Lessons from Star Trek with David Stipes and Rick Ravenell

The Star Trek universe is an iconic realm filled with unique creatures, advanced technology, and galaxies that have mesmerized fans for decades. One of the essential aspects of bringing this universe to life is the art of visual effects (VFX). This podcast episode offers an enlightening voyage through the cosmos with visual effects maestros David Stipes and Rick Ravenell, two names that have played instrumental roles in creating the visual splendor of Star Trek.

David Stipes' journey from a young visual effects enthusiast to his role as a visual effects supervisor on Star Trek: The Next Generation is nothing short of inspiring. Equally intriguing is Rick Ravenell's transition from an art history major to a successful 2D supervisor for Star Trek: Picard. Their careers are deeply intertwined with one of cinema's most beloved franchises, offering listeners an intimate look into the world of Star Trek VFX.

As the episode unfolds, it turns into a masterclass on the evolution of visual effects in the Star Trek universe. The duo shares captivating recounts of their challenges and triumphs, like reviving the iconic USS Enterprise 1701-D with CGI. Their meticulous work in replicating models to create realistic-looking starships reveals the depth of expertise and dedication behind each frame.

They also delve into the process of creating an entire planet of ooze for the Deep Space Nine finale, showcasing their ability to overcome immense challenges. The embrace of virtual production technology in Picard, despite its complexities, is a testament to their adaptability and drive for innovation.

A noteworthy segment of the podcast is dedicated to an often overlooked aspect of filmmaking - communication. The guests emphasize the importance of clear storyboards, early involvement of post-production supervisors, and editors. They provide an inside look into the complex dynamics of real-time production and the intricacies of subcontracting bids for visual effects.

Whether you're an aspiring filmmaker, a Star Trek aficionado, or someone interested in the magic behind cinematic visuals, this podcast episode is an enlightening journey. With insights into the intricate process of creating stunning visuals and invaluable lessons for filmmakers, it provides a rare peek behind the scenes of Star Trek.

The episode concludes with an emphasis on the critical role communication plays in filmmaking. From creating clear storyboards to the early involvement of post-production supervisors and editors, the episode highlights the intricacies of creating realistic, engaging, and successful visual effects for a series as beloved as Star Trek.

Lessons from Star Trek with David Stipes (TNG / DS9 / VOY) and Rick Ravenell (Picard)

Paul DeNigris: Hi everyone, I'm Paul DeNigris. I'm a visual effects artist, filmmaker, and film educator. I have made independent films, I've worked on visual effects for film and TV, and I've taught digital filmmaking at the university level for about two decades. Now I run a boutique visual effects studio called Foxtrot X Ray, and we specialize in serving independent filmmakers and helping them use visual effects to tell their stories.

And that's what this podcast is about, the intersection between visual effects and film. Independent films. Welcome to the VFX for Indies podcast.

With me today are David Stipes, visual effects supervisor for Star Trek, the next generation. And Rick Ravenell, 2D supervisor for Star Trek Picard. Welcome to the podcast guys.

David Stipes: Excellent. Good to be here. Great to be here, Paul. Thanks.

Paul DeNigris: I'm connected to these two gentlemen at opposite ends of my career.

David and I worked at an animation studio here in Phoenix, Arizona called Rainbow Studios pretty early on in my career. We were working for for a couple of fellows who had left. Hollywood after working on Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Voyager and other shows like that. They had come to Arizona to start a little animation studio and develop some film and TV projects.

And they brought some Star Trek alumni. That they were connected with such as John Eves, who did some ship design for some of the projects that we worked on. And and Mr. Stipes here who became quickly became a dear friend and one of my VFX mentors and somebody that I routinely dial up when I can't figure something out.

I say, Hey, David, what, give me some tips. What kind of magic did you guys do back in the day? And and it's been a wonderful relationship since then, I guess we've probably known each other close to 25 years now, David.

David Stipes: Yeah. Close to it. Yeah.

Paul DeNigris: And then shortly after I left rainbow studios I entered academia long story there, but I started teaching in a private college here in Arizona.

And Rick was one of my students for a number of years. And I pretty quickly realized that Rick had what it took to be successful in the VFX industry. And I said, dude you need to move to Los Angeles. Not all my students ever listened to that advice, but Rick certainly did. And he went out there and and has been kicking ass out there since what?

2009 ish.

Rick Ravenell: Yeah. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. And that's exactly what I did. I just packed up and moved to LA and hope for the best.

David Stipes: That was a brave, but right thing to do. That was the right thing to do.

Rick Ravenell: Yeah, absolutely. Great advice.

Paul DeNigris: Thanks. Like I said, not everybody took it, but you definitely did. I just pointed at the door you walked through it and then started running.

And I've been in awe of your career since then and have like I tell you all the time when I see it, I'm just always so proud of you and everything that you've accomplished and and you've just taken it to levels that I could not have imagined when I gave you that advice all those years ago.

Rick Ravenell: Thanks, man.

Paul DeNigris: The title of the episode is Lessons from Star Trek, and that's because these two gentlemen have worked at opposite ends of the Star Trek The Next Generation legacy. David, way back at the beginning when TNG was first on, and then Rick most recently with Picard season three with the ostensibly the ending, the conclusion of the TNG crew and the TNG story.

And I thought what a great opportunity to really explore the franchise and kind of, the lessons that. Independent filmmakers could learn from from even something as big and established as Star Trek. The question is what does Star Trek have to teach independent filmmakers? And like I always say, it doesn't matter whether you're doing a 50, 000, character based drama, two people sitting in a room, or you're doing a million dollar an episode.

Space opera time and money are always the enemy, right? They're always the enemy to creativity They're the limiting factor. They're always the enemy to achieving exactly what you want. So we're always being asked to do more with less doesn't matter what the budget level so there's always lessons to be learned and really when you think about it star trek began as A bunch of people in homemade costumes in a pretty cheap looking set with just the spirit of can do optimism that doesn't describe the average independent film.

I don't know what, what does. So before we dive into that, David, why don't you give everybody just the quick non track highlights of your career.

David Stipes: I got fascinated with visual effects with King Kong when I was a little kid asking my mom how to do that. Cause I knew something was going on. And of course she said, Oh, it's a trained chimpanzee.

And of course, I immediately knew that wasn't right. Didn't know what it was, but knew that wasn't it. And then it started getting me curious. In the 60s, I discovered monster magazines, and Forrest J. Ackerman, Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. And of course, then I got to discover Ray Harryhausen, Willis O'Brien, and all of the stop motion wonders that they brought forth.

