First announced just two weeks ago at San Diego Comic Con, more details on Star Trek: The Roddenberry Vault were shared by the team putting the amazing new Original Series material together for release later this year.
Producer Roger Lay, Jr., along with Rod Roddenberry, Mike and Denise Okuda, Roddenberry Entertainment’s Trevor Roth, and CBS Home Entertainment’s Phil Bishop took the stage in Las Vegas on Friday to share with the Trekkie crowd their plans for the massive film recovery project – and share the first restored footage set to hit Blu-ray towards the end of 2016.
“There is missing footage from the original show that we have discovered; there are moments you haven’t seen,” said Lay. “Even some scenes from some of our favorite episodes that didn’t make the final cut.”
“It’s snippets [of footage],” said Denise. “It’s what ended up on the cutting room floor.”
Some of the James Blish TOS novelizations, which included hints of missing or cut scenes from the final aired TOS episodes – many of which were found for the Vault project.
Denise Okuda revealed that Roth brought her and Mike into this massive secret – the existence of this lost-to-time collection of Original Series film reels – nearly a decade ago, and that the team had to keep their endeavour to bring it to the public under wraps up until this month.
The crowd was treated to the same documentary interview preview clips featured at the Roddenberry Vault SDCC panel from last months, featuring shots of the ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’-like warehouse of film reels, and the Okudas’ exuberance at the experience of seeing brand new Star Trek footage for the first time in five decades.
“It was very difficult to approach [this project] without having an endgame,” said Bishop. “It was no good [just] looking at a few cans – we really had to look at absolutely everything… thousands of cans of film. We had to look at every can, because that ‘golden moment’ could be in the last can.”
Rod Roddenberry and the shelves and shelves of archived film reels.
“This wasn’t reels of film, neatly labeled – you’d open a can and find four or five snippets… and the audio that matched might be two hundred feet away in another can,” Bishop continued. “It was a true puzzle.”
“To be honest,” said Rod Roddenberry, “Ninety-five percent of it is just the end of the take or something; not that interesting. But the gems were in there – and you need someone to go through all of it to find those gems.”
Trevor Roth detailed the long and complicated life of these film clips, from their origination in piles of loose film from the cutting room floor, to storage in multiple locations with terrible climate and humidity issues, to the difficult process of getting the ragged film ready for digital scanning… and all that was before the three-year project watching the footage even began.
“They were almost done,” revealed Roddenberry. “And then we came across like another fifty cans!”
CBS Home Entertainment’s Phil Bishop and Roddenberry Entertainment’s Trevor Roth. (Photo: @TrekRadio)
In terms of presenting the footage to Star Trek fans on home media, Lay revealed that nearly eighty hours of new interviews were conducted with “pretty much everybody who’s still alive” from the Original Series, cast and crew from the modern shows, and other Trek fans, to “create a narrative” in which to feature the new material.
Entertainment reporter (and massive Trek fan) Scott Mantz joined the group on stage, describing his shock and amazement at seeing clips of the newly-restored footage, and talked about some of the content – including an extended scene between Kirk and Edith Keeler from “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and the long-rumored lost ending of “Who Mourns for Adonais?,” where Carolyn Palamas is revealed to be pregnant by Apollo.
Denise Okuda clarified Mantz’s description of the scenes: “Yes, we have it, but it’s a single shot of Spock, and the script supervisor is reading McCoy’s lines,” she said, reaffirming to the audience that much of the footage is ‘behind the camera’ content, and not final episode clips with music or voiceover work.
“I don’t want you guys to get the DVDs and go, ‘We’re going to see all this extra footage!’ Well, you will, but it’s presented in a different way,” she stated, making sure to calibrate fans’ expectations of this new material. “The footage will be intertwined [in the new interviews].”
Mantz still maintained his excitement: “Try to imagine Paul McCartney taking you track by track through a lost Beatles album. That’s what this is.”
The Star Trek: The Roddenberry Vaultrelease is expected in late 2016.
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Roddenberry.com filmed the panel today, and we’ve embedded their video below.
