Συνέντευξη του Rick Sternbach στον Δημήτρη Ψαθά και τον Γιώργο Γιαγλή για το Star Trek Greece
How did you get involved in Star Trek? What were your responsibilities as a senior illustrator and designer?
I was lucky enough to meet up with Gene Roddenberry at a showing of "The Cage" at Yale University in Connecticut in 1974; by that point I was already a working SF and astronomical artist, so I brought some samples to show. There had been preliminary plans to make a Star Trek film and I wondered about getting into the industry. We got to talking for a few hours after the screening, though it would be a few years until I would meet with the art department folks for the aborted Phase II production in Los Angeles in 1977, and eventually got hired on for Star Trek: The Motion Picture early in 1978. My job was to create designs for ships and props that were mentioned in the movie or TV show scripts, draw occasional storyboard sequences to assist the visual effects department, and produce illustrations of sets to show the producers what things would look like before construction began. Most of the time, however, a quick 3D model built from lightweight foamcore showed the producers, director, and camera folks a lot more than one or two sketches could.
How do you proceed on designing a ship or a station? How long does the whole process usually take?
Depends on the ship. Some designs that we would see only once, an “alien ship of the week,” might only take a scribbly sketch on a scrap of paper and the VFX folks would get a physical model or a CG model built and then animated. Other major ships, like Voyager, took a total of five months of sketching and CG roughs and redesigns and eventually full scale blueprints.
Does form come before function or function before form? When you designed the U.S.S. Voyager's variable-geometry warp nacelles or the multi-vector assault mode of U.S.S. Prometheus, was it something that you first imagined and the writers used afterwards, in order to create interesting scripts? Or was it the other way round, i.e. the writers demanded some kind of innovation and you made it happen?
Most of the time the scripts called for a certain kind of ship or structure or prop, and if the writers didn’t specify certain bits, we simply designed them according to what we knew of the stylistic requirements (like Starfleet vs. Klingon). Because Trek is a science fiction media franchise, and for a designer like myself, it really requires a mix of engineering plausibility and visual coolness. Most of the time, that works out fine. For things like Voyager’s nacelles, the producers asked for something to move on the ship, we gave them four or five different possibilities, they picked the moving pylons, and those got drawn into the blueprints. Prometheus was described in the script from the start as being able to split into pieces, so that’s how it was designed. Some basic things about ships like Voyager were designed in, just because I knew what all good Starfleet ships have, and the producers were given an entire booklet about those details. On occasion, they’d apply one of those details to a story. Producer Jeri Taylor asked for antimatter pods to be used as depth charges, and I was happy to help that happen.
When you design alien ships, do you want them to reflect in some way the “character” of the species?
It doesn’t always work out like that, but in some cases, the shapes and colors and other design elements from a culture’s makeup or costumes or interior sets can get worked into an exterior ship design. With the Hirogen ships, some interior bits were definitely incorporated, like the long pointy nacelles. With the Cardassians, the Galor class cruiser and the DS9 station deliberately reflected that culture.
Speaking of alien spacecraft, you designed the model of Deep Space 9 station with Herman Zimmerman. Would you tell us a little about the creation of this design?
While the producers were evolving their backstory about the station, we attempted to keep up with evolving designs, from an ancient alien place not built by the Cardassians, to a crazy patchwork of space structures, to a stacked design like an oil rig, through the final design of a central core and nested rings and tall pylons. When it became clear that the Cardassians did build the station, we added the right stylistic details and I drew the blueprints up for construction.
You wrote the Star Trek: The Next Generation USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D Blueprints. What process do you follow in order to complete such an enormous task as that of drafting blueprints for a whole starship?
It’s basically like blueprinting any large structure; it’s just that this one was a fictional spaceship. We knew the size, we knew the hardware filling the interior, as well as the habitable rooms, so it really came down to laying out big sheets of drafting vellum and mylar and measuring and drawing things to scale. A lot of the ship was unknown, of course, so those spaces needed to be invented with the help of folks like Todd Guenther. A lot of the interior elements were repeatable, like rooms, so the actual number of unique items was manageable.
You also drafted the blueprints for the Enterprise-E. Due to various things said in First Contact and Nemesis, there has been much confusion about the actual number of decks on this ship. Could you shed some light on the subject?
Not a lot.
I think it came down to the writers not checking, but that happens occasionally, so we note it and move on.Do you have any favorite designs among all the starships and stations presented in Star Trek?
As for ships I didn’t work on, the 1701-Refit is one of the coolest designs in the Trek universe. Within the batch I worked on, it’s still a toss-up between Voyager and the Vor’Cha class Klingon cruiser.
The PADD was also one of your creations. Did you think back then that we would have similar devices, like the tablets of today, so soon in real life?
