Enterprise Designer dies

I have a picture of the Enterprise hanging in NASM from 1980. It was in
terrible shape.

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I have a picture of the Enterprise hanging in NASM from 1980. It was in
terrible shape.

I remmber reading it had been stored in a garage disassembled.

Well, my pics of her, taken in 1992, look pretty good...

Andre

I think it was restored somewhere along the way after being stored in a garage
when the series ended.

In article ,
says...
"OM" om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote
in message ...
On Mon, 21 Jul 2003 22:26:26 -0400, "Scott Hedrick"
wrote:

Matt Jeffries, the designer of the original Enterprise, died today.

http://www.trektoday.com/news/210703_04.shtml

http://www.startrek.com/news/news.asp?ID=129357

...Damn. That's all I can say. Damn.


shoulda been whoever did the "original blueprints", remember those?

Franz Joseph.

Fascinating when I was a kid, but I dusted them off a couple eyars ago.
*Really* stupid interior layout. The Captain's quarters, the bridge, and the
briefing room are all on separate levels, for starters.

They're all on different levels based on the scripts in the series. The
bridge is Deck 1, the officers' quarters are on Deck 5, and the Briefing
Room is... wherever the hell they said it was. (Memory is an iffy thing,
sometimes...)

But the exterior model was *way* cool g

Yep, though it was the last of something like 15 or 20 rough
configurations that Jeffries came up with. And the original version of
the design -- two nacelles, a cigar-shaped engineering module and saucer
-- was inverted from what they finally photographed.

Thanks, Matt, and RIP

Godspeed, Matt Jeffries.

--

It's not the pace of life I mind; | Doug Van Dorn
it's the sudden stop at the end... |

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 21:44:53 -0700, Eddie Valiant
wrote:

I tend to agree with Mike. I seem to recall on the ST:TMP DVD that
the model was actually sent to the company doing some of the updated
CGI shots of the Enterprise. I'll have to dig out the DVD after we
unpack to watch it again, but I'm fairly certain it was the large
model they showed being uncrated.

....The model was loaned out so it could be scanned into a 3D mesh that
could be used to complete and/or remake certain SFX shots originally
done in miniature and the viewer not be able to tell the difference
unless they knew the movie down to the frame. Which means guys like
me, Rick Sternbach, Mike Okuda(*), and probably the lurking geek who
calls himself Pat Flannery.

....Here's an example of how good the CGI was:

http://members.aol.com/IDICPage3/tmpdvd.html

....Regrettably, Bill McCullears doesn't update his site very often
these days, but the entire site is worth a couple of days surfing for
those wanting more info on the Enterprise and its various
incarnations.

(*) And maybe his wife Denise, but IIRC she doesn't lurk here, so...


OM

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"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

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On 23 Jul 2003 01:18:55 GMT, (Andre Lieven)
wrote:

"Scott Hedrick" ) writes:
I have a picture of the Enterprise hanging in NASM from 1980. It was in
terrible shape.

Well, my pics of her, taken in 1992, look pretty good...

....That was after the 1991 restoration, where they added all the
weathering and enhanced the hull lines based on suggestions by Greg
Jein on how to bring it more in-line with how Starfleet ships were
being shown on TNG and DS9. While adding these details were met with
some criticism by Trek fans more interested in preserving the original
appearance of the 11' model(*), there was quite a bit of agreement
that the new look was quite detailed enough to stand up to the
resolution of TV for that day, and it probably wouldn't have hurt
Paranoidmount to have used it instead of Jein's new miniature in the
DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations".

(*) Calling an 11' model a "miniature" is like calling William "The
Refrigerator" Perry is "big".

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 20:15:48 -0400, "Scott Hedrick"
wrote:

Wasn't Enterprize built by Henry VIII to test concepts for the Mary Rose?

....IIRC, you are correct.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

In article ,
om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy... _facility.org says...

snip

(*) Calling an 11' model a "miniature" is like calling William "The
Refrigerator" Perry is "big".

The Lord of the Rings effects staff built models so big that they stopped
calling them "miniatures" and started calling them "bigatures."

--

It's not the pace of life I mind; | Doug Van Dorn
it's the sudden stop at the end... |

On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 20:20:48 -0400, "Scott Hedrick"
wrote:

I have a picture of the Enterprise hanging in NASM from 1980. It was in
terrible shape.