Star Trek gurus Mike and Denise Okuda held a panel on the newly-updated Star Trek Encyclopedia at the ongoing STLV convention in Las Vegas on Thursday, revealing new details on the updated reference guide arriving in October.
Denise and Mike Okuda on stage in Las Vegas on August 4. (Photo: Claire Little)
This endeavor – to update the most comprehensive print guide to the Star Trek mythos from its last release in 1999 – was a massive, two-year project requiring the addition of the final season of Deep Space Nine, nearly a third of Voyager, all of Enterprise, and several Trek feature films.
After several years of wondering if the project would ever be revived, CBS’s John Van Citters took the Okudas out to dinner and revealed the the Encyclopedia had been green-lit for a new edition.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BItZL8QjmES/
The Okudas revealed some additional detail about how the project was tackled this time around – for example, Memory Alpha wasn’t consulted in any of their new research. “Any mistakes have to be our mistakes,” said Denise, who took the lead on the new round of Trek research. “We go with what’s on-screen as gospel.”
The Charybdis mission patch seen on DVD (left) and Blu-ray (right) – from TNG’s “The Royale.”
In terms of the new (or updated) content, the pair of hardcover books includes digital renders from the remastered editions of the Original Series (like the Antares from “Charlie X”), as well as some of the tweaks made to the Blu-ray edition of The Next Generation, such as the updated Charybdis mission patch seen in “The Royale” – treating the remastered editions of each show as the new canon.
Because the Encyclopedia is presented as an in-universe style – that is, written for readers living in the Star Trek universe – an official name for the “JJ-verse” film timeline was required, which is why Mike Okuda finally was tasked to create the Kelvin Timeline moniker for the film series.
“We wanted to [include the KT],” explained Mike, “in a way that didn’t place the Abrams films into a second-class position.” (Time constraints prohibited any inclusion of Star Trek Beyond content.)
Graphics artist Clint Schultz, who worked on both the 2009 Star Trek film and 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, also contributed some artwork for entries from the Kelvin Timeline.
The Okudas joined Starfleet for TOS Remastered. (“The Menagerie, Part I”)
The authors’ favorite new inclusion in the new Encyclopedia is a nice look at the Starbase 11 matte painting from the remastered version of “The Menagerie, Part I,” with the pair in Starfleet uniform, the pair’s most visible Star Trek appearance. “We normally work in the art department as far behind the camera as possible,” said Mike, “but in that moment we got to be in a Star Trek episode.”
Finally, in regards to an updated version of the Star Trek Chronology, last released in 1996, the Okudas didn’t expect that project to be undertaken any time soon, if at all, but included an appendix to the new Encyclopedia that serves as a “Chronology Lite” feature.
STAR TREK BEYOND had some of the most radical new designs in all of the Trek movies, from the beautiful Yorktown Station to the worn-out USS Franklin to the underground caverns on Altamid… and of course – spoilers! – that other new starship, too.
This week, artists Victor Martinez and Sean Hargreaves have begun to release their amazing concept artwork for this summer’s new Trek adventure, showcasing the brilliant design work that goes into bringing the film to life.
Spoilers below!
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Victor Martinez shared much of his work around the crew’s visit to planet Altamid, and Krall’s facility located on that abandoned planet.
An early – an ultimately unused – ‘battle shuttle’ design. (Credit: Victor Martinez)
This “battle shuttle” was an early design ultimately cut from the film after script revisions, which Martinez described as ” a small, agile fighter able to house [a few] passengers riding tandem like a toboggan, ideal for situations requiring nimble maneuvers…perhaps influenced the enemy Swarm ships seen in the final film.”
Krall’s restraints for the Starfleet prisoners. (Credit: Victor Martinez)An early design for Altamid, the planet on which the Enterprise crashes. (Credit: Victor Martinez)Krall’s docking station, under Altimid’s surface. (Credit: Victor Martinez)
Sean Hargreaves’ work for BEYONDcentered around Starfleet’s industrial design, from the gargantuan Yorktown Station to the relatively tiny Franklin – and the newly-revealed Kelvin Timeline’s Enterprise-A, which made its first appearance at the end of the film.
