The ever popular Ships of the Line calendars spawned a very cool book back in 2006, which featured all our favourite starships in glorious detail, now fast forward to 2014, this book is to be released again, but this time greatly expanded.
The book has been written by Mike Okuda and edited by Doug Drexler and Margaret Clark and features loads of eye candy of Federation ships as well as those from alien species.
Available from Dec 2nd
I would like to wish Doug Drexler a very happy birthday today.
I have admired Doug’s work for a long time now and followed all his Drex Files blog posts and now his Facebook page.
There are many people that have worked on Star Trek, many of them are the pinnacle of their talent, no other show or franchise can boast the level of perfection of their creative forces than Star Trek, and for me, Doug is right at the top.
Doug is an Oscar winner, a Bafta winner, a Saturn winner and an Emmy nominated legend.
I’ve personally found him to be one of the most approachable celebrities, always happy to point people who ask in the right direction, without being smug or demeaning.
He continues to respond to fans about his time on Star Trek and I love his anecdotes and stories about his time working with some of the Star Trek actors we have come to immortalise.
I would also like to personally thank Doug for the help he has given me over the past year, it’s very much appreciated.
Happy Birthday Sir.
Below is Doug’s Wiki bio:
Doug Drexler was born in New York City and is a visual effects artist, designer, sculptor, illustrator, and a makeup artist who has collaborated with such talents as Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, James Caan, Meryl Streep, and Warren Beatty. He began his career in the entertainment industry working for makeup legend Dick Smith on such films as The Hunger and Starman.
He has also contributed to Three Men and a Little Lady, The Cotton Club, FX, Manhunter and Dick Tracy. Dick Tracy earned Drexler an Oscar, as well as The British Academy Award and the Saturn Award for his special makeup effects on characters such as Big Boy Caprice (played by Pacino) and Mumbles (played by Hoffman).
Two Emmy nominations in the same field followed for three years working on Star Trek: The Next Generation, where he performed such tasks as aging Captain Picard for “The Inner Light”. His final make-up job for the series, and perhaps his career, was the Mark Twain makeup worn by Jerry Hardin in the two part episode “Times Arrow”
In 1992 Drexler made a career change by moving over to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as designer, digital artist and effects artist. He continued in that capacity on the subsequent Star Trek films as well as Star Trek: Voyager.
In April 2001 Drexler worked as senior Illustrator and CGI designer on the fifth Star Trek series, Enterprise.
Doug designed the ship for this series, the Enterprise NX-01.
Following Enterprise, Doug was hired by renowned Visual Effects Supervisor Gary Hutzel as CG Supervisor on Battlestar Galactica, “Caprica”, “Blood and Chrome”, and “Defiance”. Doug won two Emmy Awards and a Visual Effects Society Award for Galactica.
It is with sadness that I report the death of veteran Star Trek property master Joe Longo, who died today.
Joe was a member of the art department who was the property master on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the first five seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation (sharing a weekly rotation with Alan Sims) and all seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The property master is an artistic and organizational employee in a film, television or theatrical production who is responsible for purchasing, acquiring and/or manufacturing any props needed for a production. The property master also works with other members of the production managing the physical appearance of the stage or set, for example they might work with the script supervisor to maintain set continuity. The property master is on staff during pre-production, develops the stylistic concept of the physical production, then continues on as a member of the physical shooting/production crew.
Thanks to Doug Drexler for the image.
A few days ago, Doug Drexler posted these very cool TOS poster books on his facebook page. A long time ago he ran a Star Trek store in Manhattan known as the Federation Trading Post and across the street was Fiona Press that had publishing rights to Star Trek. They knew nothing about Star Trek so fell right into Doug’s “Gravity Well” and the next thing he knew, he had his own magazine.
Doug published 12 of these beauties before moving onto other things. His favourite issue was “The Smithsonian Report – A Pictorial Inspection of Star Trek’s Miniatures Today”.
