Douglas Trumbull/multiplane effect in Star Trek I

[Chris Millar]

Hello David! (heh heh)

 

Was reading Cinefex #1 the other day - in the time I had I couldn't quite get my head around something they were talking about called 'multiplane' - many exposures on one frame each from a different motion controlled perspective

 

I figured it might be something like the slitscan/voxel effects from Kubricks 2001 but am keen to understand it if not ...

 

Anyone know what its all about ?

 

cheers

[David Mullen ASC]

Essentially it was a form of animation stand, except I believe Trumbull's "Compsy" rig had the camera on a horizontal plane, not looking down at artwork. You had the camera on track moving in on large pieces of artwork, with repeated passes to not only build layers, but you could do hold-out mattes, etc. so that it was not just straight double-exposures (obviously the black drifting clouds passing the camera lens against the dark blue backgrounds during the V'ger journey required hold-out mattes to create opaque shapes moving in front of background art.) I believe the moving camera used motion control for repeatability.

 

Slit-scan is similar but different -- the camera views the artwork through a moving slit and you use a long per-frame exposure so that the movement of the camera towards the slit causes the artwork seen through the slit to be stretched/smeared/streaked across the frame.

 

After Edlund took over EEG from Trumbull and renamed it Boss Films, he turned the Compsy into a rig to photograph matte paintings with camera moves.

 

A lot of spaceship shots in "2001" involved moving pieces of cutout still photos over background artwork on an Oxberry animation stand.