Cheers and tears in the news: just give me a second

Wow. I'm already behind on posting some thoughts about the passing of longtime Trek art department staffer and all-around gizmo genus Anthony Frederickson last week...

And now the whiplash news of today: a Roddenberry back in the producer credits of a Star Trek series—congrats Rod! And to Trevor Roth as well! ....yet coupled with the shock news of the passing of Emmy-wining Trek (and rebooted Battlestar) visual effects producer Gary Hutzel at age 60. Gary, for one thing, was one of the four voices heard on Trekland: On Speaker Vol. 3, celebrating the 20th anniversary of DS9's finale.

It's all a bit much at the moment, a bizarre mix of joy and sadness...all juxtapositioned on a single day. I was looking forward to seeing all of these shortly, and now... well, some not as much.

More on all this when I can give them their due, each in its own mood.

TECH-ing the (TECH): 1998 Hutzel VFX ship scales

By request from Boris at Memory Alpha:

I'm opening up the vaults a little early—before we formally launch the larrynemecek.com site and its archives section—to share the actual shorthand note from onetime TNG & DS9 visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel, now famously the VFX producer on revamped Battlestar Galactica and soon Caprica.

It was May 5, 1998: We had just done our annual end-of-season wrap-up interview for his shows from DS9-6, and Gary provided his note sheet for my Fact Files research (and the legacy of all future techheads). The bottom four entries are my writing, added from Gary's verbal addenda that day— fresh from the "Operation: Return" episodes and the season finale's First Battle of Chintoka. Here you see the intended ship length, the models' actual length (or foam-core CGI stand-in), and the resulting scale and ratios needed. The list itself goes back to the end of Season 4, obviously—note the little tug and the Curry (stay tuned!).

Part of the duty of latter-day ship ner-- er, archivists -- is to contrast and compare the varied VFX chiefs' scale with the final onscreen effort to try to make sense of it all. Ha!

In the future, I'll just blog about these photos and notes here as "TECH-ing the (TECH)" —all you script and technobabble fans should get that one!—or TTT, and link you to the archive page.

But for now ... Enjoy! And comment away!

LN Photo (above): Gary Hutzel, Judy Elkins: Cooper Building, Trek post-production offices, 5/5/98.