(written from a Production point of view)
Ru'afo's flagship
The script of Star Trek: Insurrection did not give any description of Ru'afo's flagship, leaving Illustrator John Eaves to his own devices to come up with a design for the ship, a design ethic that suited him just fine. (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 3, p. 20)
However, he has described the vessel as being of "the most controversial design I have ever had to deal with on all of the Star Trek films." [1]
Design[]
Eaves working on the design of Ru'afo's flagship
John Eaves based the look of Ru'afo's flagship on two main points of visual inspiration. He stated, "I tried to combine the horseshoe shape with the inside of a piano. You see all the wires, which I thought was kind of cool." (The Secrets of Star Trek: Insurrection, p. 88) Though Eaves intended for the grand piano motif to be reflected throughout each of the Son'a vessels, he meant for Ru'afo's flagship to be a particularly strong example of this idea. "You see a lot of repetitive strings, a lot of repetitive kind of wiring going through the main architecture. And the thing with Ru'afo's ship, you'll see that through the interior of the ship." ("The Art of Insurrection", Star Trek: Insurrection (Special Edition) DVD)
As the first Son'a ship to make an appearance in the movie, Ru'afo's ship was the first one Eaves addressed. It was made smaller than the USS Enterprise-E and Eaves later remarked that it was "maybe about the same size as the dish of the Enterprise." ("The Art of Insurrection", Star Trek: Insurrection (Special Edition) DVD) The scale of the ship stayed fairly consistent. [2]
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In February 1998, Eaves finished up his design work on Ru'afo's ship. "I drew it to fly with the forks forward, because it looked more aggressive," he recalled. (The Secrets of Star Trek: Insurrection, p. 87) However, upon turning it over for appraisal, Eaves soon found out that his designs had been misinterpreted. "We had a lot of trouble with Ru'afo's ship [....] When I turned it over to the meeting, they had the impression that it was flying the other way. I guess I made the assumption that I always draw things flying forward and I forgot to indicate that on the drawing." (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 3, p. 21)
As it turned out, it was Co-Producer Peter Lauritson who had different ideas. "There was also a funny thing, because Peter Lauritson was our effects supervisor, and when I sent the drawings over, he liked what he saw, he started getting it all approved. And then when we started to do the plan view, he goes, 'Okay, put the engines on this side, make them glow over here,' and I go, 'Oh, that's the front of the ship.' And so we had this huge kind of a discussion on which way the ship was going to fly at that point. And I had drawn everything with that kind of forward fork motion, kind of carried the architecture through it, and Peter liked the opposite view. And so I remember we went all over that drawing to make it go the right direction, carry the right way, and that was kind of funny." ("The Art of Insurrection", Star Trek: Insurrection (Special Edition) DVD)
Multiple meetings concerning the design of the Son'a flagship were held. Eaves remembered, "They did all their meetings and plans with it flying the other way, so when I got into the detailed identification of the parts, they said, 'What's the bridge doing in the back?' They understood my point of view, but it was a pretty heavy discussion on which way it was going to fly, and I fought for it pointing the more aggressive way. If you don't know you couldn't tell, but I still feel that it's going backwards!" (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 3, p. 21) The discussions to and fro took almost two months, and it was not until April that Eaves presented his final redrawn design sketches with the adjusted flight direction. Years later, Eaves conceded, "Overall it didn’t really make a big difference. That is being that that was over 10 years ago, so my sadness has faded." [3]
CGI models[]
SBS' finalized CGI model of Ru'afo's ship
Eaves' elevation plans for SBS
Because Santa Barbara Studios was made responsible for creating all the space-bound visuals for Insurrection, the construction of Ru'afo's ship fell to that company, which represented the vessel as a CGI effect. The task was not perceived as a simple one, as SBS' Effects Supervisor John Grower remembered, "John sent us elevation views and one or two ¾ perspective drawings of each ship, but we had to do a lot of deduction work. The Son'a Flagship and Battleships had very complex shapes and all of these incredible compound curves, which didn't appear in the plan views. They're thin in one dimension and very wide and long in the other, kind of like a trilobite. The biggest challenge was that the Son'a ships didn't look the same from one angle to the next, so if we rotated around them a little bit, their profile changed because they had hundreds of compound curves that hooked together to form their shape. Getting it all to flow involved a ton of work and a very long modeling process." The model, like the other Son'a ships, was constructed in Maya software. (American Cinematographer, January 1999, pp. 41-42)
Though later referenced to in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine television series and Star Trek Nemesis, the Son'a would never again be visually featured, nor would any of their ships, so none of the CGI Son'a starship models were ever upgraded in the LightWave 3D CGI software for later representation, be it on-screen or in print, save for a single 2001 representation in the Star Trek Fact Files. There actually was a reason for this, as Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection project manager Ben Robinson has indicated in 2015 that the original model computer files were no longer in existence, due to Paramount Pictures's failure to maintain ownership over these, as well as due to Santa Barbara Studios' own demise, "Never found the CG models from Insurrection... so we're rebuilding them! Makes me feel like Dan Curry." [4], he explained, "I'm working on this [remark: Son'a ships for the Collection] at the moment. It's tricky because the company that made the CG - Santa Barbara Studios didn't archive them and used their own software. Nothing is impossible though and I do have perfect reference [remark: referring to renders he had received for the Fact Files years earlier]." [5] Still, Robinson considered the Insurrection designs too signature for them to be left out of his collection, and planned for their inclusion based on newly reconstructed CGI models, starting with two Starfleet ships featured in that film. [6]
True to his word, the issue for Ru'afo's flagship was released on 13 October 2019, with the CGI model constructed in LightWave 3D – the software of choice of partwork publisher Eaglemoss Collections – by Fabio Passaro whom Robinson had assigned the task of reconstructing the Insurrection ships, [7] becoming the first of the Son'a ships to make a franchise reappearance after an absence of over two decades. Not only that, but the issue came with a display model, introducing an official representation of the ship in the physical realm where none had existed previously.
Further reading[]
- Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection, issue SP19, October 2019