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Industrial Light & Magic has been part of ST visual effects in the TOS movies and in TNG series but when did ILM stop doing the visual effects for ST and why did they stop?

B&B probably thought that the costs of using ILM outweighed the benefits. The result? Voyager's reset button, always clean-looking ships (must be those Scrubbing Bubbles)...

I think that the only things that ILM did for TNG were all those Enterprise flybys they later reused through the whole series. Anyhow, this has nothing to do with B&B.

At the time paramout wanted ILM for the movie like quality for TNG, all ILM did was the F/X for Encounter at Farpoint. the F/X in later seasons were done by other F/X houses that Viacom owns. This is all explained in the TNG DVD box sets, as for the movies ILM wanted more money than Paramount wanted to spend. ILM was working on TPM at the time Paramount was doing Inserrection and simply asked for too much money. I can't blame ILM though, they had thier hands full with Star Wars.

Paramount and Viacom certainly did NOT own any of the vfx houses that worked on NextGen. Image-G and Digital Magic and CIS and all the others are quite separate from Paramount, though Paramount had their own team of folk who coordinate the outside work and even do some of it, though at those separately-owned facilities. You could probably get a detailed breakdown on the first couple of years if you find Cinefex 37, long out of print.

As for ILM and Trek ... dollar factors helped keep them off trek 5, plus the idea that they would only get what Shatner called the 'third string team' since the others were already doing INDY 3 and GHOSTBUSTERS 2.

ILM was ALMOST dropped from ST 6. There was a million buck gap in the budget and Paramount cancelled the film, so a producer, Jaffe, rebudgeted the show without ILM to show Paramount how much they wanted to make the film. Paramount was I guess impressed by this, but at the same time they knew they weren't going to do the bulk of the fx w/o ILM, so the budget of 27 mil got raised a little and the film got back on track, although it wound up costing 30 (which is what Jaffe figured it was gonna cost in the first place), though ILM did 75% of the work, they saved some money doing certain shots elsewhere.

I don't think ILM particularly enjoyed doing the NextGen trek films ... based on the different state of mind of John Knoll, the ILM supervisor on the two films. I did articles on these things, and while he was in his usual chipper mood on GENERATIONS, on FIRST CONTACT he was really beaten down. The impression I got is that Paramount (berman and lauritson) are used to making fx companies do tons and tons of takes/iterations, and ILM is NOT used to being dictated to in so exacting a fashion. That is only an impression, but I figure ILM still has the pick of most shows, so they are probably figuring why bother with Trek when there are so many other shows out there with powers that be that actually trust our judgement? That's just a guess on my part, though.

Note that on INSURRECTION, a good hunk of the work was done by a company that did lots of work on the tv series, Santa Barbara. I'm guessing Berman and co are more comfortable dealing with folks who understand how they work (though I guess all that went out the window on NEMESIS, since DD has no prior connection to Trek.) Part of ILM's strength was that they were still using miniatures on their trekfilms, which have been almost entirely absent on NEM and INS. I've seen the E-E miniature in person and it is really impressive, as the spacewalk part of FC (a movie I hate except for the fx) shows.

Kmart- I was under the impression they owned the F/x houses they had do the work for the series. I could be wrong.

kmart wrote: I've seen the E-E miniature in person and it is really impressive, as the spacewalk part of FC (a movie I hate except for the fx) shows.

I liked FC well enough, but forget that: you saw an E-E studio model in person?!

SWEET! You da man!

I am a pretty hard-core modeler. I would love to get close to some of the Trek studio models if only to take notes...even the very best photographs can only show you so much.

Shoot, even the big reproductions sold at some of the Viacom stores would be nice, like that Vor'cha they sold for several grand awhile back...

I was a very lightweight modelbuilder when I did super-8 and 16mm stuff (I'd dump cigarette ash on the model to dirty it down if that gives you an idea of how I worked), but I was in awe of some of the 'real' stuff I saw at ILM when doing the Cinefex articles.

What I thought looked even better than the Ent was the Phoenix ... couldn't believe how small the damn thing was, and that they were able to get the warp effect lighting installed in something with engines so tiny!

By way of comparison, the only other practical fed starship model in the movie (since most of the fleet was CG done by the Rebel Mac group) was that thing they had left over from the NextGen series and from the last shot of GENERATIONS (the one they called FARRAGUT in GEN) ... it was first used as a starship called Phoenix in NextGen's THE WOUNDED, I think ... anyway, THAT model, in comparison with these others, looked more like a cardboard display ship by comparison ... the paint job SERIOUSLY reminded me of the cardboard Enterprise displays that I used to see in TOWER VIDEO around 1992 or so ... and I found that strange cuz I've seen pics of that model in early years looking VERY detailed ... I guess the way they painted the aztecing on the hull at ILM maybe took some detail away?

Unfortunately, you can't take souveniers on these visits ... I came close on GENERATIONS, when I saw them blow up a small scale mountain gantry out back (was done for security reasons, in case the main unit reshoot of Soran blowing up didn't work, but since the live action crew got it okay, this shot wasn't used in the film), I caught a piece of mountain after it blew, but it literally dissolved to nothing in my hand within a couple minutes. Probably couldn't have sold a bit of foam on ebay anyway without a 'certificate of authenticity.'

Batman002 wrote:At the time paramout wanted ILM for the movie like quality for TNG, all ILM did was the F/X for Encounter at Farpoint. the F/X in later seasons were done by other F/X houses that Viacom owns. This is all explained in the TNG DVD box sets, as for the movies ILM wanted more money than Paramount wanted to spend. ILM was working on TPM at the time Paramount was doing Inserrection and simply asked for too much money. I can't blame ILM though, they had thier hands full with Star Wars.

But weren't they working on the Mummy at the same time as TPM??

THEHOOLIGANJEDI wrote:But weren't they working on the Mummy at the same time as TPM??

Those making The Mummy could afford ILM.

Durandal wrote:

THEHOOLIGANJEDI wrote:But weren't they working on the Mummy at the same time as TPM??

Those making The Mummy could afford ILM.

Thus proving my theory. Paramount execs are a bunch of cheap bastards.

At the time of PHANTOM MENACE, ILM was working on several films, including MUMMY. They did some stuff that came out that same summer like DEEP BLUE SEA and almost all of WILD WILD WEST, and worked on films that came out a few months before ep1 that were in production simultaneously with it, like half of MIGHTY JOE YOUNG and all of SMALL SOLDIERS. They had a lot of manpower and a lot of computing power, they can multitask. I don't think they would have had trouble accomodating INSURRECTION during this period if the price had been right or if they had anybody at ILM who still wanted to work on Trek.

I seem to remember that 20 mil out of the 60 mil budget for the first MUMMY went to ILM, and I'm pretty sure that is more than Paramount has paid for Trek fx ever (unless you want to be mean and add in all the writeoffs and overtime on vfx from TMP.)

Were ILM responsible for the bird-of-prey destruction scene in ST6?

Yeah, they did most of ST 6, including the BOP shots and its blow-up, which utilized extra castings that had been made of the ship a couple years earlier, for ST 4.

I just never understood why they didn't at least flip the neg or resize that shot when they reused it for GEN ... even slipping the planet into the shot to differentiate it from ST6 would have helped, but then you'd get into having to put all that debris over a new image, and I guess the roto work would have cost too much.