Saturday 04 February 2012

Interview with Rick Sternbach

Rick Sternbach came to work for Star Trek: The Motion Picture in April 1978. As illustrator, working alongside Mike Minor, Sternbach designed control panel layouts and signage for the starship sets. Almost a decade later, he was hired along with Andrew Probert to design for the new series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Sternbach helped define the look of the 24th century and from the series' second season onward served as Senior Illustrator, designing nearly all the props and starships that became the recognisable items of Star Trek.

Sternbach continued to work as Senior Illustrator on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, for which he worked on designing the Deep Space Nine spacestation and the Starship Voyager. After Voyager’s seventh series, Sternbach was not hired for Star Trek: Enterprise, since the producers decided they wanted a different look for the prequel series. However, he returned to Star Trek in 2002, producing control panel designs and signage for Star Trek: Nemesis.

Besides his work for Star Trek episodes and films, Sternbach contributed heavily to rationalising the technology seen on screen. With Michael Okuda, Sternbach authoured the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual; a groundbreaking work for Star Trek fans interested in the “treknology” of the show. He also drew the Star Trek: The Next Generation USS Enterprise 1701-D Blueprints, which contains the official Enterprise-D blueprints deck by deck on thirteen 22"x34" poster size prints. The individual prints are folded and presented in a boxed format with an exclusive 16-page booklet that includes an extensive round table discussion between Andrew Probert, Robert Justman, Herman Zimmerman. Richard James, Dan Curry, Michael Okuda, Greg Jein and Sternbach himself on the design and construction of the Enterprise-D.

Of course there are always questions yet to be answered, thus the following interview was conducted over email in July 2007, and concerns Mr. Sternbach’s work for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Next Generation. Please note that an interview about his later design work can be found in the “Post-TNG” section.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

On Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Rick Sternbach worked alongside Michael “Mike” Minor, lead illustrator on the film and Star Trek veteran who had produced a lot the designs for Star Trek: Phase II, particularly for the Enterprise interior sets. Obviously these were updated for the feature.

Could you tell us about working with Mike Minor, and about how the look of the Enterprise interior sets for the film came about?

“Mike Minor was a definite kindred spirit when it came to science fiction, and it was a lot of fun working with him. He was good pals with Bob Burns, and it was through the two of them that I got to meet a number of people working in SF in Hollywood in the late 1970s. Most of the best material on the early [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] look can be found in the Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books art books on Star Trek and the Phase II “lost series.” Mike had produced a number of very large tempera or acrylic renderings while working on Phase II with production designer Joe Jennings and lead set designer John Cartwright. A lot of the foundation work on the second series changed, of course, when the project became a feature film. Joe Jennings went on to do Shogun, and Harold Michelson took over as production designer. Mike continued refining some elements with Harold and got me working on control panel graphics, set labels, animation loops, and the like.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first year

You, along with Andrew Probert, were one of the first artists brought on on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Could you tell us about those first few months of The Next Generation when you worked with Andrew Probert on defining the Star Trek of the 24th century?

“One of the first things we worked on was a scale model of the bridge, and then while Andy [Probert] was ramping up on designing the Enterprise-D, I began sketching the crew gear like the tricorder, communicator, and phasers.”

In your designing of the phasers, how did you balance between their function as weapons and Gene Roddenberry's determination to downplay the more militaristic aspects of Starfleet in The Next Generation?

“Gene's only directive to me was to lose the pistol grips on the phasers; it was up to the writers to use them as Gene wanted, though as we know, a lot of people and critters still got vaporized at the highest settings.”

Like the phaser, the tricorder was an indispensable piece of Star Trek technology which had to be updated for the 24th century. Could you tell us about the design process which saw the tricorder evolve into the small, handheld unit that flipped open much like the original communicators.