So that really was a drive to get involved. Before I got out of high school, I'd actually worked on my first feature film as a model maker, and I got my first experiences with the the horrors or the disappointments of working on models, and having them left in the rain, and when I came to collect my beautiful prize, it was a puddle of rubble and stuff, things like that.

I'm actually old enough and I'm going to rot right in front of your faces here in front of your screen. I'm old enough that I actually did apply to work on the original Star Trek. I was as green as could be. And they patted me on the head and say, yeah, go away. Come, grow a little more, come back.

And it took me 25 years to be an overnight success and go to work on next generation because that's how long I had to plot along and work along. And I had my own studio. I did get a chance to work on Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers and, a few things like that. So got on to next generation season six and then worked on seven.

We did that great all all good things episode and got an Emmy for that. Then went on to Voyager and we got an Emmy for the first episode of that one. The first pilot. And it just keep kept moving forward to next generation. Next generation for Voyager, then Deep Space Nine. So I finished off Deep Space Nine moved out to Arizona where I met was working with Paul and found at Rainbow Studios.

I've worked on a lot of independent films here in Arizona. And so I've had a chance to work with a lot of pretty green people here and pretty seasoned people as. And I know that Paul has, I think, run into some of the same kind of phenomena too, with local filmmakers who have very high aspirations. So I've been blessed to be able to work there and be able to bring some help to that, to the people.

I will interject that I also got into academia and was teaching visual effects at a different school. And I, some of my students wound up, three or four of them took the opportunity to move to Hollywood and. They're doing their thing too and being successful.

Paul DeNigris: Thanks David.

Obviously you've got incredible depth and breadth of experience and and your students just must've absolutely been blown away by what you brought to your your classroom experience. And I, any of them that followed your advice to go pursue a career must be must be doing really well.

And I, as a fellow professor, like that's the coolest thing to see your career. Your, I call everybody, my kids Rick is certainly older than my kids, I call them all my kids and yeah, we cherish their successes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So awesome. So with that's a great segue, Rick, tell us what you've been up to since since moving out to LA.

Rick Ravenell: Yeah. My visual effects. Stuff that started when I was a kid, we always went to the movie theaters every week. That was like our family get together. It didn't matter what was playing. We just, we'd just go there. This is back when, we had newspapers. You had to pick out a movie, go there and then hope something was there.

And we just watched movies. And then my dad always watched movies when he'd come home from work, same with my mom, she'd be sitting there knitting an Afghan, watching Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever it is, and so that's what I grew up watching is just tons of sci fi. So in school, I was primarily an art history major, I'm doing drawing, painting, printmaking, and all that kind of stuff.

And my dad was like, being an artist probably not gonna make you any money. I don't want you to be a starving artist. I want you to have a career. But you play a lot of video games on this computer thing that you have. Maybe you can do art on the computer. And that's what led me to visual effects.

It's I want to work on movies. I want to work on TV shows, how do I put these two things together? So I did all my general education in Hawaii, learning again, painting, printmaking and all that. And then I moved to Arizona to University of Advanced Technology where I met Paul and basically was like, is this a thing?

Is compositing real? Is visual effects real? Cause I had no idea what any of that stuff was. I went to UAT without a direction. And I got my direction from Paul. And that was very special because he's this is what you can do,

If you want to do it, go to LA.

So I did went to LA. First thing I worked on was Knight Rider in 2008, which was a TV show with NBC. And what else came out in 2008? Iron Man. So everybody's all excited about heads up displays and graphics and clear screens and all of that. And I thought that stuff was great. So they were like, Hey, can you make any of this stuff?

Sure. Why not? Had no idea how to make it. Just faked it till I got there. So I got to do tons of graphics and motion graphics work for that show, but I also got to composite everything together. So I got to own all of my shots from beginning to end, which is really special. And that just propelled my career.

And, I did graphics on avatar, which was super fun. Didn't get to do any comp on that, but it did hide my face in every single shot that I did and put my name in there. So that was really fun. And then since then been jumping around to different studios, doing motion graphics and compositing work.

Some of the movies I've worked on, it's After Earth and Ender's Game. And most recently I am now the compositing supervisor and the head of 2D at Outpost and where we were working on Star Trek.

Paul DeNigris: Thanks Rick. That's a pretty awesome career so far and . It's amazing. I think I, when I went to visit you when you had just started at Outpost, I said I said, yeah, I give it a year.

You'll be running this place . And you basically worked. Yeah. You did. Yeah, I was that's pretty awesome. I was skeptical. And then and then you told me you were working on Picard and I got very excited. And, picard season three was everything a Star Trek fan like me who's been a fan since before TNG, since I would say probably, I don't know, probably since I was maybe six or seven years old when Trek was, the original Trek was already in reruns and when the motion picture came out, I was super excited and and had to go see that opening weekend and then, just followed the the original Through all their movies and books and comics and all kinds of stuff.

And I built a, model of the enterprise a, when I was a kid and had it hanging from my ceiling. So I've been a dying the wool Trekkie from from a long time. A long time ago, and yeah I have always said that the original ending of Next Gen, all good things, is the gold standard for series finales.

Like it's when I think about series finales, that is always the number one. It's the they Stuck the landing in every possible way. And so I was nervous going into Picard season three. Because modern Trek has has broken my heart a little bit since 2009, since the JJ reboot, I was never really happy with those movies.

I was so depressed. I didn't love discovery when I first came on. And even Picard season one and two, they're okay. They're iffy. There was some story problems, some characterization problems. So I went into season three. Cautiously optimistic. And when I heard they were bringing everybody back from the next gen crew, I was like now I have to watch it just for the sake of completeness, because it'd be nice to visit with old friends.

I follow all of the TNG crew on on all the socials. And it's they are, they literally are that family that we see on TV. They literally are that tight and you want to root for them. You want their stuff to be good. You want them to. Go out in a blaze of glory. And they certainly did with with Picard season three.

The crowning moment, of Picard season three was the resurrection of the enterprise D you know, coming back into action after being lovingly restored by Geordie David, did you I assume you, you stayed up with with Picard season three. Did you watch it?

David Stipes: I've got through season one or two.

I did pick up the. The reveal of the new enterprise and then the battle and all of that. So yes, I saw some of the key moments. I will eventually pick up the rest of the show, but I, you were asking if I felt nostalgic about it. And in a way I was, it was like when the doors open and stuff, you say, I'm going like, wow, that poor baby looks a little rougher where I love seeing it.

I am going to squawk a little bit. It's I didn't know that Geordi was such a tinkerer that he could get his old Thunderbird or old Mustang out in the garage put back together so well by himself. So how in the heck did Geordi resurrect this ship off of the planet, get it into orbit, That was a story issue.

It has nothing to do with the visuals, but the visuals were awesome. So Rick, did you get, were you involved in that shot at all?

Rick Ravenell: Not the initial reveal of it, but we did the shot where it warps in front of Jupiter.

David Stipes: Oh yeah, that was great. Yeah. Yeah, the CGI work I think was really nice. And so yes I thought it was really nostalgic and I love the moves were, very enterprise, very next generation.

So yeah, everyone did a good job. I just I want to elbow the writers a little bit yeah, come on

Paul DeNigris: guys. He used a healthy dose of hand wavium. Yeah. To get the ship fixed up.

David Stipes: Yeah. Geordi is really great. The best of the engineers. Absolutely. Absolutely. Replicators can do a

Paul DeNigris: lot.

David Stipes: Yeah. Those droids must've been really busy. Absolutely. Yeah.

Paul DeNigris: Absolutely. Rick, as you guys were working on on shots with the Enterprise D, were you guys like pinching yourselves? Were people like, oh my God, this is the coolest thing ever? Or was it just another day at the office?

Rick Ravenell: We were really lucky that we had two die hard Star Trek fans on the show.

Our producer, she worked on the remaster, and so did one of our CG supes. They were putting in so much extra effort, like, all the time, because they were like, Guys, this is gonna be so cool you have no idea. So everybody else, they, they like working on it cause it was sci fi and it was fun, but they didn't know like how much it meant to like these two people.

And those two people were like driving the whole show and the production of it. So who are the two

David Stipes: people that were, you're talking about? It was,

Rick Ravenell: Melissa DeLong and Rommel Calderon is the he's the CG soup and she was the producer and they loved it. Like they were so excited about it. Rommel has A company called Horner shipyards, who does maquettes for ships.

So he 3d prints ships and does all the decal work and sends them out. And he even knew the designer of the Titan in Picard Bill Krause. So they are connected and they talk all the time. And so he was so excited just to even be part of the project, but then to work on the enterprise deal was just like the crowning achievement, like in his career.

David Stipes: I was in awe and humbled when I realized working on this show, All of these Star Trek shows, just as you are, Rick, you are now a part of cinema history. You are a part of something that will never go away.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah,

David Stipes: and this is part of your heritage that you get to pass on to fans and people who are not even born yet And so it's a wonderful gift a gift from the universe to you, but from you to everyone else So

Rick Ravenell: if

David Stipes: you don't mind me being a little metaphysical

Rick Ravenell: there, no, it's it's really special and To be honest, we didn't know what it was going to be like while we were working on it, because we worked on season two as well and, it had its ups and downs, but we were all still excited.

And then season two came out and they're like, okay I guess we're doing season three, maybe the season three, this is the one, it'll be great. So we, everybody put in their effort and we weren't sure what it was going to turn out and especially. The final episodes the amount of work we put into that stuff.

It was really rewarding to see just the fans reaction to it. Like Reddit exploded, like a bunch of our friends are all over it. And we were like, I couldn't believe it. It was really surprised. Like people were sharing. Gifts of my shots on the internet, stuff that like I have supervised stuff that I personally worked on.

I was like, I don't know. It doesn't get any better than that, right? Like it's pretty awesome.

David Stipes: Wait till they start doing memes and stuff of it though. Yeah, exactly. I have some of my shots that are actually memes and are little snippets of oh, this is so cool. That kind of thing.

You hopefully you'll get some of that kind of stuff.

Paul DeNigris: My, my favorite TNG meme is a Picard face palming, but I don't think VFX had anything to do with that one. Oh, mine

David Stipes: Is the the Android data plan, where he's got the phone inside of his body, from Phantasm episode.

Rick Ravenell: That one's fun, yeah. That one's good.

David Stipes: That's that's my shot, and it was, it's a meme, yay. It's a meme.

Paul DeNigris: Right on. Yeah, David, give us a kind of like an overview of how an Enterprise shot would have been accomplished back in the original TNG days.

David Stipes: A bulk of my work was done with the physical model.

I can have a, I have a whole, I can do a whole nother little section on the CGI aspect of it, but most of it was done on the model, which was a four foot enterprise. They did one, I think it was about nine or 11 feet long, but that was so ungainly to work with. I never got a chance to work with that.

So it was a great gene model. So we would get the script. Immediately you would start breaking down, highlighting every one of the shots. And then you can, and almost immediately you could determine eh, that's going to be a stock shot. Okay. Now the enterprise needs to come and do something. Okay.

That's going to have to be new. So then you highlight that. And I'm a insane storyboard guy. I just, I storyboard everything, which is one of my pet rah things to do. And. I was working with usually Joe Bauer, who went on to great fame on Game of Thrones. And so he went on and did a great thing on his own, but he was my coordinator assistant.

So he and I would talk about what was needed and we would start working how many hours will it's going to take to do this shot. And where were we going to, film it? Usually it was done at a place called image G, which was a motion control facility just a couple of miles away from paramount.

And then we'd go over and shoot. It was then transferred usually as CIS composite image systems, CIS, and from film to digital, usually a D one format. And then we would take it over to digital magic or one of the similar facilities previously. Pacific ocean posts later on that sort of thing. And they would be composited.

The the models where you would have multiple passes, you would have a beauty pass, you would have each one of these was, it was programmed with a motion control setup, which has a computer controlled. And you would do the beauty pass. You would do a pass with just interior lights. There was the engine lights.

There was the Bussard, those little red lights at the ends of the nacelles. And there was also the deflector light at the top. And then there was the blinkies, the navigation lights, and each one was a separate pass. And then they would roll up this gigantic orange screen, bring up black light. And blast the heck out of it.

And they would make a silhouette pass against orange, which is quite unusual and it's the equivalent in film for what we were doing. We've been doing lately in green screen and old, the older blue screen, but it was very efficient very efficient. All of those things come together. We would take them down.

They would all be composited. But. Don Greenberg did a great deal of compositing at the facilities that on all the different episodes. There was a couple other people, but Don did a bulk of it. Does that kind of answer your question? Absolutely. I'm bored due to tears.

Paul DeNigris: No. And I, I don't want to go into too technical of deep dive cause that's not really the audience here.

There's tons of other podcasts for like technical deep dives into stuff. I just wanted to give.

David Stipes: Okay.

Paul DeNigris: Give our audience just a flavor of the process because there's actually,

David Stipes: there's a point I do want to make though, and it's relevant to segueing into CGI. When we were doing the motion control, we were lucky if we could get, maybe if we're really pushing hard and maybe we could overlap and similar moves or something, maybe you can get four shots in a day, usually two or three.

And that was fine until we ran into, shows that needed, a hundred ships in it and they had to be original moves. Now, how do you do that with motion control? Okay. So I'll leave that as I open the question.

Paul DeNigris: I see a lot of parallels, as I listened to you talk about the different passes and I saw Rick nodding his head.

David Stipes: Yeah. You probably do a lot of

Paul DeNigris: similarity to how we still do, ship composites and any CG composite. So Rick, would you just comment again really briefly and don't, you don't have to go super technical because again, that's not our audience. David blew it up. No, not at all. I think the way you explained it was such that even somebody who's not super technical could understand, could follow it, rick and I, we could geek out on like file formats and AOVs and all kinds of like acronyms and stuff like that and lose the entire audience, but. Rick, I'm just going to pass it to you to give us the overview. Imagine a similar enterprise shot for Picard. Yeah. Similar to the process that that David just spoke about.

Rick Ravenell: Yeah. So there are a ton of similarities, we start with storyboards and then storyboards go into the animators and they'll do a quick sort of a blocking animation of a flight paths. And, cause we have to make sure it feels right. Large heavy can't be making these crazy moves and things like that.

And a lot of our reference is the stuff that, you worked on, David, they sent us tons and tons of reference of that stuff. And because we had, again, to die hard track fans, they're like, it would not do that. This is what it would do, so they would help, art directing guide the animation process.

And then when we get into 3D. A lot of our 3d passes are very similar to the ones you mentioned. Like Paul mentioned, they're AOVs for us. So we did separate ones for the nav lights for the the ship interior lights, any of the Nacelle lights. And all that stuff. Like we, we rented them all separately because our showrunner was such a huge fan.

Next generation that he had a very specific look of what he wanted the ships to look like. He's I hate Discovery. I hate j. Abrams. I hate all this other stuff. So we're changing the way this all works, right? So that was the biggest challenge for us is trying to make a ship that looks like a model, but is better.

Quote unquote better, because they were like, Oh cool. Do they want them to look like this one show where they have reflections and it's all very shiny and they're like, no, don't want that. Then we made them that were really flat and they're like, Nope, too flat. Look at the models, go back and look at the models and make it look like a model.

But then put your extra fancy stuff on top of it. And that was how we ended up with what Picard looks like. We were very lucky that we were the first company to nail the look for the ship. So we passed the ship looks out to the rest of the entire team. But we did all of our look dev on the Titan, which then, we did look dev on the enterprise and we passed that off to everybody and everybody had to match our stuff.

David Stipes: One of the advantages that Rick has. That I didn't with a model, a physical model needs to have a mount that it's resting on. And so you can't put the camera down there if you see the mount. Rick. And is at a place and a point where a camera can start looking up at the enterprise, go up over the top and co down and look down on the enterprise all in one shot.

And I never could because there's a point where, oops, I see the model mount now and I can't go any farther. So yeah you got a lot of freedom with a CGI and boy, you guys nail that look. Your model work is really great. Really my compliments.

Rick Ravenell: And that means a lot coming from you, man. Appreciate it.

David Stipes: I know how hard it was, man.

Paul DeNigris: It definitely evoked, the the classic movies, especially like the space doc sequences and stuff it evoked Star Trek three, the search for Spock, them stealing the enterprise from space doc and all of that sort of stuff. And yeah, obviously we have a lot more freedom.

We can iterate a lot faster than you could back in the TNG days, David. But that sometimes contributes to the weightless feeling of CGI. The idea that, the camera can do anything. The model can do anything. It sounds to me like the showrunner on Picard maybe gave you guys some more limitations to try and make it feel more like the classical model photography that the franchise was built on.

David Stipes: That was always one of my mottos that I try to hammer with students is that. If you want it to look real, shoot it like a real camera and don't go doing any crazy, moves that a real camera couldn't do.

Yeah.

Rick Ravenell: And I think that's super important. If you can start there with like, how would you shoot this for real?

And then expand on it. You got it. I'll be cool if we could just do this little bit and then put that in there. Then you're already 80 percent based in reality and it doesn't break that that feeling of this is obviously fake,

David Stipes: yeah. You got it. Yeah. You guys are right on it.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. Yeah. The ships in Picard always felt real and felt like that scale. And one of the things I appreciated too was, back on TNG the windows were always just lights, except for a couple of, hero windows where there was something, built in there or comped in there.

But it looked like on Picard, you guys actually put. Cabins and yeah, I was the rec room and things like that behind the windows and I saw

David Stipes: that I was just going wow, you could actually see into it. That was really cool. Yeah, I actually did. I didn't remark to myself about how neat that was.

Nicely done. Yeah, we

Rick Ravenell: had a couple of shots where we got really close to the ships and we had one of our artists bill, he modeled out the whole interiors. For that stuff when we flew past it and made sure it was all realistic. Cause he's a model guy. So he's I'm going to make this stuff look awesome.

And so I'm like, I'm going to be like this big. And but they're going to notice. I guarantee you, someone's going to notice. I noticed. And you guys did. Yeah, absolutely.

David Stipes: And of course the extra trick for you is that you actually can do it in perspective. At best we had was a little slide back there, a little transparency, which, you know it can go under the Eve or something, but.

You can't, it doesn't slide around in, you don't see a displacement of any of the furniture, which it does in yours.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. Very cool. So let me ask each of you what's the hardest Trek shot, the most challenging Trek shot that either of you worked on in your in your time with the franchise?

Rick Ravenell: I can go for the most challenging one that we had.

Hopefully everybody's seen Picard season three. There's a big explosion at the end. That was an insane shot because yeah, it was, yeah, that was insane. Yeah. Like the pure scale of the cube. It was, we made it in real scale so we could get really close to it and remodeled everything in there and then so blowing that up and figuring out the simulations and all that is just insane to figure it out because we had a couple people that was their only job was work on this queue and make this queue the best as possible.

And and then we have, we get into compositing, which is the department that I'm in charge of. And they're like, okay, here's all of our stuff. Please make this work and look better. Which is essentially what happened, right? So we went back and we started pulling tons of 2d elements as well to layer in on it, to make it feel like, okay, so these explosions, like how big is this explosion really?

If you think about how large this cube is. And how big this fireball is like it's not going to be moving fast like it can't be moving fast. It's in, okay, fire in space, whatever. We'll let that slide. But the rest of it, layering in 2D elements that are, practically shot.

Is what adds the adds the feel to it. And then they gave us reference of, Hey, this is the board fight. We want to reference. And you can, I'm sure you can imagine where that came from. So we're looking at that stuff and we're like, okay, so their color of their lasers is this color. And then this is how they have their light spread around.

So it was basically like a shot of love between 3d 2d. All the supervisors, all the producers and everything to try to make it to be like the best shot ever, because the client trusted us with this huge shot. And they're like, Hey, just so you know, this is the big one. So don't let us down.

