineering station. Th engineering station was the largest station in Ops, and dominated the set. The idea was that keeping the station in one piece was a major story point, so Herman made it intentionally complex.
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(Above) Continuing counter clock-wise, and at our 3 O’Clock, we catch the right side of engineering, a piece of the arrowhead shaped situation table, and the shows trademark operational turbo-lifts. Man, you gotta stand in one of those when some jokester physical effects guy catapults you out of your shoes!
The decision to make DS9 out of the ordinary is pretty abundantly clear in these happy snaps I took while doing illustrations for the DS9 Tech Manual. It is anything but what Ira Behr used to refer to as “Star Fleet Clean”. Herman Zimmerman and the set designers broke the rules everywhere they could. The pin striping on the black plexi is the design ethic Mike Okuda called “shatterframe”. It was Mike’s solution to make standard monitors integrate with the every-which-way-but-loose Cardassian style. Enjoy these candid views of Doctor Bashir’s desk.
Continue reading ‘DS9 Infirmary – Happy Snaps – Bashir’s Desk’
More Bob Blackman magic in the form of Cardassian wardrobe, an almost medieval feeling. You can see some design elements of the makeup in the TNG version of the uniform. I rendered these for the Trek Encyclopedia.
The Cardassian Galor class warship… keeping the late night oil burning at the Presidio.
With it’s Cobra headed-Sea Skatish personae, the Cardassian Galor class battle cruiser made for a good-looking and worthy adversary ship. All about military support, these vessels are the antithesis of the sprawling space-going communities that starfleet’s Galaxy class represents. It’s easy to imagine that Cardassian military planners saw those luxurously cushy vessels as a misguided waste of resources, while at the same time counting their blessings.
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DS9 was a unique opportunity for the art department to stretch, The stations ops center was huge amounts of fun with all of it’s various levels and angular structure. DS9 was also an amazing opportunity for me, as it was the show that Herman and Mike gave that makeup guy a chance to stretch his horizons as well. I’ll always be grateful to them.
Embroiled in a conflict spanning three fronts, and resources stretched thin, the Cardassian’s developed unmanned weapons platforms. With one hundred percent of the platforms resources geared toward offense, they proved a formidable foe, inflicting major damage upon the Federation and it’s allies.
My Bajoran lightship starchart from the DS9 episode “Explorers”. The design carried on the Bajoran design ethic of “wheels within wheels”, inspired by the Bajoran Wormhole. I printed the final chart on a beautiful parchment gilded with gold.
UPDATE: As usual Jörg kept better track of my star maps than me . Witness -
Hi Doug! Here is what I found out about the Bajoran star map. In “Explorers”, the yellow star map is never seen, a different star map got all the screen time. The first appearance of the star map on your blog is in “Rapture”. Sisko uses it to find the location of B’hala. This version is white and not yellow, though.
The only appearance of the map as is (yellow background) that I can think of is in VOY’s “Repression” (Season 7) where it is seen in Teero Anaydis abode. I’ve attached screenshots of all three appearances of Bajoran maps.
The variety and texture of the Bajoran wardrobe for DS9 was yet another awesome triumph for the multiple Emmy winning Bob Blackman.
I’m sure you’re sick of hearing me say how much fun I had working on Trek. I was a Pakled on a ham, a kid in a candy store, Bukowski on a bender. I may hold the record for the number of job positions held by any one person in the history of Star Trek. Every bit of it was fascinating, and oh yes, I drank deep my friends. Sometimes I think it’s a shame I never made it into the wardrobe department working for Bob Blackman. What an incredible department it was. It’s treasures going on for miles… rack after rack of creativity. It seemed that the staff worked 24 hours a day, outfitting Klingons, Starfleeters, Borg and all manor of humanoid.
Today we examine the Bajoran wardrobe for Deep Space Nine. It’s one thing to lovingly draw up these designs as I did, but to have the actual costumes at my finger tips… well, what can I say?
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Seems like yesterday.
Here are a bunch of happy snaps of the Defiant bridge I thought no one would be interested in. Something tells me I’m wrong. If I remember correctly, I shot these as reference for the DS9 Tech manual. Since there really isn’t that much out there on DS9, I finally decided to stop putting these away. In truth they have a nice candid quality to them.
