Menu

• Home
• The Original Series
• Star Trek: Phase II
• The Motion Picture
• Feature films
• The Next Generation
• Beyond

Advertisements

•  

Articles

• Enterprise redesign
• K’t’inga
• The Living Machine
• The Walk to V’Ger
• Memory Wall production
• Memory Wall script
• Spock’s spacewalk
• The Unseen TMP

Interior design

• Bridge
• Officers’ lounge
• Recreation room
• Photorp bay
• Engineering
• Cargo bay

Interviews

• Syd Mead
• David Negron
• Richard Taylor

Illustrations

Bridge module concept by Andrew Probert.

A view of the saucer superstructure, depicting the bridge module in the centre, the Deck 1 airlock aft, and the four windows of the Officers’ Lounge below.

Wires behind a bridge console.

Designing the Bridge

The final appearance of the refit Enterprise interiors combines the design input of original designer Matthew Jefferies, as well as Art Directors Michael Minor and Joe Jennings, Andrew Probert, Production Designer Harold Michelson and Director Robert Wise. Control details were developed by set designer Lee Cole, and control screen readouts by Cole, along with Mike Minor, Rick Sternbach and Jon Povill.

Cole was already working on the sets when Michelson joined the production. She had begun work with Minor and Jennings and had already laid out the bridge consoles. She remembers that one of the things the art department did was to give the new version of the brdige fully animated screens. “When I was designing the bridge, they were just going to do static things with backlit negatives and a few little mechanical devices that moved. I said, You know, I just don’t think that’s going to do it. I think we’re going to ahve to project some things here. ”

In the end, Cole put twenty-three screens on the bridge, and film was projected onto them from behind. At the time she had no idea how much work she was making for herself. “About a week or so before filming, when we were walking the sets, they said, “Well, Lee, we can’t wait to see what you’re going to put on those screens.” I had no idea I was going to do that!”

When Michelson came onboard he made very few alterations to the bridge set, though he was responsible for the design of the attitude dome on the ceiling, as well as the redesigning of the Enterprise corridors, which had originally been built for the abandoned Star Trek: Phase II. Gene Roddenberry was unhappy with the new corridors, because he felt that they made the Enterprise look too much like an hotel. Ironically, Michelson’s redesigns ended up being used on Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Enterprise-D, which was criticized as looking even more like an hotel.

 

---

N. Ottens
25 October 2008
Last updated: 28 October 2008

Sources for this article include:
• “Production Design,” Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 2, issue 8 (December 2001)
• Probert, A. Probert Designs