Inside and outside Yorktown Station. (Credit: Sean Hargreaves)
Looks at the Franklin – and the flipped, early version known as the Pioneer. (Credit: Sean Hargreaves)
The Franklin, which first revealed itself to the world back in January right here on TrekCore, originally began as an inverted-nacelle ship called the USS Pioneer, which was able to take off vertically right from the surface of a desert where it was half-buried.
As the BEYOND script evolved to have the Franklin buried in rock and rubble on Altamid, Hargreaves eventually flipped the nacelles to the upper position to allow for Sulu’s “kick-start” maneuver seen in the film.
The newest ship in the fleet: the Enterprise-A. (Credit: Sean Hargreaves)
Hargreaves’ final contribution to the Kelvin Timeline is the newly-constructed Enterprise-A, launching from Yorktown at the end of the movie.
This was the design I gave visual effects, so any changes beyond what you see here were out of my hands, but looking at the film, it’s pretty close. The brief was to beef up the neck and arms, but I took it upon myself to go further.
Only one [revision was needed], an adjustment on the engine taper… this was accepted quickly.
We caught up with STAR TREK BEYOND co-writer Doug Jung ahead of the July 22 premiere, and now that a little time has passed with the film in theaters, we thought it was safe to now share our spoiler-heavy interview – talking about everything from Jaylah and Krall’s backstory to the writer’s surprising on-screen debut as Sulu’s husband.
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TREKCORE: I want to hear about how you and Simon collaborated. You didn’t know each other, right?
JUNG: We didn’t know each other, but obviously I was a fan of Simon, and knew him from his work. I work with Bad Robot, and he and J.J. Abrams are close, and they were just saying, you know, “Listen – he’s great. Simon might be a movie star or celebrity or whatever, but he’s great; a really creative guy.”
We just met and we sort of got on. He’s great. He’s cool. He’s as smart and funny and nice as you’d imagine.
Jung on set with director Justin Lin.
We started off with a blank page. The creative team of this movie had never met each other before – and had nothing. [Laughs] I give Bad Robot, J.J., and [producer] Lindsey Weber a lot of credit to be able to wrangle that and to get something out of us.
TREKCORE: In terms of your process, how did you come up with some of the deep-dive Trek references?
JUNG: A lot of them kind of came from like, we remembered something or we knew kind of what we wanted, and we’d think, “Oh, it would be great if we could find something that fit that.”
A lot of those line references are us just sort of having fun, like when Simon says “the big green hand” or we took some names of some red shirts that had been killed. So a lot of those were us just sort of having fun – but there were other things that were built into the mythology that helped us.
A big green hand grabs the Enterprise. (TOS: “Who Mourns for Adonais?”
For example, we had the idea with [Krall]. We knew what we wanted him to go through. We knew we wanted him to have this sort of idealistic, philosophical difference with Starfleet, but we didn’t quite have why – so we were like, “Maybe he came from this world that was taken over by the Federation,” but then we were sort of like, “Well, why don’t we wrap it back around in the mythology?” and we got to, “Why don’t we make him a former member of M.A.C.O.?”
We get to shine a light on what I imagine would have been a very turbulent time, right before the Federation is created. And for him to be in that sort of precipice of change and to be a guy who is being asked to make a big change, and is unable to do it, that sort of just fit in thematically with everything we were sort of saying. So it was a gift of fifty years of Trek lore rising to the surface when we need it.
Two M.A.C.O. marines posted to the Enterprise NX-01. (ENT: “North Star”)
TREKCORE: That’s such a great reference. I never would have thought the M.A.C.O. forces would have been disbanded because of that kind of thing.
JUNG: I thought it’d be kind of interesting, too. You can make some modern analogies in terms of like the CIA, which is – you’re asking these people, you’re training them their whole lives to see the world one way, and then you say, “Oh, by the way, you’re now obsolete, but we’d like you to do [this other thing].” It’s tough.
