Ever since I was a kid I have loved to watch Star Trek reruns. Out of all the special effects I think I've ever seen, the transporter room beam out sequence has had the most affect on me. It always amazed me to see someone step onto one of the transporter pads and then disappear in a blaze of speckled light only to reappear on an alien planet. For a long time I have dreamed of being Captain Kirk and beaming myself out of that room, but until about 1994 I had neither the money, technology, or knowledge to really attempt this special effect for myself.
By the middle 1990's I had been out of school for a few years and now had quite a bit of time and money on my hands. I had recently bought a Nikon camera and had been attempting some preliminary transporter effects test shots to see if I could do them with my camera. At the time, I was using an in-camera optical compositing technique to do my test effects, and the optical technique I was using is theoretically similar to how a real optical printer works. Through my tests I found that the technique worked well enough that I could now attempt my long dreamed of special effect.
The first thing I needed to find was a photograph of the Enterprise's transporter room, preferably one with nobody standing in it. This picture would also have to be a fairly large and clear picture so that I could take a photograph of it. If I was lucky enough to find this picture, then I could theoretically do the composite effect right off the picture itself. I then spent about an hour looking through all of my special effects books trying to find a nice transporter picture. Although I was able to find many pictures of the transporter room, they always had someone standing in it or the picture was to small to be of any use. In the end, I decided that if I was going to get a good picture of the transporter room at the angle and height I wanted, I was just going to have to build a model of it myself and then photograph it under controlled conditions. I started the plans for the model in about February of 1994. I thought that I would be able to complete the model in a couple of weekends, but it ended up taking nine months to build!