Well, I have to say that is one fine book and produced at high warp speed. This whole project only started about 3 and a half 4 months ago when everyone that had worked on the movie got a call to put all their art work together on a disc and have it ready to pick up the next day!!! Neville Page was the gathering man of all these discs and probably a lot more…I love to see things come together under impossible odds, and Titan publishing shines at doing what others would be unable to do!!! Great work displaying all the images in a very nice collage style format which really shows a nice progression, in many cases, from sketch to finished production art.
Mark and Titan really cover a little bit of everything, the concept art, CG work, ILM’s stuff, all the costume and make up work and some nice writing – full of little tidbits of info and a lot of how things came together – make a for one nice art of book. Mark could easily do a part 2, and 3 with all the art that couldn’t be squeezed into those 160 beautiful pages. The breakdown pages of the Enterprise, the Nirada, and the Kelvin are some awesome pages, as well as J.J. Abrams’ very nice and humorous forward. It is a very complimentary book to all those behind the scenes and the art work of Ryan Church and James Clyne, along with Alex Jeager, Paul Ozzimo, Neville Page, and all the rest is breathtaking!!! Even some of my scribbles made it in which was a thrill to see, HAAAA!
What a great showcase for some awesome and very stylized art work!!! Scott Chambliss (The film’s Production Designer) adds a lot of info, insight, and some very kind compliments to his crew throughout, and it was a fun read and makes a great companion along with the DVD release. OH yes!! The burning question of what is the Enterprise’s dimensions are are finally revealed in the book so now all the fighting can stop!!! HAAA! Thanks to everyone that put this book together so fast, and I so love adding it to my book collection!! Enjoy
the cover for the art of film
Eavesdropping with Johnny 
Looks like a great book.
Wonderful book, and highly recommended!
I’ve gotta get this book. I love it when they release these things. Plus, I still want to build a CGI model of the Kelvin and I could really use those sketches and whatnot. 🙂
:: pulls out his Christmas list :: There! Added to the ol’ wish list for this year!! ;D
The size debate probably won’t be settled until the basic interior layout has been canonized. It looks like they were going for a number of decks in the TOS/refit range, since the doors are labeled – , with the letter “G” being seen in the initial scenes in Sickbay (Deck 7 is the traditional location of TOS Sickbay). If they decide to retain up to 26 decks and go with a – scheme, they’ll have to double the spacing.
“…since the doors are labeled LETTER – FOUR DIGIT NUMBER”
(The comments section uses HTML, so it misread my notation as tags.)
Well, I believe it’s been disclosed that they designed it at one size and then scaled it up later, so there are going to be certain shots and/or design elements which don’t match with whatever size gets claimed. My impression is the movie guys want it to be enormous, whereas fans take cues from recognizable elements and expect it to be not radically dissimilar in size to the 1701/1701-A of previous movies.
The size of Main Engineering seems to be one of the unavoidable pieces of evidence for a huge ship, but the look of that particular location doesn’t seem to have been super popular with fans, so some choose to ignore that anyway.
Ryan Church probably didn’t have a particular size in mind while he was drawing his concepts, leaving it to Alex Jaeger to figure out along with the remaining details. None of Church’s drawings in this book are specific concerning the size, and he didn’t have anything to say about it in his interview with Round 2, except that the size had been unclear when he created his famous concept painting and that ILM would know more about the size.
It looks like Alex Jaeger started out with 1200 feet as a first estimate, then quickly realized he needed something bigger for John Eaves’ 40-foot shuttles. The Enterprise was even 1200m long in a chart from late 2007, and was then scaled down to 2500 feet in a chart from early 2008. Most sources now put it at 2379.75 feet, which is probably what ended up in the actual CG file given the precision.
The Main Engineering may be redesigned in the future according to Scott Chambliss, since the Budweiser site appears to have been a budget-driven choice. This book does have a concept sketch of a proper Engineering with a warp core. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what fans choose to ignore or not, but rather how the Budweiser plant can be rationalized in terms of canon.
On the Blu-ray (and DVD) extras they breifly address it with Alex Yeager where he mentions they doubled the size of the Enterprise over the original to ~1200 ft. So even with that starting point they still seemed to have doubled that number in the shuttle bay scene.
Jaeger doesn’t mention 1200 feet at all in that feature – he just says that the new Enterprise is a little over twice the length of the original (either 947 or 1000 feet, I’m not sure which one he was thinking of), which is consistent with 2379.75 feet. Later on he reads off the chart with 2500 feet, but this was probably revised later to 2379.75, seeing as the latter number is being forwarded to licensees nowadays.