As Doug remembers…
“The Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C. let us in before the doors opened, and even gave us a ladder to get up close and personal with the TOS Enterprise filming miniature. I was in heaven. I climbed the ladder with anticipation, and planted one on the leading edge of the saucer”.
Many many people collected these poster books, something that was never available here in the UK. Since it’s publication run came to an end we have had 4 more Star Trek series on our screens but alas, no new poster books.
I decided to take the design and make a few cover issues myself, one for each series of Star Trek from TNG onwards. I have nowhere near the talent of these guys, but thought you guys might like them anyhows.
One of the coolest things you can find on a starship is the Master Systems Display, or Master Situation Monitor or MSD for short. This cut away diagram of the ship shows all the interior workings of the ship, from damage control, shuttle status and the where-abouts of the turbolift cars. Each ship from the late 23rd century had one of these displays. Some had one on the bridge while others had them in engineering, such as the Enterprise-D.
The MSD was invented by Mike Okuda and the first one was created for the sets of the Enterprise-D. According to the Encyclopedia, it included a number of in-jokes, including “the official USS Enterprise duck, the ship’s mouse, a Porsche, a DC-3 airplane, the Nomad space probe, and the hamster on a treadmill that was alleged to be the true source of power for the ship’s warp engines.”
Originally, Michael Okuda intended the “Master systems display” and the “Master situation monitor” to be two different objects, the “Master systems display” was the information console (affectionately dubbed the “pool table”) seen in main engineering on board the USS Enterprise-D, USS Enterprise-E, and at the back of the bridge on the Enterprise NX-01. The “Master situation monitor” was meant to refer to the wall mounted back-lit (cut-away) graphics of the ships in question.
Neither of the two designations were initially seen on-screen in their entirety, though there were “Master situation” bridge work stations on both the USS Excelsior and USS Enterprise-A in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
None of the wall-mounted graphics had a caption “Master systems display” until Doug Drexler updated the cut-away graphic for the Defiant-class. Drexler gave it the caption “master systems display”, which is legible in “Shattered Mirror” and “One Little Ship”. These were the only such graphics actually carrying the designation, as other MSDs were usually labeled with the ship’s name, registry, ship class, random numbering or any combination thereof.
Meet an online friend of mine – John Cooley; 42 and living in Las Vegas, John used to work on F-15 fighters in the US Air Force, but now works for Anovos, a virtual retailer that holds licenses from CBS and Paramount Pictures to reproduce costumes and uniforms from every era of Star Trek.
John met Joe Salcedo, co-founder of Anovos years ago through the same Star Trek costuming message boards they frequented. In December 2012, Joe asked John to become an admin for their various Star Trek Facebook pages, and seeing an opportunity to become more involved with Star Trek, John left the Air Force after 18 years and has no regrets. The risk seems to have paid off as he is now in training to become a Project Manager for Star Trek Brands for Anovos.
As is necessary when working in the world of Star Trek; John’s cultivated a number of working relationships with people who served in Star Trek’s art department like Doug Drexler. And John’s interests and projects in the franchise don’t stop with his job with Anovos, though at this moment in time, I’m not at liberty to divulge. Rest assured, the moment I know anything you will find out here first.
What I can tell you is that like so many of us, John thinks Star Trek’s true home is back on television.
I had a chat with John last night and during the discussion we threw some ideas at each other for a new Trek show and it appears we both think the same way in terms of what direction the franchise should take. A couple of points we agree on is that any new series should retain Gene Roddenberry’s message but also move forward and perhaps at times shake some of the childlike naiveté that sometimes creeps into the show.
My personal opinion is that any new series should build on the strengths of DS9 in that a huge story arc works very well, in fact, maybe make Star Trek into a serial, one that is bolder and grittier than it has ever been…think of it like this, Star Trek meets 24, where Section 31 is the Jack Bauer of Starfleet. But then that’s my opinion.
This is what John has to say about his new life in Star Trek in his own words:
“So the other day was Star Trek’s 47th Anniversary. Not as big of a deal as say the 50th in three years’ time, but an important one for me none the less. Last year, on the 8th September I was at Kinsley Field working on F-15′s. It’s a year later and now I’m working in the industry that Gene Roddenberry created called Star Trek.