....Lessee, before it got to the SASM, it had been loaned out to a
small Sci-Fi con, where the two guys assigned to hooking up all the
lights got some wires crossed and blew out practically every light in
the model. IIRC, there's some story about them replacing most of them
with a few strings of Xmas lights, but these were apparently removed
before they returned it to Paranoidmount after the convention.

....Here's what it looked like when it got to Garber:

http://members.aol.com/IDICPage2/garber.html

....When it arrived at the SASM, it was missing both nacelle domes, the
main deflector dish, and several of the plexiglass rectangular and
cylindrical windows on the model. Also, the bridge dome had become
detached - the word I've gotten over the years was that the attachment
screws had been sheared loose - and some of he black decal lettering
on the top of the saucer section had been chipped in places. Finally,
there were two rather obvious cracks in the Royalite vacuuformed
plastic of the saucer, both adjacent and running alongside the wooden
ribs which supported the outer surface. Current theory was that either
the model was dropped inside of its support crate and/or someone stood
or set something on top of the model that cracked the Royalite.

....To their credit, the people at Garber did the best they could at
the time to restore the model to as close to its original appearance
as possible. However, they were hampered by many of the same problems
Franz Joseph and most other Treknologists faced in those pre-digitally
enhanced days - all they had for resources were grainy 16 and 35mm
slides of the actual film stock the show aired on. As a result, the
renovators made some major errors in both the deflector dish and the
engine nacelle caps. The domes were painted bright red instead of a
transluscent frosting, while the dish was the wrong size, shape, and
had a completely inaccurate horn element.

....Still, they did a remarkable job in getting the model in
presentable form. They cleaned up the paint only where it was chipped
or scratched (*), replaced the missing plexiglas windows, and even
replaced some of the lighting arrays with cooler, safer lights. When
it went up over the "Life in Space?" exhibit, it wound up being one of
the SASM's most visited exhibits. This despite the fact that the SASM
ignored thousands of complaints that the model should *not* have been
displayed up high, but down below where people could see it better.

....One thing that I do fault the Garber guys for was the lack of
documentation made regarding the lighting array underneath the nacelle
caps. This was some sort of oddball mirror arrangement that I would
have loved to have gotten a better grasp on how it worked. From what I
was told in correspondence with someone at Silver Hill - what Garber
was before it was renamed in '80 - the arrays were removed during the
initial restoration, and were junked as they were burned out and there
was some question as to how they worked that nobody at Paranoidmount
had any ideas about. Dick Datin wasn't able to assist, as the upgrades
were done by one of the other effects houses - probably Howard
Anderson's company - and not by himself. From what I've been able to
gather, when the model was refurbished the 2nd time in '83-'84, they
concocted their own method of lighting the nacelles, although they
still retained the inaccurate red caps. It wasn't until Ed Miarecki
did the '91-'92 renovation that they were corrected.

(*) By not repainting the entire model, the Garber guys inadvertently
provided opportunities for proof to be recorded to verify whether or
not grid lines were actually drawn on the top of the saucer section.
Computer enhancement shows that, as Jeffries claimed and detailed in
his drawings, grid lines *did* exist, but based on how light they are
it's obvious that they were drawn on, probably with a big pencil and a
straight edge. Dick Datin, who built the model, doesn't recall
puttling grid lines on it at the time he built it, and enhancements of
effects shots taken during the two pilots also fail to show the lines.
The current guess is that they were drawn on when the bridge dome was
in height and the big copper strips were removed from the navigation
lights on the top port and starbord sides of the saucer.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 00:59:38 -0700, Mike Dicenso
wrote:

Frankly someone should've been kicked in the ass good and hard for that.
It was one thing to repair the cracking in the support pylons, and replace
the nacelle domes, and the navigational deflector dish, but to add the
extra weathering and the lines was going too far.

....The decision was made by the NASM PR people, who decided that a
facelift was needed prior to the opening of the 1992 Star Trek exhibit
at the NASM. The model, they argued, was almost 30 years old and in
serious need of repair. However, the NASM was contacted by Ed Miarecki
of SFMA Modelers, a Springfield, MA based FX house about the
possibility of doing a new renovation of the model after seeing photos
of it in a magazine. During the negotiations, someone at the NASM got
the wild idea of revamping the model to look more in-line with the way
models looked on TNG. Miarecki, according to several sources, had seen
sketches Greg Jein had done of the same concept, and based his
renovations on Jein's work.

....I should note, however, that Miarecki has never, to my knowledge,
acknowledged Jein as his inspirational source. I'd love to track him
down one day and see what his side of this story is.


OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr