Star Trek Into Darkness is the 3rd movie of the 2009 reboot of a popular series that has had many series in the past.  It comes after one reboot movie and a movie about Khan, a popular character from Star Trek: The Original Series. Since much of the plot takes place on alien planets and even when it doesn’t it is based in the future, many creative and complex sets had to be made.  

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In Star Trek Into Darkness, there is a chase scene filmed in a futuristic San Francisco.  In order to make the city look futuristic, graphic designers had to create an entire city’s worth of architecture that matched the basic layout and feel of San Francisco, but introduced futuristic concepts such as taller buildings, hovercraft air travel, and above ground transport systems.  In every shot, designers had to take a 3D rendition of a current map of San Francisco, overlay 3D models of futuristic buildings and other structures, patch in the actors and the structures they were on through green screen effects, add the lights, smoke, or other artificial aspects of the scene and then deal with the motion of the shot.  While filming the actors chase scene on hovercrafts was a challenge, it was nothing compared to creating the effects for the “Vengeance”, their spaceship, crashing into San Francisco.  In order to achieve a realistic rendition of this action, graphic designers took a 3D map of the city, overlaid new buildings, and then added in the ship. From there, they had to land the ship in the water, creating a wave, and eventually push the ship into the buildings which then had to break apart on its hull.  Every individual structure from a small building to a skyscraper to the ship itself had to be individually coded in 3D for each action it performed. In the video, Pat Tubach, the co-visual effects supervisor, stated that the entire file of the Vengeance crashing was over 2G of data, even with no paint or color in it.  

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    In a wildly different scene of the movie, Jim and Bones run from aliens through a volcanic world, entirely built for the movie.  The trees are red and white and the ground is a soft mossy texture, also red. The scene was originally going to be filmed in Hawaii or another island area with coloration done in post-production, but the director realized it would be too expensive to do, and opted for building the set instead.  175 trees were painted white, with 300 leaves stapled to their branches and a mixture of moss and shag carpet for the ground. All of the set was put together outside, so the scene had an authentic airy feel to it. The scene also contained aliens, which were originally going to be created in post-production, but eventually it was decided it would be easier to do it in makeup.  The actors were painted white and then coated in white flaky mud and painted with tribal markings. The whole scene, which was originally going to be done almost entirely in post-production, now needed very little afterthought during the editing process.