Trumbull recollects the time clearly, saying:
“[W]e had 7 months. It was an actual crash program. We needed to do all of the visible results work. There have been as many photographs in ‘Star Trek: The Movement Image’ as ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Shut Encounters’ mixed, and it was an enormous drawback. It took a large effort to attempt to pull it off. We had visible results crews working 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, for the complete interval.”
Trumbull famously labored himself into the hospital, having given himself ulcers from the stress. He additionally required a variety of assist and needed to name in one other one in every of Hollywood’s better-known VFX guys, John Dykstra, to collaborate. The 2 had identified one another by a familial connection, and a few mutual work that Trumbull’s father had been doing. This, nonetheless, required a bizarre meshing of movie codecs, as Trumbull preferred 70mm and Dykstra labored in 35. Trumbull mentioned:
“After [the Southern California branch of Industrial Light & Magic] was closed by George Lucas, John and his friends, together with my father, Don Trumbull, shaped a brand new firm referred to as Apogee, to do visible results for movies. They usually had a extremely good observe report and had been doing actually nice work. So we collaborated with them, and we had to determine the best way to do a part of the visible results in 65-millimeter detrimental, and a part of the visible results in 35-millimeter VistaVision, as a result of we had been each utilizing completely different strategies.”
Trumbull additionally revealed that he needed to construct a brand new mannequin of the usS. Enterprise with its personal light-up home windows. Evidently, Robert Abel’s mannequin had little element and no lights, and Trumbull felt he could not level a digicam at such a dull-looking mannequin.