Quite a while ago I talked about the process of building a Starship Bridge for my Star Trek - First Generation series. Next, I covered the process of creating a special effect like "beaming down". Tonight, I would like to continue along the same vein with a look at the artwork that completed that bridge that I first talked about.
The bridge of my USS Bunker Hill is admittedly, a pretty cool set, but what really makes it special is the artwork panels that appear at all the various crew stations.
Without that artwork, there really wouldn't be anything about the bridge to catch the viewer's eye. Those colorful panels that we have seen on the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, well... they are what make the starship set believable.
The ones I use on my set are highly detailed, they go together and they all came from a single source. Years ago, I picked up a Trekie "Manual" for the Deep Space Nine series. In that book were beautiful color plates of pretty much all of the control surfaces on the USS Defiant bridge. When I decided that I wanted to do a 1:6th Star Trek series and that I was going to build a scaled down version of the Defiant bridge, I had all the art at my fingertips.
It was just a matter of scanning it and scaling it down to the size of my model. I printed the final artwork on gloss photo paper so that I would have the sort of shiny "glass-like" surfaces that you see in the TV shows.
The effect worked far better than I ever imagined and the end result was a pretty realistic looking environment for my 1:6th actors to work in.
And it has held up pretty good over time, which is rather amazing considering that it came to Ohio in the back of the car and my first episode was shot on the dining room table of a temporary apartment the first month I was here. I think the Bunker Hill still has quite a few Voyages in her... going where no 1:6th Action Figure has gone before.
Until next time, have a good one!
Until next time, have a good one!
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