David Stipes: Yeah. I thought that was a great shot or a series of shots. This may seem silly, but I was actually impressed. That the Borg phasers were tiny in scale, so they weren't big, fat sausages flying out or anything like that. They were in scale like you might see an Enterprise phaser be pretty large compared to the ship.

But against the Borgs, they were little tiny lines. They did their job, you saw them and everything, you knew what was going on, but they were to scale. It was great. And then I know that final explosion shot, I was wondering like, where is the enterprise going to come from? Where is it going to come from?

And then you took it right out of the fire and the big, the shields are holding it and everything. It was cool. Really cool. Good job. Good job.

Paul DeNigris: How about you, David? What comes to mind when you think, the most challenging thing you guys had to do on TNG?

David Stipes: I wish I could say something as nearly as cool as what Rick did.

I have some shots that I'm delighted that I've worked on but as far as probably challenging, it's going to be one little shot that I was totally freaking out over, and that was the shot one of the holodeck shots where Rick Fontaine the James Darin character character, he's talking to Odo and he said you need to get better duds, and Odo is wearing his brown suit and he goes, Oh, like this.

And he comes up and he does this motion. And all of a sudden he's got a bow tie and his suit turns into a tuxedo as he's talking and with us. And so it's all in motion. And so we were just going crazy trying to figure out how to do it. Usually the shot, the part that drives your composite is the person talking and then everything else goes with that.

So we got the part where Renee taught a talking and he did the motion doing the tug and everything. Then he had to go and go put on the tuxedo. We had to come back, get him back into position and have him go through the motion again with the tuxedo. But what wound up really driving it for us is we wound up having to use the tuxedo bow tie as the primary part, because that was where his hands had to land.

And so ultimately the dialogue was the first part we shot. I wound up having to put his head from the dialogue into the composite of the Odo suit into the tuxedo that was finally derived. And like I said, I was just like, Oh God, this is like the worst shot ever. And of course it turned out really well, but then they finally, they did the very last episode of DS9, what you leave behind, I think it's called.

And I basically did not. Like the Odo shots, because there was just all the CGI brown goo, molasses kind of stuff going on. And so what do they do? They make a Odo planet. So now we're on an Odo planet with a little rock outcropping and he walks out into the sea of goo. That's off to infinity. So I have to deal with that and turn around and I'll be danged if that is okay, we're going to have and do the tuxedo shot again.

And I'm just going, Oh God, no, please. So anyway, those two shots, I think are the ones that make me groan the most, but I'll tell you, they were big hits with the fans.

Paul DeNigris: I remember them both. Oh yeah. So do I.

David Stipes: On top of it when poor Rene Bergerois, he was sick with the flu during the whole thing. During the initial one that we talked about on on the holodeck And so he was miserable, but he went through and he did take after take, and he changed clothes and did take after take and never complain.

What a pro it was. It was really good. He was in his sixties, late sixties. I think we did, he had to go out on the set and he was being merged into the goo and he just got down and crunched up and rolled up, turned out he was a yoga expert. And, man, if I ever did that I don't want to sure I'd ever get up again, but he did.

It was, I'm going like, wow, he just folded right up and merged down in there and worked. I have another shot. Can I tell another shot that really wasn't a challenge in a problem challenge? Okay. I really want to give a credit here. There was do you remember the episode in DS9? Where Dax is killed by Golda Kott, and so he's got the Power Wraith energy and blah, blah.

And he fries her and holds her up and basically burns her up. You guys remember that? Did you see that Rick? Okay. Terry Farrell had a labor dispute with Rick Berman and she was not going to return. This was her last day, her last shot, and I'm on the set as the supervisor, and she's crying. And, they call her on to set, she'd blot her eyes, and whatever she did to make sure she didn't have bloodshot eyes, and go out and do her shot, then she'd come back and be talking to people, and they're consoling her and everything.

Anyway, they're gonna do this shot, and they decided that they're gonna raise her up on a rig. And so they put this leather harness around her hips and through, the crotch area and everything. And then they put, and the costume goes on that. And then there's a couple of buckles on the side that are the hoister up with cables.

Unfortunately this, Thing is something out of the dark ages, it was real thick leather. So now all of a sudden her trim figure is now got this extra width to it. And she comes up to me, she says, can't you, can you do something for me? I look horrible with this thing. And it was like, she just had this, her hips were really huge.

I don't want to make jokes or stuff, but yeah, she looked really pretty bad. So she was just so upset, but I was so impressed with how professional she was. And she, she went out there, she did the raw, did the shots, she did the whole thing. So what we did is we went back into, um, digital magic and we used liquid nitrogen.

Rick, I don't know if you wind up ever using liquid nitrogen elements for your composites, but if you don't, you should check a look, take a look at those things that Dan Curry shot, a lot of those elements. They're, it's really wonderful if it makes like vaporous gas and stuff, it's yeah, so it's really wonderful.

So we use these little tendrils of liquid nitrogen and we would turn them as sandwich them all around the outside of her, basically disguising her silhouette and covering it and making it the right color should now, when Goldicott fries her, all of this energy goes out and gets vapor and goes out into little vaporous tendrils and dissipates around her.

And at the so she looked really great. And at a wrap party, she came up and gave me a great big hug and a thank you for saving her last shot. So that was a challenge, but not as in a. Bad challenge. It was something that was good to help the show and it helped her personally. So

Paul DeNigris: that's awesome. I was going to ask you about this cause I remember you telling me this story years ago and I was actually going to ask you about it so glad you brought it up.

David Stipes: Thank you.

Paul DeNigris: I want to talk about something else that I'm seeing a lot of parallels with between the different eras and that's virtual production. We're seeing this big push now for these led screens on set. And I know they were used on Picard because I've seen some of the behind the scenes footage where like the star fields and the the warp streaks on the Titan were done, practically on set.

And it, to me it's basically just a reinvention of Front projection, rear projection, Rick did that stuff make the job easier? Did it make it harder, and David, were there rear projection or front projection shots that were used in Trek that we could draw the parallel between the, between current VP technology and that technology in the past,

David Stipes: I seem to remember dimly that there were a couple of rear projection view screen shots of some, for some particular reason.

But primarily they were green screen. If I go back, a decade earlier on Battlestar Galactica, they were using huge rear screen things that were generally overexposed and not effective at all. That's ancient history. But I don't remember them doing much with rear screen or front, front projection on any of the TNG DS9.

It's usually green screen.

Paul DeNigris: Interesting. We, do you think there might've been shots somewhere along the way that it, that might've been great? If you could, take a virtual production stage back in time with you, are there places where you could see that technology having been used on?

