This poster created for 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture has made it into a few of my posts, probably because I had this when I was a kid. I loved studying the detail of this ship. However, I did not know anything about its artist until now:
“I was a mechanical engineer for the first 10 years of my career, and I left in 1976 to be a professional artist,” said Kimble in a phone interview. “I wanted to design racing cars, so one of my early gigs was a job hopper – temporary help – so I could leave at any time for a racing job. One of the temporary positions I took was on the Apollo program; I was one of the engineers they brought in after the astronauts died in the Apollo 1 fire. Because of that credential, my sales representative John Steinberg sold the production people at Paramount on me to make all the plans that the Enterprise models were made from.”
“The hardest part was making it all match the script,” he continued. “The interiors only existed as film sets, which were all independent. So I had to take the exits and entries from the script and match it up to the interior designs in a way that made sense, deciding where everything was on the ship while getting it all nice and neat for the hardcore trekkers so they couldn’t beat me up. Starting with the second film, the production crew used it for set direction so it’s truly the official guide to the Enterprise.”
Interestingly, the image was recreated for Star Trek IV's Enterprise 1701-A:
2 comments:
I love cut away and cross section books. I remember one about gnome houses in elementary school but cannot for the life of me recall the name of it.
I'll keep an eye out for Gnome cross sections! :)
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