Well, I knew they’d be coming along, I just wasn’t sure exactly when. All of us who have designed hardware for science fiction productions have kept our eyes on computer developments for years. So tablets and smartphones and such aren’t exactly surprising, but they are amazingly cool. I’ve been able to run a hi-def slide show from an iPod, and when I started out in the early 1970s it took two film slide projectors and a dissolve unit to get the same kind of basic visual look. And that’s aside from shooting the images with a 35mm SLR and getting the slides made.
Star Trek has if fact influenced and in some cases even triggered real-life technological advancements. Would you like to comment on that?
That’s a pretty broad statement, but it’s well known that a lot of people in the sciences and engineering have been inspired by shows like Star Trek and went into their chosen fields because of the possibilities presented in the shows.
As a technical consultant to the script staff, how difficult was maintaining the chronological continuity among the enormous amount of scripts?
Keeping track of the technological concepts offered to the writers and producers was actually pretty easy, especially with our desktop computers for creating and storing the memos and drawings. The writers were good listeners, and they got to understand how the ships and systems normally worked based on our internal tech booklets and script notes. When they needed something to go haywire or operate in a different way, we worked that out and offered suggestions.
How did you come up with all the technical terminology you've invented over the years?
I’ve followed science and technology ever since I was a kid, watched science fiction films, documentaries, read space books, built model rockets, and so on. I went into art instead of hands-on engineering, but one should remember that every major space project we’ve ever attempted started with technical art. Aside from knowing how to draw and paint, it’s good to know about materials and processes, thrust-to-weight ratios, propulsion and power generation systems, environmental control and life support issues, celestial mechanics and guidance and navigation. A little of everything; mostly through reading and listening and talking with experts over the years.
You co-authored The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine & Voyager Technical Manuals. How did you manage to maintain scientific plausibility in the concepts described both in the series and the books? Why hasn't the Voyager TM been published?
Writing the tech manuals really connects to the previous answer. Once you know something of how real space systems operate, it isn’t that much of a stretch to invent new ones, to extrapolate developments in physics and other areas to give the readers some interesting future ideas. There are lots of little mental details that do enter into a new fictional tool or system, like materials, energies required, construction time, mass, and so on, but a lot of those can be established as internal rules during production. And it’s that internal consistency that has been a hallmark of Star Trek since the very beginning.
Regarding the Voyager manual, it’s a matter of the time and money resources the publisher licensees might want to apply to a Voyager book versus possible sales, and so far they’ve not expressed enough interest. Simple as that.
Which of all the types of work you did for Star Trek -designing ships and stations, drafting blueprints, creating models and props, illustration etc.- was the most satisfying for you?
It’s all satisfying, since it’s all one big process of creating things apparently out of thin air. The internal rules I spoke of keep it all from exploding into silliness, even with accepting some slightly implausible concepts for the sake of drama, and I like that.
Would you share with us some of your favorite moments of all those years of working on Star Trek?
There are a few tales I’ve told on occasion, sure. In the very early days of working with our Macintosh computers, Patrick Stewart would come upstairs to the art department and ask Mike Okuda and myself techy questions about his own Mac. He once wondered, 'I know Command-X makes a bit of text disappear... and I know you can bring it back, but where does it go? It’s very disconcerting.'
On Star Trek: The Motion Picture, director Robert Wise deliberately held up filming, waiting for me to get to stage to tell Jimmy Doohan (Engineer Montgomery Scott) which controls to activate in the Starfleet travel pod; I had designed the touch displays.
You have worked for many science magazines and research institutions. In which ways does that work differ from creating designs for TV and films?
It’s very similar, but differs a bit in that more realistic science and engineering come into play. When portraying historical or future space exploration scenes, it’s good to know about the real space systems I mentioned earlier, and for those of us who are astronomical artists specifically, it’s also good to know about the planets and moons and other stellar objects we’re visualizing. Some of get very much into cratering, vulcanism, cometary bodies, gas giant atmospheres, stellar formation and evolution, and related topics.
You worked for Carl Sagan's Cosmos. What do you think about the show's recent revival?
I think the new show is an decent introduction to the universe and some of the personalities who have studied it. I did not find this second version as intellectually challenging as the first one, and I found some of the CGI space effects disappointing. I would recommend that kids or adults who aren’t terribly familiar with any of the material to watch the new show, then watch the original and read the original COSMOS book. They’ll get much more out of the experience.
What projects are you currently working on?
I’ve stepped off a 42 year treadmill run for a bit to reorganize, pick and choose some drawing, CG, and physical scale model projects, and reestablish contact with friends and clients. Got a few more things coming.
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Τα βιβλία αλλά και την προσωπική ιστοσελίδα του Rick Sternbach μπορείτε να τα βρείτε στους παρακάτω συνδέσμους:
Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual
Star Trek: The Next Generation USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D Blueprints
Star Trek: Klingon Bird-of-Prey Owners' Workshop Manual
Επίσημη Ιστοσελίδα