Starlost and Found

Occasionally, an interesting tidbit will turn up.

Those of us Star Trek fans who are a little older (baby boomers, at any rate ) may remember Lincoln Enterprises, a mail-order company set up by Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett to sell memorabilia; I was always fascinated by their catalog and would pore over every entry in it, thrilled by the possibility that I could own a script - an actual script; of course, I ended up with so many little things that I can no longer find - an animation cel, a Science insignia that never got sewn to anything, Kelly Freas' wonderful portraits of the crew (with the sexiest picture of Uhura ever painted!). Recently, as I sorted through boxes long untouched, I found an envelope of miscellaneous film clips and slides - one of their "grab bags" - purportedly from actual film shot on the sets, but usually stills shot for promotion rather than frames of the actual episode, of course. As if finding this trove of gems wasn't enough, imagine my surprise and glee at finding a shot that must have been my old memory finally vindicated: clearly a test shot on the bridge of the Enterprise with an astrogator, just like in the old sci-fi movies! Not the helm and navigator stations we grew up with - and with a handwritten note from before shooting had begun, stating that this had been rejected . But still, here it was, the thing that must have buried itself in my consciousness so deeply that I could never forget it. Even more surprising, it appears that they still hadn't finalized Enterprise yet, either! Amazing!

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Ahhh, if only it were true ... Anyway, another truly serendipitous portrait - after a full day of rendering the astrogator [link] , I exported this image along with the Z-depth mask, and when I laid them together and played with blend modes, one (saturation) startled me as suddenly there was a stark black-and-white shot from the bridge, and I just knew what I wanted to do with it .

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By the way, the Lincoln Enterprises stuff is all true ...