Brandon Thomas MacDougall (born 1 September 1959; age 65) is a 3D ship builder and designer who worked on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his contributions to the Voyager episode "Workforce".
While in the employ of Foundation Imaging, joining that company in 1997, and afterwards moving over to newly formed Eden FX in July 2000 (becoming one of the founding staff members of that company, joining well before the closure of Foundation, after which many former colleagues joined him at Eden FX), he built the CGI models of the:
- Aeon
- USS Prometheus
- Hirogen ship
- Malon export vessel, eleventh gradient
- Malon shuttle
- Galor-class
- D'Kora-class
- Chaffee
- USS Dauntless
- Devore warship
- NX-class prototype starships (NX-Alpha and NX-Beta)
- Cytoplasmic lifeform vessel
- Borg Queen's vessel
- 8472 holo-re-creation facility
- Hierarchy ships
- Night Alien ship
MacDougall has written up an article about his experiences at Foundation Imaging during the Star Trek years that was published in the UK magazine Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models.
The cooperation between Foundation/Eden FX and the studio became so smooth that a selected few of the digital artists from these companies were allowed by the producers to try their hand at designing starships, that were slated for a "guest starring" role. Brandon MacDougall was one of them, as his then Foundation supervisor, Adam Lebowitz, clarified, "One of our model builders [Brandon MacDougall] gets to design ships on a regular basis – the ship of the week, when it's a throwaway. That's pretty cool. You don't get a lot of that with other shows." (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 6, p. 51) Ships that MacDougall created from start to finish included the Nihydron warship and Mawasi cruiser for the Voyager season four two-part episode "Year of Hell". (Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models, issue 32, September 1998, pp. 51-52)
Apart from his work at Foundation and Eden FX for the television series, McDougall has also worked from 1995 until 1998 for the video game company Interplay Entertainment as 3D designer and has contributed to the majority of that company's game releases during those years, which included Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Star Trek Pinball (both 1997), as well as Star Trek: Starfleet Command (1999). [1]
Career outside Star Trek[]
Outside the Star Trek franchise, MacDougall, as free-lancer, was a digital artist on such films as Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Scary Movie 2, and Scary Movie 4 (2006). MacDougall has a background as woodworker, which included construction of musical instruments, notably guitars and violins. In 2002 he returned to his origins and founded his own company Liquid Guitars, applying digital design techniques he had picked up during his tenure in the gaming and motion picture industry. While he still occasionally works for the motion picture industry, Liquid Guitars remains his core business.
Emmy Award[]
Emmy Award nomination in the category Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series:
- 2001 for the episode "Workforce", shared with Dan Curry, Paul Hill, David Lombardi, John Teska, Ronald B. Moore, Dave Morton, Greg Rainoff, and Chad Zimmerman
Bibliography[]
- "Foundation Imaging: Dream Job for Spaceship Modelers", Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models, issue 32, September 1998, pp. 54-55 – Author
External links[]
- Liquid Guitars – official site
- Brandon MacDougall at the Internet Movie Database
- Brandon MacDougall at LinkedIn.com