Santa Barbara Studios, or SBS for short, was a CGI visual effects (VFX) company founded by John Grower in 1990 and located in Santa Barbara, California. The company's contributions to Star Trek included the bottle sequence during the christening of the USS Enterprise-B in Star Trek Generations (Cinefex, issue 61, p. 65), as well as the space-based visual effects for Star Trek: Insurrection, on which they worked alongside Blue Sky/VIFX. They also created the D'Arsay archive and comet effects for TNG: "Masks" (their first contributions to Star Trek) and the comet effects for the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series title sequence.
Subsequently they worked with Dan Curry on the spatial effects in the main title sequence for Star Trek: Voyager, additional CGI effects for the first and second seasons, and later the nucleogenic lifeforms for "Equinox" and "Equinox, Part II". (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 18, pp. 22-23)
The CGI for Voyager's title sequence was created by using the company's own in-house developed software called Dynamation which earned developer Jim Hourihan an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1996. [1]
Outside Star Trek, the company has worked on productions like Spawn (1997), An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), Ghosts of Mars (2001), and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), as well as the critically acclaimed documentary series 500 Nations (1995).
SBS apparently ceased its existence shortly after 2002, as no website is available for the company and no further credits are known, whereas founder Grower has accumulated further credits outside SBS.
When Project Manager Ben Robinson embarked on the 2013 British partwork publication, Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection, he discovered that SBS' digital work for Star Trek most likely no longer existed. "Santa Barbara Studios didn't archive them and used their own software," stated Robinson, in the process also implying that the franchise had failed to maintain ownership over these elements, but added, "Nothing is impossible though and I do have perfect reference." [2] Robinson was referring to his earlier projects, Star Trek Fact Files and its US derivative, for which SBS had provided orthographic views. [3]
Staff[]
- Curtis Breber
- Phil Brock
- Eric DeJong
- Axel Dirksen
- Janet Grower
- John Grower – CEO/Effects Supervisor
- Eric Guaglione – Animation Supervisor
- Diane Holland
- Jim Hourihan
- Bruce Jones – Executive Producer
- Michael Kaelin – Technical Assistant [4] [5]
- Bill Kovacs
- Richard Kriegler – Art Director/Digital Matte Painter
- Peter Lloyd
- Rick McDonald
- Ron Moreland – Technical Director
- Craig Mullins – Digital Matte Painter
- Matt Rhodes – R&D
- Will Rivera
- Eric Saindon – Lead Modeler
- James Strauss – Animation Supervisor
- Kathi Sumec
- Pete Travers [6]
- Dragisa Trifkovic – 2D digital artist
- Mark Wendell – Animator
- Kelly Wilcox Travers [7]
Further reading[]
- "Designing The Title Sequence" (for VOY), Dale Kutzera, Cinefantastique, Vol 27 #4/5, 1996, pp. 72-75
- "Effecting an Insurrection", Ron Magid, American Cinematographer, January 1999, pp. 40-46
- "Star Trek Insurrection: Visual FX", Larry Nemecek, Star Trek: Communicator issue 121, February/March 1999, pp. 52-59
- "Lost in the Briar Patch", Kevin H. Martin, Cinefex, issue 77, April 1999, pp. 68-95