SPACE.com: Your first
job was to create a new bridge for the starship Andromeda?
Ken Rabehl: That was
one of the first tasks, yeah.
SPACE.com: Almost
everyone is familiar with the layout of the Enterprise's bridge. Was that
a jumping off point?
KR: Yes, there were
discussions with Allan
Eastman and Robert
Wolfe. We started off saying what we didn’t want, but that wasn’t so
important [because I had] a clear direction [regarding] the atmosphere
they wanted to create. This
ship, this High Guard vessel, about a kilometer long, was supposed
to be very
elegant, beautiful. I thought it would be jewel-like, extremely sophisticated
and dangerous at the same time. So my mind started immediately filling
up with images that were actually quite far away from Star Trek,
in the sense that they had very gray-white vacuum-formed shapes are that
are very functional. And I started to lean more towards gold and bronzes
and tried to get more curves and beautification of arches and images like
that.
My very first concepting
was beyond our scope of [construction] time, unfortunately, so we started
trimming down to what we could do, [but] in the end we did move away from
that Star Trek look. So the influence of Star Trek was there,
but in my mind it wasn’t that hard to detract from it pretty quickly and
move in a different direction.
SPACE.com: Was your
original design more Art Nouveau, with lots of curves and swoops?
KR: It was a touch
of Art Nouveau, but I would rather say it was more arches, more shiny curved
arches with graceful sweeps between and consoles that were not so brutally
functional. More delicate and flowing, more or less as they are now.
If anything, I think the
biggest change between what we have now and what I originally envisioned,
is there [are] less really physically curved surfaces. Because of the nature
of working with that type of material, we have to turn things into planar
surfaces and take curving walls and section them off, which isn’t really
what I wanted, but it ended up being okay for what we are doing.
We had no choice. It is still
maintaining a look, but I did envision plenty of curves and shinier surfaces
and more floating-looking consoles.
SPACE.com: Did you
look at it from a point of view of a set, or as the bridge of an aircraft
carrier or submarine?
KR: One of the comments
that Robert Wolfe made was that he didn’t want anybody sitting. His model
for that concept was that on nuclear submarines there is a more standing-oriented
sort of environment. We carried that concept into the bridge where all
of the stations are standing stations, so that would probably be the only
real 20th Century military model.
Next page: In the space
navy.
~
SPACE.com: Did you
know that in most naval traditions, the only person that gets to sit on
the bridge is the captain?
KR: I guess that’s
what they did in Star Trek. That may be the naval tradition.
SPACE.com: The Andromeda
is a much bigger physical space then most of the bridges that you generally
see.
KR: I did this on
purpose. I wanted this bridge to be big and I know that at the beginning
that Allan Eastman and Robert Wolfe did as well. I wanted the bridge to
be as big as possible because if this is a kilometer-long ship, I wanted
to convey the idea that this is a massive ship, with a massive brain
core where there will be at any given time 40 or 50 personnel. And I think
that [the] size of set gives a bigger impression of the size of the ship
as a whole.
And also that was largely
due to the [director of photography] and his camera needs. We didn’t want
to have a difficult problem in there, because the tighter you make sets,
the more you have to pull wild walls away to shoot through the crew, or
to shoot through to the actors and around the actors and that just creates
a great deal of problem. With the speed of television, removing wild walls
is becoming a big chore that nobody wants to do. They just want to get
in there and get the shots done and move fast.
The second aspect is that
we had a large well-like structure that we [have] since removed. That was
meant to be a viewing well that was basically underneath the pilot’s chair.
It was meant to have a greenscreen in it for burn-ins as well, so we could
project video imagery down there -- it would be like a floor viewing screen.
Now the problem with that
was it was quite big and so that would take up a lot of space around the
ship. We still needed about 14 to 15 feet radius around that well to allow
camera crew to roll freely back and forth and hence I expanded the sides
and front of the ship further out for that reason.
SPACE.com: In the
shows we’ve seen so far, we generally don’t see the crew's POV of the up-front
view screen that often.
KR: I recall seeing
a lot of video playback imagery in the forward screen. The only other video
playback we have in the bridge are the monitors and we only use that in
coordination shots with the actors. So, in effect, in most of the shots
you are not looking over the shoulders of the actors at those video screens.