TREKCORE: Did you feel any responsibility to include these types of deep Trek things?
JUNG: I don’t think we felt like we had to do it, but we wanted to do it – and also, there was some kind of sneaky fun in it. But for sure, we wanted fans to feel like we weren’t taking too pedestrian of a view of this.
Greg Grunberg appears as Commander Finnegan. (“Star Trek Beyond”)
TREKCORE: I have to ask you, Greg Grunberg’s character, in the credits, is Finnegan – from “Shore Leave,” right?
JUNG: Yeah, that’s right! [Laughs] I totally forgot that. That was a Simon thing. And some of the dates we used were references; we talked about the ship a lot, the Franklin. But that was all fun, too, you know – like back then, they didn’t actually have human transporters, you couldn’t beam a human up.
So we had to put a line in where Scotty says, “I made these recalibrations.”
TREKCORE: So, in terms of the script – tell me about the evolution of Jaylah.
JUNG: We wanted to have a strong female character; I think Simon’s talked about this, like Jennifer Lawrence in “Winter’s Bone.” We just kept referring to her as ‘Jennifer Lawrence’ for a long time, then somebody, joking, was like J-Law? [Laughs]
Jennifer Lawrence in 2010’s “Winter’s Bone,” and Sofia Boutella’s Jaylah.
TREKCORE: Well, no one picked up on it until you guys talked about it!
JUNG: Well how would you? [Laughs] It’s so esoteric. But phonetically, it sounded good – ‘Jaylah.’ It sounded a little foreign.
We wanted her character to be someone who was outside of the understanding of the Federation and what it means, and really, to really be a blank slate in the sense that she has no real understanding even of her own people, in a way.
Again, it’s a little bit obvious, but she’s basically a survivor who is all about herself. Even the initial deal she makes to help the crew, she doesn’t do it out of the kindness of her heart. We thought it would be nice to have a character who can feel the full effect of what it means to be a part of this Federation and this group of people. To adopt their sort of unifying way in which they look at who they are.
She was kind of great, and Sofia was amazing. As soon as we saw the makeup effects they were going to use, we knew it was going to be great.
TREKCORE: Okay, same thing for Krall – what was your goal with his character?
JUNG: That was one of the first conversations we had. Again, we were trying to find something that felt it was worthy of the fifty-year anniversary – so a character who could challenge the Roddenberry universe.
Justin had an interesting take on it. He’s a Taiwanese-born guy who’s interested in politics, and I am, too, and we had this talk, with Simon, too, saying “Could that utopian kind of universe actually exist? What does that mean? Is it even necessarily good – and without a sort of Darwinist drive, do people evolve or will they just not? And what is the Federation?” If you look at it one way, it feels like it’s sort of colonization.
Krall aims his weapon. (“Star Trek Beyond”)
These are themes that have sort of been addressed in Star Trek. We thought it would be an interesting thing to bring up and also parallel with Kirk’s personal journey of realizing his initial purpose for joining Starfleet – or, at least one of them – has been accomplished. He’s eclipsed his father. Now what? Now what do you do?
It sort of felt like they were all kind of dancing around the same idea of “How do you find purpose? What does it mean that we’re trying to create this ideal as a society?” That’s how Krall came out of it.
TREKCORE: What about the challenges in conveying the whole ‘DNA vampire’ aspect – about how Krall was sustaining himself on the lives of other people?
JUNG: Well, here’s the thing – it was really easy to talk about, but once we got there it was pretty challenging. There were ways we could have done it to demonstrate that he has this technology, but again, if you get to into it you start to cast light on some of the things that might not be quite as believable – or, you just tip your hat too much that he’s not who he is.
We had a lot of different versions. We hinted at it a lot more at one point. We talked about it more at one point. And then ultimately we just sort of decided that we needed it to be part of the whole reveal package. It’s a complex idea, if you really think about what he had to do and how he had to get there.
Captain Balthazar Edison… and his later appearance as Krall. (“Star Trek Beyond”)
TREKCORE: The lynchpin of the movie is the reveal of Krall’s true history – I loved it, but as I was watching I knew some people would say, “Oh, it’s just another bad guy in heavy makeup.”