“The [The Next Generation] tricorders were initially inspired by the HP-41C programmable calculators, which I found to be amazing new (at the time) pieces of technology that could do amazing numbers of functions. The basic shape involved a button interface, sockets for plug-in modules and peripherals, and a one-line display. With some 24th century updating, the thing was perfect, and evolved into a similarly shaped and sized device that boated touch-sensitive controls, multi-function color display, and a variety of sensors and com subsystems. And all way before the iPod or iPhone. :)

“The fact that it folded was partly to give the actor something interesting to do with it, since the communicator was reduced to a single solid object. The pull-out sensor was another actor “piece of business” that worked well for us.”

The prop that underwent the most significant chance was the communicator. Initially, the wrist-communicator concept that had been used in The Motion Picture was considered, before the device was combined with the Starfleet emblem. Could you explain how you came to the design that was finally chosen?

“I didn't work on the TMP version; a lot of the prop design was handled by artists outside of Paramount or by the folks who were going to build them, if I recall. I invented a couple of 23rd century electronic clipboards and that was about it. For [The Next Generation], I sketched a number of TMP-ish wrist devices, but Gene [Roddenberry] looked at the sketches and asked why the device couldn't just be the emblem. Made sense to me; I was sort of heading in that direction with an arrowhead on a larger gizmo, thinking that they wanted chunks of equipment to handle, but Gene nailed it and we ran with it.”

With the design of the Enterprise-D exterior finalized and the model being constructed at ILM, time had come to fill in the interior details. Did you contribute to the design of the Enterprise-D bridge?

“I didn't do a lot with the interior sets; that was mostly Herman Zimmerman and Andy [Probert] and the set designers; occasionally I would add an idea for a tech bit in the first season. From the second season on, I was supplying large numbers of high-tech furniture designs and sickbay and science lab gear.”

For the third season, several enhancements were made to the Sickbay set. Could you tell about your contributions to this set?

“I designed a few standalone consoles and wall units. I couldn't tell you exactly what I drew up season by season without a lot of digging in the drawings, but if the set decorator needed some new bit of tech gear or table or display widget, I drew it.”

Your contributions are perhaps most clear in the engineering details of the new ship. [...] Could you elaborate upon your reasoning in designing Engineering?

“A lot of the TNG Engineering look was built upon the sets from the Star Trek feature films, with some color and shape changes to give it a new feel.”

The Engineering set for The Next Generation was a slightly more extensive redress of the Enterprise set for the features than Mr. Sternbach would suggest. Only the structural elements of the second floor were kept, with the rest of the set being rebuilt.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture had already featured a vertical warp core; had the precize functioning of the warp drive system been explained, or did you device the matter/anti-matter reaction assembly as source of the ship's power?

“The engine systems in [Star Trek: The Motion Picture] had come together through the assistance of people like Jesco von Puttkamer at NASA, some of the designers at Bob Abel's shop, some of us at Paramount, and it made some basic cinematic sense. The loss of the vertical core and horizontal plasma conduit in [The] Wrath of Khan was confusing, since all we saw there was a cylindrical sort of ash tray that lifted up and sprayed Spock with radiation. When the time came to do [The Next Generation], Mike Okuda and I sat down over many pizzas and bowls of noodles to compile and clarify all of the information we had on impulse, warp, power generation, and so on. The original series touched on many of these concepts but wasn't clear or consistent, so we wrote a lot of memos which eventually became the TNG Technical Manual. As we said, people didn't have to read it all, and the writer's didn't have to give engineering lectures in an episode, but the answers were in the book if they were needed. I wanted to get all of this material sorted out and to have it all make sense, and a great deal of it is based on established aerospace engineering, structures, and materials processing. Even the 23rd and 24th century engineering has its own internal consistency, driven by future concepts for high-energy fusion and antimatter devices being looked at over the last twenty years. We didn't stop there, since we also detailed a lot of the advances in energy storage, weapons, communications, computers, and medicine. Everything a good science fiction show uses.”

