Cracking Station Model Web Page
This web page is dedicated to a Star Trek original series special effect miniature that I created over the course of about three weeks. This model represents the main entraceway into the engineering building of the lithium cracking station on the planet Delta-Vega. This entranceway appears in my most favorite Star Trek original series episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before", and it is the beam-down spot on the planet for the Enterprise command crew which included Lt. Gary Mitchell and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner.
This model was built between January 9th and January 23, 1999 and required a total of about 35 hours to build. This 1/7.4th scale model was 3.5 feet long, 2 feet wide and 16 inches tall. The model was constructed completely out of three colors of picture frame matte board, and it was built as a series of three separate frames. In order to give the model depth, these three frames were stacked in front of each other and then connected along one wall. See picture below. The model had no ceiling so that ambient light could be used to illuminate the model's interior colored walls.
The three main pictures shown below were all shot using a 50mm lens set at f22 with an 8 second exposure time using Kodak Gold 200 speed film. The model was lit using two 250 watt (photographically white light) blue bulb lights. Each of the three main images below required four hours of manual image processing time each. Image processing tasks included negative scanning and image cropping, dust speck and model flaw elimination, color correction and desaturation, blurring and image resizing operations. The size of each of the original images is 3000x2012 pixels and each are stored in 24 bit color.
I have no immediate plans to composite any special effects with this model. At this point, I just want to have some background plates of this building should I ever decide to do either an individual or group beam-down effect. In order to support future effects work, the camera and light positions used in photographing the model were carefully measured. In addition, the positions of where a variable number of transporter personnel should be standing during subsequent foreground plate photography was also recorded. These measurements will then be scaled up 7.4 times to obtain their full size set equivalents. Since this model is relatively large and because I'm rapidly running out of room in my little one bedroom apartment, I was forced to destroy this model on February 13th.
NOTES: Most of the images on this web page benefit from an 800x600 pixel display.
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