I grew up a Trekkie, I don’t remember a time before watching it. And I think it’s because my favorite possession as a kid was my old green Star Trek shirt; that I grew up loving the uniforms of Trek. I slept in them, played in them and most of all I loved wearing them. Something about the uniforms more than toys or anything else served to make me feel like I was part of the crew of the Enterprise.
So when I left the Air Force and needed something else, the creator of this universe granted the fondest wish of a kid who grew up loving Starfleet uniforms and led me to Anovos. Friends who founded a company out of a shared love of the costumes and uniforms of the shows they loved, and a desire to create them for everyone to enjoy. What an awesome group of people…my friends. They demonstrated an enormous amount of faith in me, an outsider, who they chose to help be their voice here on interwebs. And they even extended their friendship to my brother Peter who they invited along with his camera. Too cool.
And then last week I’m told that in addition to my duties as part of Anovos’ Social Media team; that my training had already started to become the Star Trek Products Manager. It’s an honor to say the least and a responsibility I take very seriously, but the kid I was would be amazed and overjoyed to know that when he grows up he gets to work with his friends and with Star Trek uniforms every day!”
Keep an eye out for more of John and his ongoing – secret projects, remember, you will hear about them here first.
Some new visual candy due out on the 30th July with both Star Trek: The Next Generation season 4 Blu-ray and the remastered TNG episode “Redemption” also on Blu-ray.
The fourth season contains all new interviews with the production team of Doug Drexler, Herman Zimmerman, Mike and Denise Okuda, Dan Curry and Rick Sternbach.
Featuring all 26 episodes, including the iconic episodes of “The Best of Both Worlds”, “Brothers” and “Reunion”. All have been lovingly remastered and repackaged and included 6 discs.
There are also plenty of extras too, with “Relativity” a multi-part documentary that explores the relationships between characters and how the show followed the original Star Trek into popular culture.
In regards to “Redemption” (which is also included in the season 4 release), the 1-disc blu-ray combines the TNG season 4 finale Part 1 and Part 2 seamlessly together and features audio commentary from Ronald D Moore and Mike and Denise Okuda.
“Redemption” also includes it’s own documentary, “Survive and Succeed: An Empire at War”, again with interviews from Moore, and the Klingons Michael Dorn, Robert O’Reilly and Gwynyth Walsh.
TNG Season 4 remastered Blu-ray is available in the UK from 29th July at around £42.44 (Amazon UK) and “Redemption” as a US import.
For the US, season 4 will cost $130 and Canada $150, while “Redemption” will cost $28.28 in the US and $32.00 in Canada.
You can find alot written about Star Trek technology on the web, top ten of this and top 20 of that, a lighthearted look at the cool stuff seen in the show that people wish would become reality. Think holodecks and transporters, scientists of course wish for warp drive.
But what about those things you take for granted that had it’s roots in Star Trek? From the simple CD/DVD to your favourite mobile device and of course pioneering medical research.
In this article I’m going to take a look at a few things that really have changed the way in which we live our lives. I’m not suggesting that everything listed was invented by Trek, but some of the things seen in the show may not have been seen by the public before it’s release, that’s because Gene Roddenberry had a keen interest in science and knew about the development of certain products before the average person.
First up, the humble CD.
Way back in the day, the crew of the Enterprise were seen using a hexagonal data storage medium that was flat, slotted into a reading device and gave instant information, written and visual, to the user. Back in the 60’s people were either using vinyl or 8-track tapes to listen to music, and print was the only way to display text.
Around the time Star Trek was in production a German company released the cassette tape, pre-loaded with recorded music that became very popular through the 70’s and its popularity peaked in the late 80’s, until of course the compact disc really took off.
The first CD player was launched in 1982 but it really didn’t start to become popular until the early 90’s. The CD was first developed as a data storage device, intended to replace smaller capacity hard drives on early home computers as the data storage capacity was much higher, but it was music that really propelled the CD into the populus, and eventually surpassed the cassette tape.