The thinking at the time of The Motion Picture was that the anti-matter would be in magnetic containment, centered around the keel at the bottom of the engineering hull, sending anti-matter up into the reaction chamber. The shaft above Engineering, however, doesn't really make sense, as there was no place where the “matter” was coming from. For The Next Generation, Sternbach solved this problem by establishing deuterium tanks at the top of the warp core, which would provide the necessary “matter”.

Star Trek: The Next Generation, from season two onward...

For the second season of The Next Generation, with Andrew Probert leaving the show, Rick Sternbach became principal illustrator under new Production Designer Richard James.

The quest for a practical, and inexpensive, shuttlecraft continued into the second season. With a shuttlecraft designed by Andrew Probert already built during the first season, why was a second design required and could you elaborate upon your considerations in designing the craft.

“We always wanted to see shuttles in the shuttlebay as well as out on locations or on our planet sets, but with the amount of compound curves on Andy's first season shuttle, construction was tough. We made use of one of the [Star] Trek V shuttles by chopping a section out of the middle and giving it new engines and windows; the great thing about it and most of the other Starfleet shuttles we built was the fact that where there are curves, the curves follow a single bend, and “softening” the joined edges is no big deal. It was much easier to do the real set pieces that way, even if we did migrate to some ships that had no exteriors except for CGI.”

The design of the Enterprise-C for the episode “Yesterday's Enterprise” was inspired by an early Andrew Probert drawing for the 'D'. Could you explain how this came about?

“I honestly don't recall exactly how that sketch of Andy's was picked to be the Enterprise-C, but we should actually go back a step and be sure we're talking about the same drawing. [...] There is a sketch of a ship that I assume was the one David Gerrold took in to Gene's office, eventually becoming the Enterprise-D. A different sketch [is] also labeled as an early Enterprise-D. That ship, with some slight modifications to help in the timely construction of a miniature by Greg Jein, became the Enterprise-C because it very much appeared at the time to have design elements between the “B” and the “D”.”

Probert had always favored compound curves and had given his Enterprise-D predecessor a very bowed engineering hull that was reminiscent of a sailing ship. Sternbach, concerned that these complex curves would make the ship difficult to build in the available time, made the cross section of the engineering hull circular.

Your design for the Klingon battle cruiser that appeared in the episode “Reunion” incorporated elements from the original Klingon vessel designed by Matt Jefferies. Could you elaborate upon this design?

“The idea here was to combine elements of the original battle cruiser (and the hyper-detailed versions from the movies) with some slight Starfleet influence, as though there was some deliberate technology sharing between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. The color was a bit lighter and less of a saturated dark green, the wing lines a bit curvier, but overall still recognizable as Klingon.”

The impressive Cardassian Galor class made its debut in “The Wounded”. How did you set about to design a vessel for a species that never been seen before, and how do you feel about the style that inspired the look of subsequent Cardassian ships and space stations?

“I'm a big fan of iconic shapes or more correctly shapes that somehow remind you of something without beating you over the head with it. The Galor class started with an Egyptian ankh, given how they were like the Pharaohs to the Bajoran slaves, but you don't really see the basic shape unless you look straight down on the vessel. The little disruptor pyramids were a bit more obvious, as were the “temple” type structures on the ship's backbone, and the sandy yellow shades.”

Could you tell us about designing the Nebula class starship that first appeared in the episode “Redemption”?

“Not a whole lot to tell besides mixing and matching some Galaxy class hull parts with a new AWACS style sensor wing up on top. I don't recall the original VFX or script requirements for that ship, but I seem to remember we wanted to say that the saucer was smaller than the 1701-D's saucer, so we called for a larger scale bridge module and larger windows. Model makers like Greg Jein were always under the gun because of the TV schedule, so anything involving “found” parts was always a help.”

 

N. Ottens
25 July 2007

Many thanks to Mr Rick Sternbach for answering these several questions over email on 24 and 25 July 2007.

Images courtesy of the artist.