Voyage Trekkers: The Great Hall VFX

This is another guest article by Diane Cook from 2011.  It is slightly revised with Diane’s permission.

At the end of July (2011), David once again asked if I would like to help him on another one of Nathan Blackwell’s web series, Voyage Trekkers. The premise for this show is not a parody of Star Trek, but homage to all sci-fi. The twist being, “With all the starships in the galaxy, somebody’s gotta be the worst”…or as the tagline goes, “These are the voyages that don’t make the captain’s log”.

Blackwell gave us the footage for episode nine, “Fabulous Technology”, filmed entirely with green screen background. David chose to do physical models for these shots instead of digital. I was in charge of making the models, while David was responsible for prop designs and post-production effects.

Our assignment was to create a columned great hall similar to one in Star Wars (c).

Read the rest of this entry »

Building the “Normally This Weird” Death Ray Weapon part 4

Here is the challenge: how to construct a detailed prop with virtually no budget. Well, there are some strategies for accomplishing such a task. 

If you have a lot of money, time and resources every part can be meticulously designed, rendered or blueprinted . You can take the designs and manufacture every item on your prop by hand or subcontract it out.  Or you can do as our little team did for the Death Ray prop built for “Normally This Weird,” the Sci FI web series. Read the rest of this entry »

Building the “Normally This Weird” Death Ray Weapon part 3

As I mentioned in my prior post, my friend Diane Cook introduced me to a fantastic, low cost craft material that we put to use in a number of ways on our death ray prop and on a put-it-together-quickly  “time machine.”

What is this material?

Read the rest of this entry »

Building the “Normally This Weird” Death Ray Weapon part 2

As I began working on the Death Ray weapon for the web series, “Normally This Weird” I quickly had a number of realizations. The most sobering was that this was not going to be as easy as I thought!

I had forgotten how important a well tooled and supplied workshop can be to efficient model and prop building! I had taken for granted the quality of the shop when I was at Cascade Pictures, or the one in my own studio. Unfortunately when I went to work on Star Trek and got immersed in the digital world, I let my tools go to others.  Now, what should have been straight forward tool cuts became laborious chew-it-out-with-my-teeth kind of endeavors.  Read the rest of this entry »