JUNG: Well, there was actually another phase [of makeup] that we took out, where Krall became too human-looking, and you would have connected the dots a little more. But one thing that surprised me is that no one was saying “Oh, there’s Idris Elba in a lot of makeup; there’s an NX ship that seems like it shouldn’t be there. He’s going to end up being the [captain.]”
JUNG: But that was a tough one; that was one of the big balancing acts. How do we portray this guy without giving away too much, to kind of make him interesting and try to make him seem like he’s not just another dude with a beef. At some level you can’t avoid that. You have to preserve the things to come.
But because we were preserving that surprise, there was no other way to do it than to basically have him talk about it. And to have him talk about it in the past was much better than to have him talk about it in the future.
There was one version where he was talking about in the future, and he explained it all, and it leaves [the audience] wondering, “Why are you explaining this to us? No one cares. We just want you dead.”
Krall’s drone soldiers overpower the Enterprise crew. (“Star Trek Beyond”)
TREKCORE: Justin Lin talked a bit in our interview about backstory to the drone soldiers that didn’t make it into the film – can you expand a bit on that?
JUNG: We had loftier ambitions about that planet from early on. Justin’s idea was that [the soldiers] were sort of like drones in a way, and that they don’t actually have a lot conscious thought of their own. That sort of answers how Krall would be able to come in and take all this stuff.
But they weren’t a society that had weaponized anything. He took this energy source and perverted it in a particular way, and took over what was essentially a mining colony out there. It was one of those things were we felt that he didn’t have an invading force, but he was taking his skills as an ex-soldier and applying them in a way that he probably never thought he would have to do.
Ben (Doug Jung) runs for safety as he carries his – and Sulu’s – daughter. (“Star Trek Beyond”)
TREKCORE: What about your role in the film as Ben, Sulu’s partner? Had you ever acted before?
JUNG: No, I’d never done it before, and it sort of came up as a last minute thing. There was an actor they had cast in Dubai – and it is really hard to cast in Dubai, because there are not a lot of local actors – and he fell out for whatever reason and Justin and Lindsey kind of said, “Listen, if you’d be up for it, it would be great. Cho’s up for it.”
I was self-conscious about just being up on the screen. I’m not an actor. But Cho’s amazing just in the way we talked about it, and how Justin wanted to it, and how everyone wanted to portray it.
It was great to do and I was really proud to be able to do it, because it’s not often you get to put your money where your mouth is and it’s something we all believed in so strongly.
As you know from the our last two years of coverage on the topic, the classic USS Enterprise model from the original Star Trek series has undergone a massive renovation and is now back on display at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
While there’s a full two-hour documentary on the process coming from the Smithsonian Channel in September – and of course, our series of interviews with the model team – one of the primary contributors to the project, ILM modelmaker and visual effects artist Bill George released a video last night of the intricate repainting process needed to bring the starship back to life.
It’s the end of the line for the crew of the Enterprise-D, as Captain Picard’s journey through time and space requires him to think beyond his normal comprehension to solve Q’s ultimate test – and undo twenty-five years of history to save the universe!
After one hundred and seventy-six episodes, it’s the final entry in our Star Trek: The Next Generation Blu-ray comparison videos!
A new video released this week from WIRED dives into some of the heavy-duty visual effects work used to bring STAR TREK BEYOND to the big screen.
From the ample use of greenscreen set extension aboard the Enterprise to the creation of Krall’s drone soldiers, the newest Trek adventure may have been filled with more graphic work than you may have expected.
In a newly-released interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, STAR TREK BEYOND director Justin Lin noted that the final length of his original edit ended up being two hours and twenty-seven minutes long, nearly thirty minutes longer than the final cut of the film.
Collider: So is there going to be a bunch of deleted scenes, or…
Lin: No… no. The thing that Simon and Doug, I have to say I really enjoy – these scenes come in long. But long and compelling, you know? At 2:27… well, I shouldn’t just blame them. The action sequence came in pretty long too!