Later, CD’s became a popular storage device, as was intended, enabling users to record images, text and movies that could be played on interchangable devices, enabling exchange of data from one person to another, much like the disc Spock would use on Enterprise, where data could be recorded from engineering and then displayed on the bridge.
Looking at the CD now, well, it’s barely used anymore, digital downloads are far more popular and with the capacity of USB drives, much, much larger than any disc the CD is a piece of tech that was first seen by many on Star Trek, but also one that has faded from general use, long before it’s debut in the 23rd century.
Lets up the ante, Mobile devices, more speciffically, the smartphone
Everyone knows the phrase “beam me up Scotty”, a line in fact, never spoken in any episode or movie, but iconic nevertheless. Kirk, leading an away team to some desolate planet (coz shuttle scenes were too expensive to make, the transporter was the cheapest way to go), needed a way to communicate with the Enterprise, and to get back to the ship.
In the early 80’s, the only way to commuincate with someone in the next town would be by the humble landline telephone. Then along came the brick, a huge push button telephone attached to a brief case that was so huge, it hardly looked like anything Kirk would use. Then came along the brief case free mobile, and the iconic flip phone. Now we have something that looked exactly like that which Kirk and co were using, flip up the case, press a couple of buttons and hey, your talking to your long lost family member on the other side of the world.
But as time went on, these things became smaller and smaller, it seemed to be the mission of Nokia to make the worlds smallest phone without looking to improve its function. That’s when Nokia died and Apple came to the fore.
With the introduction of the iPhone, the smartphone was born, and with it, the functionality of a mobile computer. Forget SMS, social networking on the move was the norm, in fact, people rarely use thier phone to just make phone calls.
These devices were almost certainly inspired by Star Trek, future developers were watching the series and thought how cool it would be to have a small communicator that could fit in your pocket. Now the phones have far surpassed the Starfleet issue communicator in fact, with certain apps, the phones are becoming more like tricorders, another trek piece of kit that has become a reality in the medical world (more later).
Moving on from the iPhone, we have the iPad.
Imagine (if you could afford to) you had three or four iPads scattered over your office desk, laptop sat next to them, large LCD TV mounted on the wall, USB memory sticks, and a Lion fish sat in the corner of the room. You could be forgiven calling your office a ready room, as it would look just like Captain Picard’s.
The iPad, especially with an LCARS app installed, is exactly like the PADD used by Starfleet. It can display almost anything you want, movies, pictures, music, documents, all with touch screen technology on a flat panel surface.
If you ask the people that worked on the Next Generation, one of the things they are most proud of when it comes to real world treknology, they would probably say the iPad.
The Next Generation came on air in 1987, the bridge was filled with flat panel, touch screen monitors and the PADD was seen for the first time. The closest we had in the real world to a PADD was a PDA, a small hand held version of the Windows Operating System, that could store as much as 64mb of data, Wow.
Tablets are now everywhere, and thier popularity seems to be increasing. Steve Jobs, Apple founder, was a fan of Star Trek and he made it known that he looked to the
show for inspiration, so no doubt here that the iPad is a direct piece of treknology that’s influence made it into the real world.
Now for proper science, the Transporter.
The notion of a teleportation device is nothing new, and was long the transportation device used in many sci-fi movies long before Star Trek, but it wasn’t until James Kirk and co used the transporter to beam to another world that it really entered into popular culture, and scientists everywhere thought of ways to make this technology a reality.
The word teleportation was coined in 1931 by American writer Charles Fort to describe the strange disappearances and appearances of anomalies, which he suggested may be connected. He joined the Greek prefix tele- (meaning “distant”) to the Latin verb portare (meaning “to carry”). Fort’s first formal use of the word was in the second chapter of his 1931 book, Lo!:
“Mostly in this book I shall specialize upon indications that there exists a transportory force that I shall call Teleportation.” Fort added “I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes, and superstitions. To some degree I think so myself. To some degree, I do not. I offer the data.”