Oh

David Stipes: gosh, yes. We always suffered with Viewscreen eyelines, because they always, I see Rick nodding his head. They always said, Oh yeah, it's a 3d view screen, but you're shooting at 2d. So we were often we, you don't have the master plate of captain Picard looking at the view screen left, and so sometimes you don't know which way the director's going to shoot that. So then when you do the closeup of, Admiral, so and so talking to Captain Picard, you'd have to do a version of him looking to the left. You'd have to do a version of him looking to the right, and then you'd have to figure out which one works so that they looked like they were looking at each other in 3d space.

So having these new, wonderful virtual screens, I think would have just, It's been great. I would love to see one of those in person and I know that I guess he got started on gravity.

Paul DeNigris: So Rick, were these was this technology deployed on on Picard? Yeah, they did

Rick Ravenell: use they use some of it.

I didn't have the opportunity to go on set to see any of it, but we got to see the plates that would come back from it. And what David's saying I think it depends on how you want to use it, cause rear screen projection, trans lights, all that stuff. Yeah. In practice, it sounds like it's really great.

But if it's overexposed and it's out of focus and they're like, Oh, Hey, can we add some motion back there? Then you're screwed because you have to read to everybody anyway. So also on Picard, we had tons of blue screens and tons of green screens. It's places where they could use it, but they're like, we're not a hundred percent sure what's going back there, so we're not going to put anything up.

And to be honest, that was like the smartest call they could have made, because the thing you run into with these led screens. One part is that they're really cool because you can put whatever you want up there and you get all the reflections on your surfaces, right? Until you have to change all those.

Cause if you have to change all those reflections on all the surfaces and you have people with hair. You get edges that get crazy. Can you imagine trying to do a warp tunnel shot? And they're like, Oh, actually this isn't a warp tunnel anymore. It's supposed to be in like the jungle, everything, all the color changes, all the edges are horrible.

So you're just like, so you're like why wouldn't you just put a green screen up? So I think there's give and take with it. Like we, they used it for some of the bridge shots when they're traveling through warp any of the other windows in the outside, you would see like the warp streaks works perfectly because that's exactly what they wanted it to be.

But there are other shows where they use this projection stuff because the director is whoever wants to see it on set and they get really excited about it. But then they want to change the whole background and it's just, it makes it harder and harder to do it than if they had just done in green screen in the first place.

Paul DeNigris: I know each of you have worked on lower budget stuff. I know David's talked about working on some indie stuff, particularly here in Arizona. So Rick, what would you say your relevant experiences. And let me also say, Rick and I both worked at a a studio Called Encore for a period when I was living in LA and we worked on a lot of TV stuff.

I remember those videos. Yeah, absolutely. My, my vlog series that I did back then hard to believe it's eight years ago now, but oh wow. Eight years. Working in TV as far as I'm concerned is very similar to working in independent films, right? Because you never have enough time. You never have enough money.

And network TV is like that. The microcosm. Where everything's got to happen and it's got to happen in this truncated timeframe, not not like a Marvel movie where, you know, one, one compositor can work on one shot for six months. It's every compositor on a network TV show is working on, Dozens of shots and they have to be done by the end of the week.

So it just feels much more like a, like an indie film type of type of schedule. Rick, anything that comes to mind, that's that's like lower budget, lower, low to medium budget where you had to pull a bunch of VFX tricks out of your hat. Yeah,

Rick Ravenell: I would say the majority of the episodic stuff I've worked on fall into that category only recently with the streaming ones because the streaming ones, even though they don't come out all at once, like for Netflix, they try to finish those shows six to eight months before they actually air.

So I finished book hard season three last year, like way earlier last year. For the ones that Pong's talking about, those things air the next week. So you have literally like a week to do everything. Yeah, what happens with that is you have to be, you have to be really smart with your tools, just your workflows, everything and get a, have a really good VFX supervisor on it that can look at everything at once and be like, okay, this is all we need to do for this shot next.

Next, next, what happens on these shows that you're mentioning, like Marvel and some of the bigger ones is that you'll iterate on the same shot for weeks, months, when maybe it gets better, but maybe it gets worse, you don't know until the showrunner sees it and they approve it. But for the showrunners on television shows, they're like, okay, this is better than what I shot next.

So the, because they don't have any time cause the problem that happens in televisions, like you were saying, Paul is like time and money, more time costs, more money. And in, in TV land, if you're putting an entire company on overtime, it's insanely expensive. So they are just like us and they're trying to be as efficient as possible.

And if. If the shot works and it looks great, they will push that through first and then spend all the money on the big money shots.

Paul DeNigris: David, does that does that, that jive with your experience?

David Stipes: Yeah. To give a little perspective, we had seven weeks to do an episode. We were doing, I think, 27 episodes a season in those days.

And so I had a show in post production. And I was had a show in post production. Pre production, I had a show in production and I had a show in post production all the time. And then so you always had three shows that you were putting your mental and physical energy or creative energy into all season long.

And I got the dubious joy once of when I segued off to, off of DS, off of Voyager onto DS9, I had five episodes I was working on simultaneously. Which was really crazy, but yeah you're, you really want to have good supervisors and that are thinking ahead. Yeah. So Rick's right on there with all of that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Paul DeNigris: For each of you what's something, what's like a time saving or money saving trick that you might've picked up on on a bigger budget project, like a Star Trek? That then you've subsequently applied to a smaller budget show or that you would apply to a smaller budget show in the future.

Rick Ravenell: A biggest thing for me is what David mentioned earlier, storyboarding. When you have shots that you're unsure of what it needs to look like, just start drawing some stuff out and get it over to them early. Because trying to do animatics, In 3d, sure. Like people are really great and unreal now.

But it just takes a lot of time, and you could hire a storyboard artist and have an entire scene done in a couple of days, get approval on it, and then you already know that you're working towards something that's that, that the director wants, because what happens sometimes is you spend way too much time trying to make something look really good.

And then they don't want that at all.

David Stipes: Yeah. Rick's right on the biggest challenge at least when working with independents. Like out here in Arizona is the lack of preparedness. And reflected in storyboards. You heard me a few minutes ago say the same thing. It's I'm a big storyboard guy. I draw terrible storyboards, but when you look at them, you can tell where the composition is.

You can tell where things need to be. My storyboards, if I need a 24 millimeter lens, my storyboard looks like it's a shot with a 24 millimeter lens. And so having that kind of a skill set is really important. I actually had a situation even recently, somebody could I want you to do a shot for me.