It was interesting because at the end of the day, there was only a couple of scenes that I ended up not using. But it was really a contraction issue; a rhythm issue.
Collider: Oh I get it, a lot of people don’t realize you’re cutting frames, cutting little bits in the same frame, just to move it quicker.
Lin: For example, if you see in the movie, Scotty runs into the torpedo bay, and then you see Manas come in, and you see the torpedo being loaded [for Scotty’s escape from the Enterprise]. But there was this great one-er of going with Scotty – he’s trapped, he has nowhere to go – and he’s looking and looking and he finds that there’s a torpedo being repaired. He reacts like “What the hell!”
Simon did such a great job and I didn’t want to cut, and that was one of the last shots I ended up removing because it was not helping the overall [flow], even though I loved the performance; I loved that moment.
Collider: Will I see that on the Blu-ray, or will I not?
Lin: I haven’t decided yet.
Collider: I’m telling you, as all fans – they want to see this kind of stuff.
Lin: I know, I know… but I’ll tell you as a filmmaker – I spend hours and days and every frame of that movie, I’m fighting for, you know? And unless the studio gives me the money to go back in and get all those things right, I don’t feel comfortable sharing that.
Collider: I get it, I get it. It’s not finished.
Lin: Yeah. If it’s greenscreen and visual effects or CG is not totally done, it takes you out.
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When we caught up with Lin at the London premiere, the director told us about how much material was scripted but never got shot due to time constraints, but this is his first statement about filmed footage that didn’t make it to the theatrical release.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eObxNzsZk4
There are hints to much of this deleted content in the various trailers and TV spots released ahead of the BEYOND debut, with several lines and shots present in those promotional videos not included in the final film.
Uhura’s status report appeared in the second trailer.Another Uhura line, standing up to Krall and Manas, was removed.An ad-libbed, alternate line from the opening of the film appeared in a TV spot and web featurette.Kirk and Spock don’t answer McCoy’s “You really want to head back out there?” in the final cut.
In addition, Simon Pegg revealed a deleted scene involving McCoy’s reluctance to carry a weapon to ShortList.com a few days ago:
There was a whole thread in the film which didn’t make the final cut about Bones picking up a gun and having a crisis of what it meant to fire a weapon. He is a life-saver and not a soldier.
There was some really nice stuff which didn’t make the cut – which often happens – and [Karl Urban] was great with all that stuff. He’s a very funny and cool guy to be around.
A foggy view of Yorktown from the December teaser trailer.
The crew’s terror – and what they’re looking at – are all out.
Oh, and this wasn’t a cut from the trailers, but it’s interesting to note that this consistantly-used shot of the Swarm ships buzzing Yorktown’s towers – while the station crew runs below – ends up actually being the final resting place of the Franklin at the edge of the waterfront in the final cut, with the Yorktown crew running in to help.
The marketing teams needed shots of Yorktown for the trailers, as one BEYOND editor told us, but because not much was available so early in the post-production process, this shot of the Frankin resting on the city plaza was provided – with the downed starship digitally removed.
The Franklin was ‘painted out’ of this shot for use in trailers to avoid spoilers.
Anyone who reads our site regularly knows that we’re a big fan of those deleted scenes, alternate takes, and other cuts that end up not making the final edit – so we’re hoping to see at least some of this content in the STAR TREK BEYOND Blu-ray content!
We’ve got another new STAR TREK BEYOND poster out of South Korea today, with the first inclusion of Sean Hargreaves’ gorgeous Yorktown Base in the film’s advertising campaign.
Yorktown Base was an enormous digital model, featuring over 100 Million polygons even in its earliest computer-generated structure – and this bright and sunny location looks amazing on this poster design.
Well, just because STAR TREK BEYOND is out in the USA and many countries around the world, that doesn’t mean we’re done seeing new advertising art!
A new poster for the film arrived from South Korea today, featuring the Enterprise crew, Jaylah, and the crashed and smoking saucer of their downed vessel.
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