One of the extraordinarily fun things about working on DS9 was the immersive nature of the sets. You could walk down a corridor, jog into an airlock docking port, and hop into a runabout cockpit. All of it alive, and merrily blinking away. I always loved those giant cog doors on the DS9 airlocks. They were so dramatic. Opening one was by hand was like rolling back a stone on an ancient catacomb. They had real heft and even felt a little dangerous. Ds9 undoubtedly had some of the most comprehensive and gargantuan science fiction sets ever built for a television show. I knew these sets like the back of my hand and it seemed so natural to be diagramming them for the Technical Manual. They were home for seven years.
Undoubtedly an all time Trek classic, the erstwhile workbee.
If my memory serves me, the workbee was only used once on DS9, and that was in the title sequence. That was all the provocation I needed to slip it into the Ds9 Tech Manual. Sleek and sexy, this Probert design caught everone’s attention in the spectacular drydock sequence in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Like many of Star Trek’s spaceship designs, it never seems to go out of style.
(Below) Cutaway view. The miniature interior was outfitted complete with a G.I. Joe doll.
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(Above) The intriguing DS9 defense sails. Magazine, conveyors, massive rotary gatling phasers, and torp launchers. Note the fire control center.
If I told you that I did not have a good time doing these diagrams I would be a big fat liar. I think you can pretty much tell by looking at them. One of my favorites is the cutaway of the DS9 defense sail. So much of the station was left unexplained, and I pretty much had a field day filling it out. The idea was that starfleet fully refitted the station’s defensive capabilities, which had been stripped by the Cardassian’s when they abandoned it. This should not have come as any surprise to the Cardassians, but to say that they were unprepared by the newly acquired fire power was an understatement.
(Below) The rotary, gatling style phaser emplacement was something we hadn’t seen before, it was as big a surprise to viewers as it was to the Cardassians. The nifty pop up phaser bar.
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(Above) The Quantum Torpedo. A Ds9 bit of ordinance often utilized but never seen. I had great fun streamlining the erstwhile Pho-Torp that had been around for decades. Sort of the sport coup of photon torpedos.
(Below) The standard photon torpedo, basically unchanged since “The Wrath of Khan”. We all have a lot of nostalgia for this one, as it was used as Spock’s casket. I detailed a few of these during my time as a scenic artist, and I’m here to tell you that they would have had to chop our favorite science officers legs off to make him fit.
Gouda nuff – Basically a space going wedge, the Bajoran assault vessel recalls an almost “star destroyer” design ethic.
Drex Files follows up last weeks Bajoran Transport ship with this freighter from that spiritual race. Nothing graceful about it, it is the antithesis of last weeks elegant gull-like design. Judging by it’s straight forward basic shapes, it appears as if it’s design was driven by ease of construction for the modeler, a very real consideration in the days of physical photography, but not much of a concern in the unshackled CG era.
The Jörg report -
The physical model of the Bajoran ship first appeared in “Past prologue” as the Bajoran scout ship Tahna Los is on. The model then appeared in many episodes as a Bajoran transport ship. I have included some screenshots of the physical model from “Sons of Mogh” and “Prodigal daughter”. For the scene in “Shadows and symbols” where Kira is facing off the Romulans with a small fleet of Bajoran impulse ships, the Bajoran aussault vessel was turned into a CG ship too, like all the other Bajoran physical models. As far as I can tell, the CG model was only seen in this episode and never appeared in any other shot again.
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(Above) TNG borrowed the runabout, establishing the layout of the aft compartment of the vessel, seen in this cutaway. Note the warp core situated in the spine of the ship, and the deuterium and anti-matter pods in the aft part of the assembly.
Wow! The DS9 Tech Manual Illustrations were a real hit with everyone, so we’ll keep them coming!
Until the Defiant came along, the Danube class runabout was the only real piece of starfleet hardware we had on Deep Space Nine. It was designed by Rick Sternbach before he turned his attention back to TNG. Jim Martin’s main contribution to this design was suggesting the idea that the runabout carry detachable cargo pods under wing, like the Space: 1999 Eagle Transporter.
(Below) I put my own spin on the idea by suggesting that these containers could also be special duty modules coming in a variety of flavors… science, medical, cargo, or even crew cabins.
![mod_Layout-[Converted]](http://drexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/mod_layout-converted.jpg "mod_Layout-[Converted]")
![Lab-[Converted]](http://drexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/lab-converted.jpg "Lab-[Converted]")
(Below) “Visible V-8″ style, the Runabout’s total warp propulsion system pared down to it’s basic components.
![14.2.18-Total-Warp-Prop-[Converted]](http://drexfiles.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/14-2-18-total-warp-prop-converted.jpg "14.2.18-Total-Warp-Prop-[Converted]")
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