It is possible that the 2379.75-foot figure may be revised slightly as someone starts figuring out the interior layout, but somehow I don’t think this will become a Defiant situation, where the official interior is about 1.5 times shorter than the baseline VFX size confirmed by both supervisors at the time (560 feet). The starting point ought to be the shuttlebay, which was canonized and should be mapped without revisions if possible, and then the rest can be derived from there.
@Boris — woops I watched the entire 2nd disc of my Blu-ray set, full of extras, all in one giant sitting Tuesday afternoon and didn’t remember the numbers said (clearly!).
I’ll be picking this one up! I wish I could be picking up an ENT one, too!! …maybe someday…
I bought this book, and I really loved it. After seeing the evolution of the Enterprise, I’m glad they went with what they did, because the other concepts were pretty weird looking.
Still, as I said in the “star trek the dvd and the art of trek come out tomorrow” thread, I’d love to see what you would have done with a rebooted Enterprise design John. Maybe someday we’ll see what you would have done. 🙂
I’ve got a drawing hanging on my wall and signed by John of a rejected NX01 concept that might have been a good contender for the new film.
Haveta pick it up at some point, eh. If not for the mere fact that you’re in it, dude. 😉
LLP,
deg
The instant this book shows up at the local Chapters, I’m pouncing on it. 😀
I envy you, guys!
Here, at the far side of the world, the wait is still on, sigh!
Please show us, overseas dudes, just a little peek!
Hey, John, have you considered that if you would had nailed this gig with your design, it would have been not one, nor two, but three 1701s in your resume?!
That is the “B” modifications (I’m afraid I don’t like it, not just a bit), the “E” (superb, magnificent, majestic, standing ovation -even though it has no impulse engine in the secondary hull-) and the new kid on the block.
Too much for one mortal to handle?
All the best for you
Gus
For a while there I though they where not going to make this book as this type of book normal comes out at the same time as the film and not the DVD.
Needless to say this is going on my wish list.
I’ve just ordered this book, really looking forward to when it arrives 🙂
“The Main Engineering may be redesigned in the future according to Scott Chambliss, since the Budweiser site appears to have been a budget-driven choice. This book does have a concept sketch of a proper Engineering with a warp core. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what fans choose to ignore or not, but rather how the Budweiser plant can be rationalized in terms of canon.”
Yeah, they decided to go on location because a set to the scale and detail of Abrams’ vision was out of reach of the budget, and the alternative, dropping in set extensions as visual effects was something Abrams wanted to avoid because of his improvisational directorial style and desire to keep as much in-camera and real as possible. So finding an industrial location was the only option. I’m in two minds about it myself – while I like the idea of a grittier more industrial aesthetic for Trek, I also don’t really want to be taken out of the movie by things that just look too familiar as present day environments. Finding a container ship or liner or something to shoot on would have been better IMO because at least ship engine rooms have that sense of direction and well, you can just tell when something is meant for propulsion purposes as opposed to making Bud Light. Though, it has to be said, the idea of a starship powered by beer is too cool for words!
You could probably rationalize the Budweiser plant in a reasonable fashion, but it’s not the same as actually designing it to make sense. Old-school Trek designers were very much into “form follows function”, working out the how’s and why’s as they developed their concepts, so collecting such information into a tech manual was usually a no-brainer. I’m constantly amazed at all the background information Andrew Probert can provide at the drop of a hat for his designs; such data should’ve been collected and published from the very start, but unfortunately, we’re only finding out about it now (better late than never, though). For instance, when I asked him about the Refit intermix chamber in an email, he mentioned that you can actually see its shielding on the miniature exterior, indicating precisely the extent of the conduits. I had never noticed that before, although it may have been published in one of the official sources from the TMP-era.
Of course, I prefer the original Jeffries concept of having the reactors in the nacelles – keeping reactants and radiation away from the crew. Main engineering would essentially be a control room. Visually less interesting but makes infinitely more engineering sense.
I don’t think we know the details of Jefferies’ intended reactor layout, only the basic idea that the nacelles are away on pylons in order to protect the crew from whatever was going on inside. Doug Drexler may have asked him while preparing the Captain’s Chair MSD, so we could check with him.
The book looks good after the first couple of read-throughs, but there’s two areas where I would have wanted to see much more of the pre-production material for: the Kelvin/simulator bridge set, and the Starfleet “guest ships”. A sign of my greed-induced discontent, I’m sure.