J.J. Abrams on Rebooting the Star Trek Franchise, Talks FX and Musical Score

PostMagazine.com posted a new interview with Star Trek director J.J. Abrams and here are excerpts from the article.

Post: What sort of film did you set out to make?

J.J. ABRAMS: "The ambition was to make a film that was emotional and character-driven and yet also fast-paced and full of action, and combine those two elements that are often so separate."

Post: What were the biggest challenges facing you in rebooting this franchise?

ABRAMS: "I wasn't this big Trekkie fan, so my connection was more peripheral, and I wanted to see certain things, like the communicators and the way the technology worked. That's what I remembered, even though I didn't know it that well.

"Shows like Next Generation had gone beyond all that technology. So I wanted it at a glance to look like Star Trek - the wardrobe, the ship design, the Starfleet logo, all that stuff. I just felt that if you're going to do Star Trek, do Star Trek. On the other hand, I didn't want to be constrained by the preexisting design or paradigm to the degree it would render the film somehow anachronistic or irrelevant. I wanted it to feel vital and alive and relevant."

Post: How many visual effects shots are there, and how did it break down?

ABRAMS: "Well over 1,000. ILM did the movie, then Digital Domain did Scotty in the pipes sequences, and Lola did the green-skin girl, and Svengali did the set extensions and Starfleet auditorium scenes, adding on there. They also did some great work on a prison sequence, which we ended up cutting. It's one of my favorite visual effects, but it had to go."

Post: What was that the most difficult effects shot to pull off?

ABRAMS: "Certain shots, like the implosion of Vulcan, take a very long time and there's an incredible amount of math going on to make those shots work. The computational and rendering time creates long turnarounds between iterations of the shot.

"For me, the most tricky and exciting shots were the ones incorporating practical elements, where you connect that with the digital elements. The 'Polarilla' chase scene on the ice was very hard to get right and we kept working on that. That took a very long time. And getting the look of the transporter effect to work took a long time."

Post: How important are sound and music to you?

ABRAMS: "They're always 51 percent of what makes a film work. As important as everything else is, when the sound and music don't work, it never works as a whole, and when they're great, it often looks great. It's weird - even if the visuals aren't terrific, the sound saves the day. Most films I love, if you pull out the sound and music, they're just anemic. So it's critical for setting the right tone, and Michael Giacchino, with whom I've worked since Alias, wrote a beautiful score.

"We mixed at Fox, and that was the most difficult part of post, because, for whatever reason, the first mix just didn't really work. So we brought in Ben Burtt to help out with some of the sound effects, because it just didn't sound like Trek. So he created all of these iconic sound effects that we hadn't been using at all, and identified the ones that were aurally the equivalent of what I was trying to do visually, and he ended up basically making the film into a Star Trek movie. Even those first sounds you hear, those sonar pings, weren't originally in the film. And he did a brilliant thing - he cleared out areas of sound.

"Think about your favorite movies of all time, and they might have had 16 or 24 tracks. Now we have 196 tracks, but it doesn't make it better and often makes it worse. Ben came in and said, 'Get rid of it all, pull it all back, use just these three sounds.' And suddenly it was, 'Holy shit! It's impactful now, not just a wall of sound.' So he de-Phil Spectored the film and gave us more clarity. But then we found we'd gone too far in that direction, and taken out 16 minutes of music and pared it all back. So now it felt too slight, so we did a third mix, which was partly possible because we'd delayed the release date by six months. That was massively important. We actually ended up putting back a lot of the score and then we took certain cues written for scenes and switched them out. We must have moved and added and adjusted nearly 24 cues. It was a huge amount of last-minute fine tuning, but it brought the music back to the fore in a lot of scenes, brought sound effects back more and used them as a support as opposed to a central element."

http://trekweb.com/articles/2009/06/02/JJ-Abrams-on-Rebooting-the-Star-Trek-Franchise-Talks-FX-and-Musical-Score.shtml