An outside looking in view of the Enterprise recalls 2001... but J.J. Abrams' Star Trek has a bit more action. All images © Paramount Pictures. Courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic.

J.J. Abrams admits that he's not a Trekkie -- the original Star Trek series and movies were never quite convincing enough for him as space adventures, and he never quite got the cultural vibe either. But, ultimately, he couldn't resist the opportunity to turn the franchise on its head with more action, zip and scope. In other words, he's put Star Trek on steroids to tell this origin story about how Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), McCoy (Karl Urban) and the rest of the beloved crew of the Enterprise meet and form the connective tissue of this Utopian phenomenon.

"What I thought was ingenious about our story was its own parallel universe," Abrams suggests. "It was all about treating it with believability… with reality… [And] it had to work at a higher resolution, not just because of IMAX but [also] because the audience is very sophisticated now and it had to work on a level they didn't have to worry about in '66."

Not surprisingly, Abrams chose Industrial Light & Magic to boldly go where no Star Trek had gone before. This included a whole new approach to space battles, explosions, black holes and planetary destruction, as well as cool upgrades for vfx involving the phaser, the transporter and Warp Speed. Along with it came some new wrinkles, including a new fracture program along with improved procedural rendering and volumetric shader tools. ILM handled 797 out of the 1,005 vfx shots (with additional support from Digital Domain, Lola, Svengali and others).

Explosions in space are a lot more realistic looking, thanks to a virtual pyro technique comprised of new volumetric shaders for smoke and plume. Courtesy of ILM.

"We [definitely] wanted to take it in a new direction -- we wanted to make a harder kind of space movie," explains Roger Guyett, ILM's visual effects supervisor, who previously worked with the director on M:i:III. "And what I mean by harder is slightly more realistic and make it more about space exploration and making you feel more like you were going on this great adventure, and there's a certain amount of fear [involved] and really playing more with space, which would be lit more naturalistically. I looked at 2001, which I still think is incredibly well done. And I really enjoyed Sunshine for the way they tackled their version of space." (NASA's Carolyn Porco, who led the Imaging Science team on the Cassini mission at Saturn, assisted Guyett as a space consultant.)

One of the first things Guyett did was put together a Star Trek highlight reel of the previous films (which ILM worked on). "J.J. and I just talked about the kinds of moments we might have in our movie. And, of course, we were doing a prequel, so you have some kind of creative freedom. You can learn a lot about how they photographed the Enterprise in the older movies and learn what they'd done that was good and bad and do the best we can for our movie."

Abrams and Guyett got along so well, in fact, that the director entrusted him with the additional task of second unit director. "For me, it was a great experience," Guyett adds. "And often times you find visual effects supervisors working on the second unit because you're doing a lot of those action scenes that have visual effects in them. We did a lot of stuff related to the space jump and on the Delta Vega, the Ice Planet. I still remember spending a lot of time in editorial filling in holes. It puts you one step closer to the source of the movie so you're authoring material. You get inside the director's head a little bit more because you're talking about shot design and how the sequence is gonna work. And J.J. was trying very hard to photograph as much as he could, and that's not easy when you're doing a movie set in the future."

A harder space movie required some fundamental design updates to the Enterprise (particularly the Bridge). "It's a more muscular Enterprise," Guyett continues. "We didn't want it to feel too retro, but more contemporary to our time now in terms of the design lines and the way that the lines across the whole thing worked. It was a Scott Chambliss/Ryan Church design and then we took that silhouette and Alex Jaeger filled in all of the details. The idea of doing it in CG was out of necessity and more appropriate given the new shaders and other software tools that would provide more visual opportunities.

"The Bridge of the Enterprise is being compared to an Apple store. One thing that we tried to do is have the view screen opened up so you feel that connection between the people and where they and not have it seem like a closed set… a security camera view of the outside world. I love the idea of seeing the hood of the Enterprise, the dish spreading out before you when you sit in the captain's chair. We have a very particular approach to the design… we don't do impossible camera moves -- we wanted it to feel as though someone could've photographed it. Those are values that J.J. really stands for. He wants you to believe that you're really there."