What is it? It's this, and this. I said send me a storyboard. Never got a storyboard. We finally got together and we're going to shoot it. And the, we were drawing the storyboards before we shot. So, it's I don't know what we're doing. I'm not going to, I can't tell you how much you're, what you're going to need.

I have no idea what you're having in your mind. Those are the things that really came through on Star Trek. I immediately started storyboarding. I immediately started talking to my took my boards and talked to the post production supervisor, Peter Lauritsen. We, sometimes I'd even go and talk to the editor.

And then here's what I'm thinking about doing. And they say, Oh yeah, we can do that. Or it can be thought about this. And then of course, a lot of times I'd send storyboards over to the the companies that we would, subcontract to, digital magic or foundation imaging, those, some of those different companies, because they have to figure out what they're going to bid in order for me to put my bid in.

And they, my people always wanted bids done like instantly. And anything that you can do to communicate. And have clarity is going to be valuable and that come. Whether it's on a star Trek or whether it's an independent. And I'm going to say that the less money you have, the less time you have, the more critical those things become.

Paul DeNigris: Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. I have clients all the time or prospective clients ask me, this is what I want to do. How much is it going to cost? And I'm like, I need to see something. I know you haven't shot it yet, but what, is it this big on screen or is it, a hero element? What is it?

Yeah,

Rick Ravenell: I think the part that also dovetails into that is doing looked at or style frames, cause sometimes you'll work with directors that are, that they have a hard time looking at storyboards, especially, if they don't look like much but having somebody that can do conceptual art.

Or style frames in addition to those where they're like, this is how you guys want to shoot it, right? But this is what it's actually going to look like, or something like that is really good to show them to just to get their head wrapped around it.

Paul DeNigris: Okay, so that probably covers my next question, which was What if filmmakers consistently get wrong about working with VFX regardless of the budget?

Right? So other than not being prepared enough, what's another thing? And when I say filmmaker, I could mean directors, I could mean showrunners, I could mean producers. What's, Other than not being prepared enough with previs, if you will, storyboards, planning, whatever, what's something else that, that filmmakers or clients get, just get wrong about the visual effects product process that you've noticed.

And it consistently, regardless of the budget level.

Rick Ravenell: Yeah, I think the it's a, it's an open question to that, but I think it's the limitations in visual effects based on how much time they have. Cause sometimes like you can look at something and be like, wow, they did this so fast, you're like, yeah, they had 150 people on it, if it's a small company, like having realistic expectations of ask these questions like, Hey, can you guys do something like this?

Cause sometimes they, there isn't that dialogue. They're like, we really want this, and this is how much money we have. And you're like I want to say no, but I also want you as a client. So why don't we jump on a call and talk through it? What is it that you actually need?

And this is what we're able to give you. Cause sometimes those are completely different. And once you start seeing eye to eye with each other and be like, okay, this actually needs to air soon, we can do this, and this, what do you think? They're like, oh yeah, that sounds great. How about we try this?

Just getting that dialogue like early on, because sure, we can do any, anything in visual effects, but it costs a lot of money and it can take a lot of time and just realizing expectations between the vendor and. And then he's reflects company. Yeah.

Paul DeNigris: As I always say, good, fast, cheap pick two.

David Stipes: Oh yeah. Yeah. I've got a drawing of that thing right here next to me. I think there has been a change in the attitude toward visual effects. I remember being on set and often I was considered to be an obstacle to production, okay? And so they didn't want to do visual effects very much because, one, we're going to take too much time, we're going to slow down production, and we're going to cost a lot of money.

And then all, a lot of times, they would want to do stuff like my remember original glass map paintings, producer came up to Matthew Urosich and said, I really would like to fly around and go around to the back of the painting. See what the back of the building looks like. Of course, that's a two piece, two dimensional piece of glass on top of some primary.

And of course, now with digital, you can do that, with 3d modeling and stuff, you literally can fly around a two dimensional thing fabricated into 3d space. What happens now is there's the assumption that we can do anything well, again, with money and with time and 500 people working on the, on the show.

Yes, you can do a lot of stuff. So I think there's a tendency to want to dump stuff into, the old let's fix it and post what's everything's posts now. Even during production, like it, it's Oh you guys can track it. We don't need to do a motion control. We don't need to shoot, the tilt angles or anything.

You guys can figure it all out. Yeah, it's going to cost money. So I see that as been a tendency and a trend. And of course I definitely see it here as people don't have a lot of experience. The other thing I think is. I wanted to bring up is people don't get the visual effects artist supervisor involved early enough.

And so they think, oh we're just going to shoot this, we'll call somebody in when we need them. And, by that time, sometimes they're in real trouble. And then the other thing is just not taking advice.

Paul DeNigris: So to summarize, plan your shots. Involve VFX as early as possible and take our advice.

Yeah. Don't surprise us.

David Stipes: Don't try to do our job for us. Don't surprise us.

Paul DeNigris: Fix it in pre don't fix it in post.

David Stipes: Yeah. Yeah. I come the other part of that swings around to be in the, to the director decide, make decisions. Because I know I'm I won't say I know, I guess I could guess that Rick probably has run into these things where, okay this looks pretty good.

Can you go ahead and do another version of it for us? And can you make it a little greener? Can you make that a little redder? Can can you adjust this thing? How about blowing it up a little bit? Oops, that's too big. Can you make it a little smaller? I don't know. You run into that at all, Rick?

Endless variations and permutations. Yeah, of course.

Rick Ravenell: And because I work for Multiple vendors. It's we have our internal supervisors, we have our internal VFX supervisors, and then it goes to the show supervisor. And if it passes the show supervisor, then it goes to the show runner.

And then they'll all bet. And then all the EPs look at it. So it's you have seven different people. It's got to get through first before it gets to the person that actually makes the decision. So somebody that somebody down the line could be changing it and and yeah, that's the thing that I wanted.

And then the person above them is what did you do? This is nothing. Oh

David Stipes: yeah. This is nothing like what I wanted. Yeah. Yeah. I worked on a feature film like that. I said, who is the final authority that, and the production manager said, I am going to be your authority. And I had it in the contract. It turned out I was giving him shots.

He was approving them. He never showed them to the director. He finally showed them all the director said, I hate everything, months and months of work. The final person never saw anything.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah. I've encountered similar problems too, where particularly on TV movies, you have a producer.

Maybe a director, if they're still connected to the movie, sometimes they're not, they're guns for hire and they're gone. And a producer is approving. And then the executive producer has to chime in and they make a bunch of changes and then it has to go to the network. I actually prefer that over the client where you have one point of contact, but they don't know what they want.

The, the client, I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it. 12 variations should go back to number

David Stipes: one.

