the Spacedock from ST Nemesis

Morning all and Happy Monday!!!  I wasn’t home much over the weekend, but I did manage to grab an arm full of files on the way out the door.  First up on top of the pile was the Space dock stuff from Nemesis.  A fun piece to work on, and, as with the stories of Alex Jeager and I drawing the same things from ILM  Paramount Pics, the same was true between Darryl Anka over at Digital Domain and myself over at Paramount.  Darryl and I worked at Apogee (John Dykstra’s motion control company) together in the ’80s, and he is one awesome illustrator… he would create a lot of the images we would build as miniatures, and he was always thrilled to see what would come out of his scribblings.  During the Nemesis years, he was on staff at Digital Domain and a part of the Star Trek crew.  Ron Gress was one of the VFX supervisors on the show, and, if you recall his name, he was the one that did the beautiful pearlescent paint job on the Motion Picture “E”.  Ron had the shot list created that would pertain to anything that would involve a visual that DD was to produce.  Daryl was given the same list, and both art departments would try to get all the visual designs done as quickly as possible, so as to get the digital and practical models going.  Over at Paramount, we had come up with some Space Dock designs, and they were not too much of a high point with importance visually, so they went through the approval process with only one cosmetic change.  The top of the dock had a considerably large living complex,  and the producers opted for a minimal area, as to keep the frame work more open.  Sketch two did this, and the final part of the dock was the docking coupler, which is suspended from the top and forward third of the dock.  The Enterprise “E” saucer based shuttle bay is where the docking arm connects.  This was to be a broader design as to accommodate more that just the “E”, but there was little concern for these details based on the secret fact that this was to be the last TNG film.  As these were being turned over to Digital Domain, we received the fax of Darryl’s drawing, which was a cool design that mixed a little bit of the original and the dock created for the NX-01.  Seeing the name on the bottom is how I found out that Darryl was on the show too!  Sadly, his idea was presented too late to get in the run, but together we had both done new worker bee concepts for the next meeting.  Darryl’s ship made the cut, and talk about a very excited guy!!!  He was so giddy and thrilled to get his crafty drawing conceived and built and then put into the final film!!  We were all very excited for Darryl and his first big addition into the world of Star Trek!  Here today are all the sketches and some images from the final shots produced by the awesome crew over at Digital Domain!!

sketch one with the heavy top section

the final sketch with much more open areas