Fort suggested that teleportation might explain various allegedly paranormal phenomena, although it is difficult to say whether Fort took his own “theory” seriously or instead used it to point out what he saw as the inadequacy of mainstream science to account for strange phenomena.
A scientist in Copenhagen managed to find a way to teleport groups of billions of atoms from place to another using light, quantum mechanics and magnetism to create entanglement. The leading scientist, a Professor Eugene Polzik and his team, moved the object by almost 18 inches:
“Creating entanglement is a very important step, but there are two more steps at least to perform teleportation. We have succeeded in making all three steps — that is entanglement, quantum measurement and quantum feedback.”
Although scientists are in agreement that moving a human from one place to another in an instant will likely be impossible, it would also be ethically and morally debatable; essentially killing a person and then re-assembling them somewhere else.
This technology however, might make it possible to transmit and process data at near light speeds.
Medical Tricorder
It’s a device first imagined on the original Star Trek series decades ago. And now, a real life company is working on a real life medical Tricorder in a laboratory at NASA. When the crew of the Starship Enterprise landed in San Francisco, they brought some pretty advanced medical devices with them. Perhaps the most famous is the Tricorder. The device that grabbed a patient’s vital signs in an instant, lives on in an old movie prop that Scanadu CEO Walter de Brouwer keeps in his lab at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.
“Just suppose that this would be in the hands of a consumer,” Brouwer said. “You know like you would have the power not only to know what’s going on with you, but also to help others.”
That prop was the inspiration for the Scanadu Scout. Like the Star Trek version, it comes in two pieces. The scanner was originally made to look just like the those in the movies, but now it’s a little easier to hold. And the computer device? Well, you already have that. It’s your smartphone. Biomedical engineer Brandon Woolsey shows how the Scout reads your heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen, and soon blood pressure, just by holding it between your fingers and your forehead.
“And every time I do this demo in front of a camera, my heart rate goes up,” Woolsey said. “The idea is to make it easy enough that people will do it often and start to learn about their own health. They can even tell their doctor, my heart rate is indeed low, but it’s always been low you know, look at the data from over the three months, it’s always been like that,” Brouwer said.
The idea of this little device has apparently made enough people’s hearts pound that it’s just set a new record for the most heavily funded Indiegogo campaign ever.
“When we clicked the button for Indiegogo, it came from all over the place!” Brouwer exclaimed.
At $200 a pop, more than 8,000 people in a hundred countries have ordered this early version of the Scout. They’ll be among the testers who help Scanadu win FDA approval.
[Scource: ABC7]
From the small amount of Star Trek technology mentioned above, we can see that the series has had a profound influence on our scientists and a profound effect on our lives. Most of the tech mentioned came from the mind of one man, Gene Roddenberry. Gene had a unique vision of the future, where spectactular tecnology used in the 23rd and 24th century were advanced enough to generate an exciting new universe, but not so out of this world that real world scientists would look at it and think “this is impossible”, in fact, what scientists thought was “this stuff is so cool, but wouldn’t it be great if we could have this stuff now, not just for our own use, but for everyone to use”
Gene was a futurist, just like his fellow contempories Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Hawking, and had a very creative mind, one that saw that the future of humanity was one we could all look forward too. We may not have got there yet, be we are well on the way, and Star Trek continues to influence scientists, politicians, and you and me, and one day, we may achieve the dream of Gene Roddenberry.
Speaking exclusively to startrekblog, Doug Drexler has this to say on the whole subject:
“The health of Star Trek is indicated by how far thinking it’s tech is. You can measure it’s heart by it’s ability to extrapolate far reaching technologies. Although Trek regularly utilized technology in it’s story telling, the high-impact technology came in definite waves that could be directly linked to the presence of Gene Roddenberry. The two Star Trek series that yielded it’s highest ratio of revolutionary stuff that the real world had to have, was the original Star Trek and The Next Generation… both Roddenberry driven shows.
