it's a great score, but horner kept reusing the same theme. The music first showed up in battle beyond the stars. It would later be recycled for other films, and one of his themes for st3 turned up in aliens and commando, with slight modifications.
There is a video out there about ILM doing the first season of the mandalorian ship effects using models like in the old days. The workers there would crowd around and watch how it used to be done like they were watching an archeological dig, as for many it was skills and methods already long forgotten at ILM. The realism and depth of the effects ILM was creating in the 80’s were peak artistry of analog methods before digital took over.
I'll tell you, compared to U.S.S. Enterprise refit J.J.'s Enterprise doesn't even come close . Even after all these years, the 1701 refit ship is still my favourite.Star Trek 2, The Wrath of Kahn, what a classic!
Strangely enough I find good model work doesn't date as obviously as CGI does. The practical effects in this film are 40 years old and probably some of the best visual effects ever made. ILM were really at the top of their game here.
Heck yeah. All the ship scenes in (for example) Close Encounters look real because they were composited real objects, i.e. models. Still incredible today.
And yet, the shots shown here clearly show their age in terms of the mismatched lighting and the obvious matte lines in the compositing. Problems that CGI does not suffer from. However, practical and CGI are tools. Give those tools to experienced people, with a large enough budget and enough time and they will produce good results. Hire less experienced people, or do not give them enough money or time and your effects will look terrible. Even ILM could not make this movie look good if they had been given half the budget and were asked to finish it in 6 weeks. For every good example of practical effects there are a hundred really bad examples. The same goes for CGI effects.
As an ultra-avid Star Trek fan, particularly Star Trek II, I have never seen this featurette. Thanks for posting this. THE best Star Trek film to date.
The 'Wrath of Khan' in my opinion, is the best of all the Star Trek films, best models and uniforms; the music from start to finish is just amazing too. I never tire of watching this film.
Amazing that these difficult and expensive effects hold up so well over time, and yet even the latest CGI is obvious to the eye. This truly was the renaissance period of sci fi moving making.
@@scottishdude9682 Sorry to say, but no. I have seen such flat CGI, particularly in Star Trek. I remember watching the New Enterprise in 8 on the Big Screen enter Warp. It was embarrassing how poorly they pulled it off. Models work because they are 3D, 3D software can look, frankly, comical in my opinion. I see it a mile off.
@@scottishdude9682 Its SO overused. Now studios are relying upon it instead of building sets. Nothing looks authentic in film anymore. I think that's what's killing the superhero genre in movies. Everything, even a basic conversational scene, feels "digitally tampered with."
Its why I basically stopped going to movies. Everything looks digitally fixed and created on a Mac. That's not reflecting life or the human experience.
I have a hot take. TMPs effects are a good bit better than these. But considering they had such a low budget. They made this movie my favorite sci-fi movie ever.
I believe, while CG is very impressive, and its becoming easier and easier to do, we miss something compared to the older way of making physical models.
@infoPeace infoPiece u are projecting, and it seems u cant read either. never offered my opinion. OP stated "and its becoming easier and easier to do", again an idiotic statement, cg always requires a lot of work and is never simple. Demonstrably true, not an opinion.
Agreed 👍 but some are morons I have a friend who couldn't tell the difference between the TOS & the Refit Enterprise he said they looked the same to him 🤷🏾♂️
As good as the FX in the Motion Picture are, they were also expensive and slow moving, plodded on forever, which of course was not the fault of the FX artists but the fault of the director and editor. In Trek II, the FX are equally high-quality and also move along at a much faster, more efficient pace to tell the story more economically.
Maybe I am just WEIRD, but I had ABSOLUTELY NO TROUBLE -- even when I first saw this movie in 1982 {at the age of 21} -- differentiating the USS Enterprise from the USS Reliant.
I think I remember Ken Ralston or Nicholas Meyer saying that, although they personally operated the parent Ceti eel in the eel tank scene, the scene to this day gives them a jump scare every time.
And the VFX looks better than any of the CGI they have spit out nowadays. You cannot duplicate the texture and lighting tricks of physical VFX systems and shooting models. Its also why Seth Macfarlane opted for Physical Models on his new hit show The Orville.
I don't think "The Search For Spock" gets enough love. It's a great follow-up to "Khan". Really, the only original series movie I don't care for is "The Final Frontier", and even that one has some great scenes.
Well, I still consider it the best example of Starship vs Starship in Trek to this day, so they must have done something right. It also has elements which peaked here, and sadly went backwards imo. The phasers here were my favourite representation of them, and sadly never used again. Here they were screeching pulses of clearly damaging energy that cut into the hull instead of a single pulse or a sustained beam. They felt grittier with far less 'pew-pew' cartoonishness to them. Photons were a great visual, with that hot core surrounded by a softer glow with strobes of energy spinning from it. TNG moved from this to a dull visual that lacked the inner core and the clearly defined strobe effect. And of course here the ships were represented as slower battleships delivering broadsides. Later everything was sped up so that Starships flew around with the agility of fighters and lost a lot of the suspense the slower interactions could generate.