Paul DeNigris: Yeah, I've been there done that one. That's never good. Where do you guys see the industry, the VFX industry in 10 years? And I know this is a loaded question because there's a lot of stuff going on in our industry.

Rick Ravenell: Right now the the biggest hot thing on, around the block is AI. So AI is is doing amazing things. And I think the people that are able to utilize it in ways that I'll say makes sense. Are going to be ones that succeed, there are companies out there right now that are using AI to do things like redub movies, and so they have the mouth lines up to all the different languages.

That's cool technology I don't want to do that frame by frame. I don't think anybody wants to do that frame by frame. So if you can teach a computer to do that's based on how the artist would do it. That's pretty cool, man, and then you see the things like the deep fakes, where people are doing facial replacements.

That type of work is super hard. Any duty work, Paul, I know you did some with us at Encore, any duty work is really painstakingly tough and anything you can use to make that go smoother, if it's AI based, if it's machine learning based, whatever that is, that's going to make you more efficient and better at what you do.

So I think being able to utilize these new technologies. To help you be more efficient at your job. It's going to be able to make you more creative because nobody wants to roto something and you have a machine do it, then you can focus on the creative part and have more fun. I'm really curious to see where AI takes all of our technologies.

Cause even the programs I use right now, we have machine learning and AI built into them. And you can use that. And it's exciting, scary at the same time, but. I don't, I'm optimistic. Yeah, that's great. Right on.

Paul DeNigris: I agree. AI is definitely gonna be part of, part and parcel of what we do going forward.

And a lot of people are, naysayers and they're they say, oh, that the RIP visual effects artists, or IRIP art editors or whatever. And it's guys, horses did not go extinct when Henry Ford invented the Model T. Yeah.

David Stipes: Yeah, you're just going to have VFX people that are going to interface possibly and probably very differently than they do now.

So what I see I'm really impressed with what Rick's coming up with there and I hadn't really thought it out at terms of AI, but yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. I think the work is just going to get better and better. I, it's been amazing. From, some, from like some of the early art star things and the early, lightweight things to what we're doing now, truly phenomenal.

And so it's, I'm actually very excited to see what else you come up with. Cause when I see shots, like what Rick's been working on, or you've been working on Paul that's the sort of stuff that I would, if I could have done it, I would have gotten Academy Awards back in the day, and you guys do it day by day, just matter of factly and this stuff is just so amazing and yeah, so it's good.

Once again, even with AI. It may make the process faster, but I'm going to circle this back around. It still comes back. A lot of the issues are still going to come back to the director and the creators of the shows. They need to have their act together. They need to be able to make decisions and articulate in a way that would allow the new up and coming visual effects people to interface.

With them and with the software that's coming.

Paul DeNigris: Absolutely. AI is only as good as the prompt from the human operator. Yeah. So as long as we have clients out there who don't know what they want, but they'll know it when they see it, you might be able to program

David Stipes: some variations a little faster than what we might've done at this point in time.

Exactly.

Rick Ravenell: And I super agree with David saying the quality, like seeing where the quality goes I'm going to plug avatar because when avatar came out, like nobody knew what it was going to look like. And now we have the newest one, the way of the water. I think my brain shut off. In the first 10 minutes of that movie where I was like, okay, they know how to make water and all this stuff is just amazing.

And then I just watched the movie, like you forget that all of that water is completely fabricated, you forget that these characters were, they're just in like little suits, like underwater, like trying to breathe with rigs and all kinds of crazy stuff. If you see any of the behind the scenes for that movie, and you see what, like what NILM and what they did, you're just like, that's it.

And that's what they did for this movie. Their technology is already better for the next movies. And all of that technology comes down to television and the stuff that you guys are working on right now. We're using deep compositing on these TV shows, which was developed for avatar.

What it was using deep for a long time. And they're like, Oh, now Nuke just uses deep always. And so seeing that technology is really exciting because wherever that stuff goes, it all rolls down to everybody else. So seeing the quality of television shows like Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones looks like a movie.

But they're doing that on like television, quote unquote, budgets, but timelines, and they're able to push that stuff out. So what do TV shows look like in the next five years, next 10 years? Like they're going to look amazing. People are figuring out how to use this technology and make it and, bring all these crazy stories to life.

And to me that I think that's the best part. That's just the most exciting to see what people can do.

David Stipes: Yeah. I consider myself as being fairly visually savvy. I'm always delighted to find shots that I know are trick shots, and I can't tell where the trick is. I can't tell exactly what is real, what is not real, unless it's something obvious, like a dragon or something, but a lot of the scene replacements, face replacements, all of this work that goes into making a production.

It's, the old classic invisible art, the invisible effects, and it's just getting better and better. And for old dogs like me, it gets harder and harder to catch the tricks.

Paul DeNigris: That is an absolutely perfect place to wrap up. So I want to thank you gentlemen for being being part of this podcast. Thank you. It's been a very special hour talking with you. I appreciate your time and and expertise always.

Rick Ravenell: Thank you. Lots of fun. Thanks for having us.

Paul DeNigris: Where can people find you online if they want to see what you've been working on or or just want to catch up with you,

Rick Ravenell: I actually don't have a website, but if you want to check out my video it's Ricks VFX, R I C K S VFX.

On video, you can see some real, some of the stuff I've been working on. And yeah, find me on Facebook and LinkedIn. Cool. Fantastic.

David Stipes: David, how about you? I'm on Facebook, just David Stipes. But I have davidstipes. com, which is a, probably my last vestiges of a website. I haven't really done a lot, but you can see a lot of my really old work if you want to see antique stuff.

But what I'm more proud of is davidstipes. net. And that's an actual writing blog. And I have a lot of articles and I talk about behind the scenes things, and I'm going to be adding more content to that. I, and I've been, I've got probably close to 30 articles I've done. I'm going to be adding more of them to the blog.

So I'm trying to document the. Behind the scenes while I can, so

Paul DeNigris: Fantastic. And I, I will be, I will make sure to bookmark that because

David Stipes: and Rick, when you can, I would recommend documenting anything that you're working on because people will find it interesting in the future.

And it does tend to fade away if you don't get it down quickly. I'm sorry, Paul, I jumped on you there.

Paul DeNigris: That's all right. That's all right. But David's right. You're part of Star Trek now, buddy. Future historians of the the Trek franchise will be talking about the exploits of Rick Ravenell, 2D supervisor at Outpost.

David Stipes: Yeah. I'm starting to think I'll be talking about you.

Paul DeNigris: All right. Thanks so much, gentlemen. And thanks to our audience for tuning in today. If you liked what you saw here, if you learned something I want to hear from you, so please like comment and subscribe, and I will see you on the next installment of the VFX for Indies podcast.