While all of the various series were driven by human relationships and what it meant to be human, it was Gene Roddenberry’s singular fascination with the technological extensions of humanity that made Star Trek unlike any other science fiction television show. What’s the attraction? Pretty simple. People love their kids, and technology is our offspring. We can’t help but be fascinated by it. To be human is expressed by our ability to create. Understanding what it is to be human is the basis of Star Trek. Ideas, art, and technology are it’s mainspring, because true Star Trek is about promise.
Wireless hand sized communication devices, tricorders/sensing devices, artificial intelligence with personality, computers as an everyday presence that are capable of interacting on a verbal level, hospital beds that monitor patients, holodecks… all the stuff that stuck… came from the Roddenberry driven era of Star Trek.
It was Gene’s ability to recognize cutting edge, emerging, and sometimes far off technologies and their potential impact on the human condition that made Trek unique. Since Gene Roddenberry, there has been no one to take that place. Not that there aren’t people who have worked on the show over the years that are capable of similar foresight, but they have yet to be in a position of authority on Star Trek.
When Gene died, wisely or unwisely, the wheel was lashed. Now, although hundreds of years have passed between different eras of Star Trek, the basic complexion of it’s technology has not changed. This is contrary to what we experience in real life, and I feel certain that if Gene lived on, we would have seen him stretch Trek tech more to better illustrate potential human growth”.
Doug Drexler, Star Trek makeup artist, scenic artist, Illustrator, and VFX artist has has just been nominated for two Emmy Awards in the category of Outstanding Special Visual Effects 2013 for Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome and for the pilot episode of Defiance.
Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome is a prequel to the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series. It stars Luke Pasqualino, Ben Cotton, and Lili Bordán. Michael Taylor wrote the teleplay from a story by Taylor, David Eick, Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, with Jonas Pate as director. Distribution of Blood & Chrome began as a 10-episode online series in conjunction with Machinima.com on November 9, 2012, and also aired as a televised movie on February 10, 2013 on Syfy.
Defiance is an American science fiction television series developed for television by Rockne S. O’Bannon, Kevin Murphy, and Michael Taylor. The series is produced by Universal Cable Productions, in transmedia collaboration with Trion Worlds, who are producing an MMORPG video game of the same name, which will be tied into the series. Defiance stars Grant Bowler as Joshua Nolan, the local lawman in a border town known as Defiance, as well as Julie Benz, who plays the newly appointed mayor of Defiance, Amanda Rosewater. Also starring are Stephanie Leonidas,Tony Curran, Jaime Murray, Graham Greene, and Mia Kirshner.
Among the other guys that are nominated with Doug are (for Blood and Chrome) ; Gary Hutzel, VFX Supervisor; Michael Gibson, VFX Producer; David Takemura, Sr. VFX Coordinator; Doug Drexler, CGI Supervisor; Davey Morton, CGI Artist; Kyle Toucher, CGI Artist; Derek Ledbetter, Compositer; Heather McAuliff,Compositer; Jesse Siglow, Compositer.
And for Defiance; Gary Hutzel, VFX Supervisor; Michael Gibson, VFX Producer; Doug Drexler, CGI Supervisor; Davey Morton, CGI Artist; Neal Sopata, CGI Artist; Kyle Toucher, CG Artist; Sean Jackson,CG Artist; Douglas Graves, CG Artist; Derek Ledbetter,Compositor.
I will keep a keen eye on the awards and will post the outcome once it has been announced, Good Luck to both shows.
First up is this very cool Original Series Enterprise plush toy, which has some amazing detail. It has the aztec paint job on the saucer and a moulded deflector dish.
Made from polyester and plastic (the dish), and 10-inches, this has got to be a must have for any trekkie…im ordering mine as soon as possible.
Pre-orders in July, $16.95. Click here for more.
Also due this year is the Artisan Enterprise NX-01, the starship featured in Star Trek: Enterprise and designed by Doug Drexler.
With breathtaking grace, the dual-nacelled Enterprise established United Earth as a legitimate interstellar power and was the first human-made starship to hit warp 5. Now the ship under Captain Jonathan Archer in the Star Trek series, Enterprise, can be yours.
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