One of the really impressive things: when they have the lightning flashing in the cloud tank, they need that exact sequence of flashing to hit the ship models that are later green screened on top of the nebula footage. I would like more detail on how they managed that.
You mean, with enhanced visual effects? Almost definitely not. But after the Director's Cut of the first movie showed up on Paramount Plus, all of the films got new 4K Dolby Vision transfers, even though Paramount didn't use them at firstt. But they don't seem to have any plans to update the visual effects of any of the classic Trek films. not even Star Trek V, which desperately needed it.
The movie photo still with the two young ladies with him? His daughters? His wives? After Marla McGyvers perishes? Another elephant 🐘 on the bridge of the Reliant, 😂 Lol for me anyways, is ,..... that young man his son that dies at the end, you know the scene were the young man dies in his arms? To which Khan promises to avenge him? Is that his son? Why not, Kirk,s son was introduced in same movie? Anyone know? 😮.Thanks.
Seeing Michael Okuda working on one of the huge practical models that were built for the close-ups? Makes me jealous. Edit...so many great shots, and other artists involved.
Where did you get this? Can’t you manage to upload a better quality version? We can’t even read the hand written notes on the storyboards held right up to the camera for f uck’s sake
There's an awful lot of work that goes in to great CGI. You have to model the ships, creatures, etc, and "paint" them (using textures), and light the environment, and animate them, as you would with physical models. There's not some magic button that you can push that does the work for you. Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park wouldn't have been possible without CG (not to the same standard, anyway - take a look at the test footage of stop motion dinos for JP). Watch this featurette, where they use CG for the genesis effect - their early idea of a rock turning into a flower wouldn't have the same impact, would it.
@@reessoft9416 : I'm not disputing any of that. But CGI does mean that "everything can be fixed later" rather than coming up with a solution to be creative at the outset. Most of the challenges are gone when you can just "fix it in the computer" which is a lot easier for the director than doing it right in the first place. Plus, especially nowadays. it's WAY overused. It's almost impossible to find a single shot that hasn't been manipulated in a computer at some point, even the practical stuff, as the image is always digitally enhanced and looks it.
I intended to make the same comment. The theme to Star Trek II is the best Star Trek theme ever. The others are great, but this one is just better, IMO.
Interesting how they didn't mention the destruction of the Reliant. The camera they used to film that scene ran at such a high frame rate that if film jammed in the camera, it would literally blow up. The Reliant's destruction and the imploding house in "Poltergeist" were both shot with that camera, and they ended up being the most dangerous effects shots ILM ever attempted.
CGI has its place of course and there’s no going back (not the all time greatest example of a cgi film, but there’s a great video montage of cgi from Batman v Superman showing all the layers being added and then the final shot and there are scenes you wouldn’t think - or at least you’d have to think about it for a bit - are 100% CGI. Such as the Batmobile driving through a warehouse before shooting out the 2nd floor onto the street, where everything is cgi. The car, the walls and floor of the building, boxes and other stuff stacked against the walls, etc). But I think more than just CGI vs practical, it’s old movie magic and craftsmanship vs. push out product in an assembly line fashion. I’m thinking there may be a correlation there though. As effects could increasingly be done on computers, we lost the ingenuity and variety of ‘magic’ employed by the old filmmakers. With cgi, it’s one tool that’s used for everything and you run the software. Maybe you get a new technique or modeling/simulation software that comes out that can allow a certain jump in photo realism. But it’s telling that in the old days you had famous names in SFX work, where you knew you were getting the best, most inventive mind to do your effects. Now you get credits for 5,000 anonymous cgi cubicle jocks.
They didn't. They simply reused footage from the first movie, specifically stuff that Dykstra didn't work on. Dykstra was persona non grata at ILM for at least a couple of decades, especially right around then. Ken Ralston was the VFX supervisor.
Today, so much fake CGI computer stuff... just doesn't come close to old school modelmaking and creative solutions to film scenes like they did in the 80's. It's so superior and far more life like than the CGI junk today.
1983 was the pinnacle of spaceship visual effects, Return of the Jedi, Star Trek 3 - they both look perfect, and its never been improved upon, those ships look real, CGI is just beginning to look real finally, but still looks a bit cartoonish and digital / pixelated, you can't beat actual models, you just can't.
I’m really not sure what they were thinking with the JJ Trek Enterprise . If it ain’t broke- why fix it! This is my favourite version of the USS Enterprise.
1:02 I love how Ed Catmull (a co-founder of Pixar, btw) is just generally credited as 'computer graphics'. The man who invented so many techniques used in not just computer graphics and animation, but gaming as well.
Ahhhh you're too hard to please ! "Krull" was a fine sci-fi/fantasy romp and a fine score. You want to hear a suspiciously similar score, listen to the "Battle Beyond the Stars" epilogue and end titles. I'm just glad we have so much sci-fi to begin with.
This is such a good documentary, yet someone totally f ucked it up so badly by screwing up aspect ratio in various scenes, as well as the horrendously poor resolution. Who f ucked this up and ruined the hard work of a great documentary crew? Mr. xtraspecialmango? You? Are you the idiot?
