Building the Bridge

When I first started this project, I knew the greatest challenge facing me was designing and constructing the bridge for this series. As Project Potemkin is set in 2296, I knew I was going to work using the Enterprise-A bridge from Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country as the basis.

The first thing I determined to do was to reduce the size of it considerably. The double stations of the studio set appear to occupy 96" of space. My thought was to trim this to a more manageable 76" and use single consoles for the basis of our film. This would result in fewer actors/actresses on the bridge, and make things more intimate.

DRAFT #1 - POTEMKIN BRIDGE	The second thought I had was to remove the angled control panels. Each panel has an angle of 15° across its center, allowing the actors more access to the control panel. However, while that looks good, especially on the plans, it seemed unnecessarily complicated. So I made the decision to remove them. The third thought I had involved the turbolifts. As they're located on the upper deck of the bridge, it stood to reason that they, too, would have to be elevated. And that meant to accomplish a bit of film trickery, I would have to either devise a method of lowering them or raise the corridor they will open up. Instead, I made the decision to have the bridge set include steps down to the turbolift. That would allow me to simply rotate the turbolift interior to open out onto the corridor set. The next thought I had concerned the Master Situation Diagram which I originally planned to include at the rear of the bridge, much like the one we see on the Excelsior bridge in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. With all the bridge stations having plenty of diagrams already, I thought that might be overkill. My next thought was to replicate the LCDs seen at the back of the bridge in Star Trek: The FInal Frontier. A quick glance indicated that it would make the bridge too busy-looking, and so I decided to put a damage control station on one side, a food dispenser station on the other, and a stairway to the captain's ready room and the head (bathrooms) at the rear of the bridge. It makes more sense to have the heads just off the bridge than Ilia going to potty on Level 5, in my opinion.
DRAFT #2 - POTEMKIN BRIDGE	After studying DRAFT #1 thoroughly, I chose to remove all rounded edges from the set. While they look terrific, they can be terribly complicated to contruct, especially if one's using wood for the primary construction material. I also revised the helm-navigation console as well, making it more angular. I'm trying to avoid the Star Trek: The Next Generation-look we see in Star Trek: Generations. While figuring out the dimensions to each station, I realized that I did not want to do the angled panels so that the top of the panel was wider than the bottom. Ideally, I wanted to do the panels rectangular, and that meant modifying the station partitions so that they will appear to be angled instead of the consoles. This also works better in terms of practicality. The partitions, as you can see in the first illustration atop this page, are lit, presumably with fluorescent lighting. If we choose to follow that example, we'll need the larger partitions. I also revised the entrances to both the turbolifts and the entrance to the captain's ready room and heads. This being done, I set about designing the first station using the dimensions of 76" wide by various heights as dictated by the original set design. Using images found on the Internet as a guide, I revised and created the overhead panel, mid-level panel and control panel for Engineering.
	The graphic artist, Keiichi, whom I believe did both these particular pieces, did an excellent example of following both what was seen in the Star Trek: The Voyage Home (left) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek: The Search for Spock (right). Both these layouts can be found in various places on the Internet, and there's quite a bit of Shane Johnson's work found in both. I chose to base my material from a synthesis of both and completely reworked them using CorelDraw and Adobe Illustrator. One of my choices was to remove the bountiful use of nonsensical numbers that the set designers employed. Instead, I relabeled them, using the ST:TMP material as a guide, and even built in some material that I felt needed to be added, in particular, to the controls themselves.
	Using the equipment at Fast Copy in Albany, Georgia, I printed out the panels. This was intended to be a two-fold test. I was going to test the size of the panels and the practicality and necessity of backlighting them. The panels printed out quite nicely. I put a lot of attention to detail, and it showed on the material I did with CorelDraw in particular. Every single button and graphic is labeled.
Once I had the sample panels at home, I attached them to the walls of our carport using staples and tacks, and took some test photos from various angles. (Note: The upper panel will be tilted out from the top to match what we see in The Undiscovered Country. Ignoring the obvious warp of the control panel (which was stapled to the wall at its top and attached to three pieces of corner molding on the bottom to hold it out from the wall), one can immediately tell that the panels do indeed look realistic to a large extent, even without being backlit. However, they are clearly too large to be practical even for Linda, who's 5'9", and sitting in a 22" chair.	In order to further test the size, I had Jeremy take a seat and try pressing out various commands. At 6'1", the console fit him better, but was still wider than our piano's keyboard. We also got to see our first glimpse of my greatest fear with this sort of set: reflection of the light. This will need to be addressed before we go further in our testing.

Overall, I had mixed reactions to the test. First, clearly, the station panels are too large. We're going to re-size the bridge layout so that the stations are 60" across with 8" partitions. Second, the reflectivity of the medium is questionable. Fortunately, we suspected that. For this test, we used High Gloss Photographic Paper. I'll be discussing the reflectivity of the material with our wide format supplies vendor on Monday. There is a Satin paper we might try, as well as whatever she might suggest. Third, we received some really excellent advice and suggestions from Robert Mauro, who works on Star Trek: Phase II. His suggestions for backlighting may well solve several problems, and I really appreciate his advice, as well as Patty Wright for referring him to me about my concerns. Fourth, we spent a great deal of time on the details. Every single oval you see on the control panel is labeled. (Jeremy was really impressed with it.) When we printed the panels out, I was concerned in particular with the Enterprise diagrams and how rough they looked. Oddly enough, I was surprised that the pixelation that is noticeable to the average untrained eye on the set isn't caught by the digital camera we used even at high quality levels. Next time, we'll need to use a video camera to see if the same is true there. Lastly, I'd planned on using an LCD monitor on the front center of the control panel. I'm concerned about the cost, of course, but I'm now wondering if the image there would even be visible... If not, I may make that an easily replaceable panel print. More next time!