It’s usually a tight shot and then an imagery shot of the screen itself
showing the video display. Those forward screens are a projector system
with a direct feed to the computer.
SPACE.com: Do you
have an interior design concept for Andromeda or it is sort of "make it
up as you go"?
KR: No, the color
scheme is there. It is established. But in terms of graphic design from
hallway to deck to level, some of that [has been] dealt with, but in general
it was decided that we weren’t going to do a lot of applications to decks
to levels and things and shoot graphics on the walls in corridors. That
was a decision early on[:] it's just more or less generic and you don’t
have to worry about that kind of structure.
SPACE.com: And the
reason for that was just to contain continuity?
KR: Yeah, I think
it’s a continuity problem, but also we were extremely under the gun in
terms of production time and budget and we just didn’t have the budget.
Next page: Where we go
from here.
~
SPACE.com: So, now
that you’ve established the Andromeda and the bridge and stuff like that,
what do you do from day to day? Is it pretty much the guest set of the
week?
KR: Yeah, pretty much.
We have a couple of sets built for early on episodes that we’ve been renovating
quite a bit. We take those and alter them. One of them in particular which
is in the first incarnation was the penthouse from "The Pearls That Were
His Eyes".
It was a very functional
set in terms that it can be changed quite often and given a very different
look each time. It was oddly shaped to allow for that, and so we’ve been
using that quite often and renovating one of our sets recently for the
continued episodes. We have a train world which we’ve created.
SPACE.com: I’m sorry
-- a what?
KR: We have a train
world. We call it a train world. It’s some cave walls that we’ve been using
quite a bit for asteroids and things like that. It’s an all-purpose cave
that would be used as a war planet or war asteroid. It’s our version of
an outdoor set, but enclosed and defined in the sense that it’s smaller
than the great outdoors but allows us to shoot internally.
SPACE.com: The Trek
productions used to call a similar set the "Planet Hell" set. Have you
talked about changes for season two?
KR: There has been
some discussion but not a great deal at this point. I think there has been
some desire for color changes. I’ve heard that they want to possibly reduce
the size of the bridge, but that discussion never got repeated, so at this
point I have no idea what the next season changes will be.
SPACE.com: Are we
going see new sections of the ship?
KR: That would be
a general hope. But there hasn’t been any discussion about future sets
like that. I would hope there are plans to discuss that, but I don’t know.
I know there was some desire to create a somewhat gracefully curved hallway
where we could do a walk and talk and have the characters disappear along
that curve in a long shot, but that’s the only real tangible thing I know
about.
SPACE.com: What has
been the nightmare thing for you to design?
KR: What has been
the biggest nightmare? I think trying to get the look I wanted. To be utilizing
the type of materials and the budget and the time frame that we had. Like
I said, I really wanted many more curves and many more fabulously artistic
textures on the wall. I really wanted to give it much more of a sculptural
look, it should look elegant, jewel-like. That this civilization was so
advanced and so sophisticated that even their warships would reflect the
aesthetics of the culture. And I think that unfortunately in television,
"curves cost and straight lines are more reasonable" is the rule that applies.
SPACE.com: Are you
talking about developing a High Guard, Commonwealth aesthetic, what it
looked like in the bygone era, or is that something we are not going to
be seeing for a while?
KR: You know that’s
a really, really good question. We’ve all sort of wondered that, too. In
the [series] bible that we all got in the beginning, there was [a section
about] the bygone era of this High Guard: culturally and socially sophisticated,
technologically advanced, a culture that had produced the High Guard title
and tied all these planets together in this massive Commonwealth. But what
was missing is that you don’t get a sense of what was that culture. Who
were these people? What did these cities look like? What do the clothes
look like? And I would hope that we could develop.
I think it’s very important
simply because the audience needs to believe in it, in order for them to
care about Dylan’s fight to regain the Commonwealth. They have to know
more about the Commonwealth, they have to say "yeah, wow, that’s quite
a cool culture. That’s wild, that’s worth saving." It would be a shame
if we don’t develop that somehow, even if it's in visual effects, landing
on the odd planet that used to be a High Guard planet and doing a matte
painting and small set pieces. Or doing flashbacks into that kind of era.
I personally think it’s a very important and hopefully we will do more
of that.
advertisement
