As previously reported, the Paris-based Jules Verne Adventure Film Festival & Expositions held its first series of events in the U.S. around Los Angeles earlier this month, and devoted part of its program to a celebration of Star Trek's 40th anniversary. At the Aero Theater in Santa Monica last Sunday, the festival concluded with screenings of two remastered episodes of the Original Series, plus, to keep with the time-travelling theme, "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home." Special-guest speakers included Eugene W. "Rod" Roddenberry Jr. and George Takei. Also present for an earlier screening that afternoon was Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Rossi on Remastered Star Trek

Dave Rossi, former associate producer and supervisor of Star Trek projects under Rick Berman, was given the opportunity to speak to the festival audience about the Star Trek remastering project being undertaken by CBS Digital, which he is supervising along with Michael and Denise Okuda. He did this as introduction to the screening of two recently completed remastered episodes, "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "The Naked Time." (Note: "All Our Yesterdays" — which won't air in syndication until April — had been publicized in place of "The Naked Time" by the American Cinematheque, who operates the Aero, but that information was erroneous.)

"When we first announced the project, there was this influx of outrage and painting moustaches on the Mona Lisa and all this stuff," Rossi remarked. "What it boils down to is, we love the Original Series, we love these characters, and our purpose here is not to change that. We never want to do things that let you forget that Captain Kirk and the crew are in danger. That's our key: not changing the story, not changing the plots, not changing anything except bringing these effects into the future."

"One of the great comments we got from Rod and his mom Majel was that, Gene was all about the future, and if he could have done effects in the way we can do them today, he would have," Rossi continued, adding that the remastering team pledges to be "very reverent to what those people accomplished back then."

"As we go on these boards and we read things, it's amazing how it's turned from 'We hate what you're doing' to 'Go further, show us more!'" Rossi emphasized that all the new visual effects shots will stay true to both the timing and the intent of the original cuts, and no entirely new shots will be invented. "I've read things where people say, 'In "Naked Time" you should've cut outside to show the flames off the Enterprise'" (as the ship enters the planet's atmosphere). "But that takes time away from the characters, and that's what we're not doing."

However, for the "character" of the Enterprise, the digital team plans to expand the range of "poses" of the ship from the 17 stock shots that were used over and over in the original. "We're gonna hopefully give you 50 or 60 poses of the Enterprise eventually — duplicating those original [shots] exactly, but then doing things with the digital model that they simply couldn't do with the physical model."

Rossi further explained that the new effects shots are being created in a 16:9 aspect ratio in preparation for eventual transfer to high-definition DVD — even though the episodes are airing in syndication in the conventional 4:3 aspect ratio. "For instance, in 'City on the Edge of the Forever,' there's a line where Captain Kirk says, 'These ruins extend to the distance.' So we extended that shot into a 16:9 aspect ratio and created all these wonderful ruins. Unfortunately, you won't be seeing them tonight!" (Or on TV anytime soon.)

Further, "Something that we're trying to take to heart is, the idea of 'strange new worlds,'" he said, and thus there will be a much greater variety of planets seen in the remastered episodes, such as the ringed yellow world in "I, Mudd" which aired last weekend. But sometimes things don't come out quite as intended.

"The Guardian planet [in 'City'] is this ancient world where supposedly the civilization died many millennia ago, and so I think what everyone expected to see is a gray, barren planet. Which we could have done — we can make a lot of gray, barren planets." But instead they attempted to create some consistency with the soundstage-filmed planetside scenes. "We started looking at the backdrop — the cloth backdrop that they used — and it was kind of a purplish color, and so we wanted to tie these things together. What the visual effects team did was, create this rocky barren world with these giant purplish desert flats. Now, unfortunately, without us being able to come into your home and say, 'These are giant desert purplish flats,' I think a lot of people read them as oceans, which is kind of unfortunate. But that's what we were going for."

Rossi said the visual effects work will get more sophisticated over time. One reason is that a new, simpler digital model of the Enterprise has been created, one that requires much less processing time. "After we got the measurements from the model in the Smithsonian, the detail level is so high — and it's detail you'll never see at home, it's like, down to nuts and bolts on the plating of the ship — that the render time is really taking away from doing the lighting and other kinds of things we really want to do to make the Enterprise shine.

"So I want to let everyone know that this week they're delivering a new Enterprise that will cut down the render time, be just as gorgeous, and allow us to do some of those really cool things. So, the work just keeps getting better and better and better, and we're gonna show you some really, really amazing stuff down the road."

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Rod Roddenberry & George Takei
Buzz Aldrin