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Dan Curry:
"The other thing we had to do was have the Voyager fly over people. And so we would do things to cast shadows on them and in those shots Voyager was CG. But in a lot of the wider shots we wanted to add volcanoes. So I would paint the volcanoes on a Paintbox system by hand and we used sometimes real lava but sometimes baking soda puffed up through a piece of black velvet to make the kind of spurting magma look, and just tinted that orange so that it looked hot and scary." |
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Dan Curry:
"The other problem that presented itself was Voyager had to land out in one of the open spaces between these incredible rock formations. So we got a piece of rope the length of Voyager, which is about 1,100 feet, so we'd see how big the ship really was." |
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Ron Moore:
"So we got this rope and we measured out so we knew how big Voyager is. And there was just Dan and I, and we had a teamster that had taken us out there. So we just told the guy: 'Just take the end of this rope and just head out that direction. We'll tell you when to stop.' This guy's taken off and we're just feeding out the rope, and this rope is the length of Voyager, you know, and we're looking and we can't even see the teamster at the other end! We're just feeding out the rope and we're like 'Wow! It's big!' " |
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Dan Curry:
"The script called for a creature that lived in the tunnels and was always hungry. I had recalled reading something about Charles Darwin on a voyage where he was on some tropical island and he saw particular flower. And he predicted a bird that would exist that would have a certain beak shape to be able to eat the nectar of that flower. And I thought that was cool that he was able to figure that out, and a few days later they actually found the bird and it looked remarkably like Darwin's anticipated drawing. So whenever I design creatures I try to use that Darwinian approach where: "What's its environment, what would it need to exist in that environment?" So since it was a cave-dweller I thought it would be cool if it had certain eel-like properties, that was very voracious and had a big mouth, but gave it
radically symmetrical appendages like big claws so it could kind of scramble up tubes. And like a puffer fish that it would have air bladders that it could squeeze itself into a tube and fill it so it could kind of hang out there or contract itself so it could go forward. And that's how we arrived at the creature that you saw on the show." |
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Ron Moore:
"We measured a lot of stuff. We made sure we knew where the camera is. We shoot the set. We get an idea what this creature's going to look like, and then when we go to the CGI we have to of course put it in. There's a lot of times when we're at that stage where we're shooting and we don't know what it is, we don't know what it's going to look like, we're in the middle of design. It's stuff like that which can make it very difficult. I remember a lot of that happened with the snake. " |
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Ron Moore:
"The hard part was that it had to snatch somebody off and eat them, and it was like ok we don't know what it is but it's going to eat this guy. And Dennis 'Danger' [I assume Dennis Madalone the stuntman] the stunt man was very good. To simulate this and we could pull him off the rocks we have a two-fold problem: we have to remove whatever we need to assist him which would be cables or anything else, and then animate the creature to make it look like he got pulled off. And setting that stuff up can be tricky, but fun. And we didn't really eat him!" |
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From Janet's Star Trek Voyager Website |
