Technical Details
Most of the movie segments were shot at 12 frames per second. Each frame was produced as a single picture, and then combined with the soundtrack into the proper video sequence using Stop Motion Pro. The movie was output by Stop Motion Pro in full, uncompressed AVI format. The very large AVI file was then converted to the much more compact WMV format using Windows Movie Maker.For the movie "P.S.A", I switched to a 15 fps framerate. Since the .WMV files output by Windows Movie Maker run at a rate of 30 fps, I noticed occasional jerky movements in the other films, caused, I think, by errors in stepping up the 12 fps of the original .AVI to the 30 fps .WMV rate. I hoped that using a rate that scaled evenly from 15 to 30 fps would avoid that. Also, the higher the original framerate, the smoother the animation.
The heart of my special effects is a program I wrote called Starfields. Originally intended just to produce animated moving starfields, it eventually evolved into a picture-composing program, which can combine imported pictures and moving elements like stars, engine glows and blinking lights, and output complete frames. It can also do cross-fades from one scene to another (cross-fading is at the heart of the transporter effect in "What Trouble With Tribbles?", also). A scripting language I devised for it allows me to swap different images in and out, and create animation sequences. These collections of individual pictures are then combined in Stop Motion Pro.
I rewrote this application and renamed it EZCompositor, and used it exclusively to produce "P.S.A.". It is available for download, if you would like to try it out for yourself. It doesn't use scripts any more, because I found the rewritten version was powerful enough on its own to not need them. I may add the scripting language back into a later version.
This particular version of Star Trek takes place in a Lego universe. Even the ships are "made" of Legos, but they are actually virtual ships. Although they follow standard Lego design rules, and could be made just as they appear if one had enough bricks of the proper colors, the ships do not exist outside the computer. I constructed the original designs for them using a Lego design program called MLCad. The finished models from MLCad were converted using the utility l3p into project files for the ray-tracing program POV-Ray. Once loaded into POV-Ray, the models had their colors and surfaces tweaked into the final forms.
POV-Ray can produce almost photo-realistic images. Moreover, by changing the location and viewpoint of the virtual "camera", you can view your models from any orientation or distance, and POV-Ray handles all the details of perspective and lighting. I was able to animate the approach of the "BortaS bIr" in the title, for example, by determining the beginning and ending points of the movement, and then using POV-Ray's "clock" function to generate all the intermediate coordinates for the desired number of frames. Each image is saved as a separate picture, and when these are combined in sequence in Stop Motion Pro, the ship moves in a very realistic way.
Many of the pictures (both component images and final composite frames) were edited using Adobe Photodeluxe, Lview, The Gimp or plain old MS Paint, whichever was most appropriate for the task. Masks for engine glows, for example, were made in Paint, while the gradual darkening of frames for fades was done in Photodeluxe (later replaced by the use of EZCompositor).
I borrowed the original Star Trek introductory theme as a MIDI from Squirrel's Corner, other music and sound effects from sites thanked in the credits. I use Noteworthy Composer to tweak the instrumentation for a more "Klingon" feel or to compose original music, and then convert it to a WAV using MIDI2WAV. The sample rate of various clips can be changed in Windows Sound Recorder. The music, spoken tracks and sound effects were combined using Audacity. Syncing the soundtrack to the video is done the old-fashioned way: by counting frames and converting to fractions of a second.
The Assistant Director (far right) tries to defuse a tense moment on the set